The Island of Missing Trees

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Have you immigrated? Have you been rooted and uprooted and rerooted in your life? How did you make your choice as Yusuf and Yiorgos made their choice or was the choice made for you as it was for the fig tree? How did you experience that uprooting and re-rooting? A rich, magical, Sunday Times bestselling novel on belonging and identity, love and trauma, nature and renewal.

Merryn Glover is a novelist and radio dramatist. Her first significant work was a stage play, The Long Way Home, and since then she has written radio plays for Radio 4 and Radio Scotland. She was born in Kathmandu and brought up in Nepal, India, and Pakistan, where her Anglican Australian parents worked as Wycliffe Bible Translators. The author now lives in the Upper Spey Valley, in the Highlands, which provides the setting for Of Stone and Sky, her second novel. Redefining Trauma is one first person blog on how the author has worked to understand her own trauma and the importance of de-stigmatizing trauma. The Island of Missing Trees is a strong and enthralling work: its world of superstition, natural beauty and harsh tribal loyalties becomes your world . . . for all its uses of enchantment, it is a complex and powerful work in which the harrowing material settles on the reader delicately * FT *

by Elif Shafak

The Island of Missing Trees, for all its uses of enchantment, is a complex and powerful work in which the harrowing material settles on the reader delicately * FT *

Rounded to 5/5. Recommended for readers who enjoy thought-provoking historical fiction that blends together love, loss, and the magic of the natural world.INSKEEP: Now, you can imagine a novelist would take an interest in this ritual of burial and unburial, of disappearance and rebirth. And it became part of her newest novel, "The Island Of Missing Trees." The story reflects on a divided nation on a divided island in the Mediterranean, Cyprus, where Greece and Turkey went to war in the 1970s. The main characters are a family who fled the violence to live in the U.K. Elif Shafak says it's a book she struggled to write. Shafak combines mimicry and metaphor in her Fig Tree character as the tree’s annual rings communicate history and symbolize human immigration. The Fig Tree takes its role as a storyteller very seriously, explaining how it tries “to grasp every story through diverse angles, shifting perspectives, conflicting narratives,” drawing a biological parallel: “Truth is a rhizome—an underground plant stem with lateral shoots. You need to dig deep to reach it and, once unearthed, you have to treat it with respect.” Inhabiting a voice from a different species in an authentic manner is difficult, but the Fig Tree pulls it off with endearing dignity by highlighting collaborative experiences. “Untold stories bring us together,” Shafak writes. “Numbness is destroying our world.” Elif Shafak What do you know of these atrocities? What do you know of the exhumations that are going on around the world? How can we educate ourselves and others on both the atrocities and the work to identify the bodies that are discovered? Quotes Her botanical reading, as her bibliography reveals, was extensive (Richard Mabey, Merlin Sheldrake, an academic article about the notion of “optimism” and “pessimism” in plants). In the novel, Kostas at one point buries his fig, the better to protect it from the British winter. “I’d heard that they could be buried,” says Shafak. “When I lived in Ann Arbor in Michigan, where it can be quite cold, I heard of Italian and Portuguese families doing this. I found out that it really works. You hide it safely beneath the ground for two months, and then, when the spring comes, you unbury it, and it’s a kind of miracle, because it’s alive.” Later, this unburying is mirrored by other, grimmer exhumations: those carried out by the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus, a bicommunal organisation that continues to try to find and identify the bodies of the civil war’s disappeared. It has stopped raining now, and the cafe is closing, so we go out into the fresh air. We’re heading in different directions, but she’s determined to walk me to the park gate. I notice what a good listener she is, her body angled towards mine confidingly. She is a very serious person. It’s not only that she regards it as her political duty to talk of such things as equality and diversity; she seems to relish doing so. But there’s a larky, student-ish side to her, too. Is it true that she loves heavy metal, I ask. Her gentleness seems a bit at odds with headbanging. “Oh, yes,” she says. “I’ve always loved it.” She lists several bands, none of which I’ve heard of. “I like all the sub-genres: industrial, viking…” While she’s working, she listens to the same song over and over, using headphones so her children don’t complain. Crikey. Can she concentrate? “Yes! That’s when I write best. I don’t like silence. It makes me nervous.” Somewhere in the distance, I hear the obliging roar of a motorbike.

