Whispers from the Fig Tree: Love and Loss in a Divided Land

Written by Amelia Cropley

“Look,” she said “I don’t want to talk about this. You must understand, whenever something terrible happens to a country – or an island – a chasm opens between those who go away and those who stay. I’m not saying it’s easy for the people who left, I’m sure they have their own hardships, but they have no idea what it was like for the ones who stayed.”

“The ones who stayed dealt with the wounds and then the scars and that must be extremely painful,” said Kostas. “But for us… runaways, you might call us… we never have a chance to heal, the wounds will always remain open.”

Across the pages, Shafak also tells the story of Ada, a sixteen year old girl living in 2010s London. Living with her father Kostas, Ada is mourning her recently passed mother. Shafak here, created a quiet, climate-change focused, young girl enduring crushes and cyber-bullying, and who lives without the knowledge her parents have protected her from. Her entire life she’s lived within the void of ignorance of her family’s past in Cyprus, a place she’s never visited, disconnected from a heritage that defines both her parents.

Until her Aunt travels from Cyprus and begins to unravel the truth that was so tightly woven shut.

The third narrative however, is the most magnificently original of Shafak. In the tavern Defne and Kostas adore, a fig tree grows in the middle of the building and curates the third narrative. This aboreal character is always present around the young lovers in Cyprus and London, when botanist Kostas takes a sapling of the fig tree to London, allowing this marvellously beautiful, intellectual, natural character tell the story she witnesses during and post-war.

I found this layered narrative and perspective so refreshing and hard to imagine without. Not only did it express the many voices of victims of war, equally struggling on opposing sides, Shafak did not shy away from how the whole Island was devastated – including the natural world and the next generations, like Ada, so far yet ancestrally so near to the devastation she never endured. The back-and-forth of the time zones was unconfusing and a successful method to keep you reading. As a reader, you are in the unknown, and when Shafak decides to end the chapter and switch to the past or future, you have to wait for answers, yet simultaneously continue discovering the truth you were so close to in the previous chapter. With Kostas and Defne on the Island in the seventies, unable to escape, and Ada having lived in London all her life, the constant time-shifting keeps you questioning how Defne and Kostas escape, live outside of clandestine meetings and move on from war. This was, in the least, very smart and hooking, effectually mirroring the complex history of the beautifully tangible characters before us.

“You don’t share a language, you think, and then you realise, grief is a language. We understand each other, people with troubled pasts.”

Throughout the novel, Shafak immaculately presents a clean and devastating juxtaposition of beauty and violence. So present is the beauty in love for one another, both romantically, platonically and familiarly for both the Greeks and the Turks; alongside the beauty of the natural world that looked ugly events in the eye. Defne, as an anthropologist on the Island, allows the readers to see the destruction that hit their Island when her and her co-workers are finding and researching the remains. Kostas, as a botanist and a soft-spot for nature contrastingly presents the beauty, delicacy and peace in the natural world set against a backdrop of human destruction.

“The Island of Missing Trees presents our world’s geopolitics and humanism like a fine art in all temporality.”

Amongst the irrecoveral ruins that is explored in the Island’s physical landscape, the trauma and emotional suffering of the Island’s people (and trees) are as equally devasting. Shafak faultlessly conceives the Cypriots who loose their homes, peace, their family, those sent away for safety like Kostas, or living inside war and its sanguinary like Defne. The Island of Missing Trees presents our world’s geopoltics and humanism like a fine art in all temporality.

Around forty years later, readers are able to endure alongside Ada who, growing up hidden from the devastation that hit her parents, and finding out alongside us. Shafak makes sure we as readers witness wounds and scars as they unfold first-hand. We too, are searched by authorities and wandering with the characters, hiding for safety and in secrecy with Kostas and Defne and wondering what happened all those years ago with Ada.

One of many aspects that stays with me from this magnificent read is Shafak’s suggestion and presentation that generation trauma is, sadly, inescapable. This writer encapsulates how someone’s pain can be passed down as much as their genetics, and affected by a history they didn’t even witness. As Defne often showed in her depression the effects her history has on her, and it’s inevitable contagiousness. Shafak unpacks and makes us question what immigrants and victims of war do with their painful memories? She makes us imagine what it must feel like to watch your home and country crumble around you.

“Each time Kostas pushed her on the swing, watching her fly away from him, up into the air, laughing and kicking her legs, Ada would shout, ‘Higher, Daddy, higher!’ Struggling with the fear that she might flip over or the metal chains might break off, he would push her harder, and then, as the swing came back, he would have to move out of the way to make space for her. And so it still was, this back and forth, with the father ceding space to his daughter so she could have her freedom.”

The most memorable, and remarkable, aspect of The Island of Missing Trees, is of course, the fig. Written as if to be almost-humane, and yet more beautiful than if she were, the fig tree is more than just a tree; it is an empathiser, a witness, an educator to readers on the natural world, and most importantly, an endurer too. Written in the first-person narration of the fig, she feels like part of the family and a victim of war – and I suppose, she is. Expressing her love for Kostas as he cares for her, feeling sorrowed by the state of homelessness on London streets, the jet lag she feels from her travels, grieving Defne, hurting to see Ada hurt, Shafak makes the tree, debatably, the most important and loveable part of the novel.

“So delicate and so rich, the fig’s narration represents every single living creature on our planet, and how they are living beside us as we tear their world in two.”

Of course, the novels title refers to the environmental damage that was inflicted to Cyprus, not to mention the damage caused to its human inhabitants too. The island which, still stands with the scars this war left behind. The fig provides rich details about nature and the ecosystems that surround us all, speaking of songbirds, butterflies, mice, and other trees as a few examples, she too honoured the insects that live within her branches, and they became characters themselves, like the ant queen that simultaneously exists in the world; “here she mated and chewed off her wings as though discarding a wedding dress.” So delicate and so rich, the fig’s narration and magical realism represents every single living creature on our planet, and how they are living beside us as we tear their world in two.

The fragility and simultaneous strength of this constantly surviving ecosystem represents the vulnerability of every living, human and non-human organism at the time, generations past and in the future. This fig, and Shafak of course, moved me to delicate tears by their mutual sensational storytelling – both beautiful and with the most gorgeously fierce empathy and love.

With the fig tree at the centre of this novel, accompanied by the overarching themes of shared history and ancestral past, root are physically and metaphorically the blood that runs through the story’s veins. Shafak’s fig tree is an immaculate double entandra to the importance of history. The tree’s roots, we learn from a small age, are valuable and essential to its survival, defining the tree. Ada grows up without her roots, and the Cypriots had so much of their roots upturned. Our roots connect us to each other, in a shared history with shared experiences whilst we live in collective existence. These notions are continually present in every page; the collective existence of everyone, no matter which side of the island you lived. Like the earth is the home to a tree’s roots, Cyprus is the roots to Defne, Kostas and the other Islanders who weave in and out of the novel. Shafak allows these roots to be heard, to be discovered and to help illustrate her characters with perfect effortlessness.

“Roots run deeper than we can fathom, connecting us to the past and shaping our future.”

All in all, The Island of Missing Trees is a masterpiece impossible to be matched. Beautifully eloquent, heart-breaking and heart-warming, Shafak captures so many of the human emotions that define us alongside the non-violent cosmically large phenomenon of the outside world. I know I as a reader, felt bigger than just myself sat in a chair reading a book, but wiser and more curious of the roots that belong to many people on Earth, so many Ada’s, so many Kostas’ and so many Defne’s.

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