The Island of Missing Trees: Review

What If Tree Could Talk!

The island of Missing Trees is an outstanding novel by British-Turkish Writer Elif Shafak written in the backdrop of the civil war of 1974 that occurred in Cyprus a beautiful Island at the far end of the Mediterranean Sea. Conflicts between Greek and Turk Cypriots led to the island being split in two. Humans were not the only ones that suffered on an island plagued by years of interethnic conflict and terrible tragedies because these disagreements caused so much harm. This particular novel is written in the historical context of Cyprus, a beautiful Island of “golden beaches, turquoise waters, lucid skies” where Turk and Greek used to live together.

Elif Shafak tells the story through a fig tree, but what makes this novel unique is how Shafak compares a tree’s characteristics to those of a person. The fact that this tree is a female lets us know right away because women feel their feelings more strongly. The tree portrayed in this book is very observant and highly sensitive to the changes going on around her. The British-Turkish author Elif Shafak’s book is a blend of dreams, love, war, imagination, generational trauma, communal tensions, and migration, and many of the events are tragic, including bereavement, violence, and catastrophic misunderstandings.

Three narratives that alternate between time and place make up the novel. Ada Kazantzakis, a 16-year-old girl, and her father were distraught when their mother Defne passed away 11 months before to the beginning of the novel, which takes place in the late 2010s. The intriguing subject of epigenetic inheritance and how memories are transmitted from one generation to the next is discussed in the novel’s opening pages.

The environmental perspective of the book is one of its primary topics, and the subject of this study. In this book, Elif Shafak introduces A Fig Tree as the narrator. Through the fig tree, Elif Shafak conveys the idea that not only do humans suffer from war, but also animals, plants, and birds. You could say that the entire ecosystem suffers as a result of conflict.

The tree is wise and intellectual, and because they outlive humans, they get a close-up view of history. Shafak creatively gives a tree human characteristics; she describes the thoughts and observations of the tree, and at one point we start to think of the tree as a person. The fig tree witnesses the horrors brought on by the haphazard split of the land, in addition to seeing the horrors that come from it. This talkative fig tree listens to the confessions of the bereaved and remembers the joys and horrors of what occurred during those turbulent years back home with the sorrowful wisdom of an immigrant.

Throughout the whole novel, the tree brings back memories of the island she misses the island and the Tavern where she belongs to. But the conflicts and clashes between Turks and Greek Cypriots destroyed the Tavern, which was once called The Happy Fig.

“I miss Cyprus too. Maybe because of the frigid climate, I can’t help harking back to my days in the sun. I might have become a British tree, but some days it still takes me a moment to fathom where I am, on which island exactly”.(pg79)

The fig tree also complains about the negligence of human beings saying they do not pay attention to us even though they took so much advantage of us and we are the major part of this ecosystem but humans do not much care about our existence.

It never meant anything to anyone, what happened to us. It matters to me though and, so long as I am able to tell this story, I am going to include in it the creatures in my ecosystem — the birds, the bats, the butterflies, the honeybees, the ants, the mosquitoes, and the mice — because there is one thing I have learned: wherever there is war and a painful partition, there will be no winners, human or otherwise”

This magnificent novel written by Elif Shafak is a deliberate effort on the part of the author to shift our attention toward the problem of climate change. It equally focuses on human suffering as well as how the environment is being treated.

Hira Khalid.