This is an enchanting, compassionate and wise novel and storytelling at its most sublime' Polly Samson The push and pull of teenage emotion is also captured with precision. We see Ada’s thinking mature, experiencing her shifts in perception incrementally. Resisting the urge to simplify or judge is a recurring theme. Perhaps the most fascinating and intriguing aspect of the novel is Elif Shafak’s treatment of the natural, which is infused with the magical. The story is replete with symbolic representations; needless to say, ‘tree’ is the primary symbol. Divided into six parts, each part of the novel is designated a title with reference to the tree: The first being “How to Bury a Tree,” the second is titled “Roots,” symbolizing cultural identity and traditional values; the third is “Trunk,” suggesting a connection; the fourth is “Branches,” representing wildness and freedom; the fifth part is titled“Ecosystem,” which is an amalgamation of Roots, Trunk, and Branches, also representing society. Acting as a perfect conclusion, the final part of the novel is titled “How to Unbury a Tree.” When Kostas and Defne carry with them a dead and decaying segment of the fig tree to England, the readers are made aware of the plight suffered by the immigrants and the displaced. How do your multiple geographic and ethnic identities overlap, merge, stand unique? Where do you think of as your geographical place or places? How has language influenced your sense of place? What are the elements that transport you to where you have lived before? A taste of a particular food? A word you hear in another language?Intergenerational trauma among descendants of enslaved people, native American children, refugee descendants, children of holocaust survivors and others from events that occurred both recently and many decades ago are now being studied. In the On Being with Krista Tippett podcast titled Notice the Rage; Notice the Silence, Krista Tippett interviews Resmaa Menakem who talks about intergenerational trauma and how that is often expressed as “culture” in a society and as “traits” in a family.

The Cyprus setting is stunningly described in this spellbinding story about identity, love and loss * Good Housekeeping, 'this month's 10 books to read right now' (September) * The New York Times has archived its articles online. Reporter's Notebook: Politeness and Violence Mix in Cyprus, from the July 30, 1974 issue, shares a perspective of the destruction of the war in July of 1974. This is the time period when Kostas is sent to London, Denfe seeks an abortion and The Happy Fig is bombed. Intergenerational Trauma Knowledgeable, sociable, and connected to lively organisms, the fig tree draws the reader into a subterranean world of dirt and roots, resisting the green pastoral of literary tradition. Kimmerer and Simard’s work thus gives epistemological weight to Shafak’s arboreal imaginary. But we can also see how the novel’s branches of arboreal knowledge overlap, as the intra-diegetic account of tree existence converges with the extra-diegetic understanding of mycorrhizal networks. The novel absorbs and compresses tree discourse in the interests of nonanthropocentric ways of valuing nature. The Island of Missing Trees captivated me as I learned some history of Cyprus and some tree wisdom— not an expected combination! There are myriad ways for readers to connect their experiences and learning with this novel. Intergeneration trauma is explored in Ada’s family as well as in nature, as the story unravels through bits and pieces in three time periods— Cyprus in 1974, Cyprus in the early 2000s and London in the late 2010s. In addition the ecosystem, the flow of time, and secrets are essential elements of the novel that we have each experienced personally. ELIF SHAFAK: When I was in Michigan, Ann Arbor, the winters were so cold, and I remember meeting Italian American families who would bury their fig trees if the winters were particularly harsh.I think most (all?) authors recognize that readers own their personal connections with what they read. At the same time I enjoy listening to what the author was thinking about or struggling with as they wrote. Here are two excellent options to hear Elif Shafak share her perspective on writing this novel.