‘Love can triumph over hate’
Turkish-British novelist Elif Shafak talks about her new book, The Island of Missing Trees, and about how literature can rehumanise those who have been systematically dehumanised
“All around the world, wherever there is, or has ever been, a civil war or an ethnic conflict, come to the trees for clues, because we will be the ones that sit silently in communion with human remains,” remarks the fig tree in Elif Shafak’s new novel, The Island of Missing Trees. A moving tale of love, grief, eco-consciousness, exile and regeneration set in Cyprus and London, the author’s thirteenth novel is woven around the lives of Greek Cypriot Kostas and Turkish Cypriot Defne Kazantzakis, and their daughter Ada.
The Island of Missing Trees is a forbidden love story set against the backdrop of a civil war; the love between Greek Cypriot Kostas and Turkish Cypriot Defne acquires a spiritual dimension. Did this love story come to you along with its setting — Cyprus, the island, and Nicosia, the only divided capital in the world?
We live in a world that constantly puts us into boxes, categories, tribes, clashing certainties. Can you love someone who is not of your tribe, your religion, your ethnic background? Yes, you can. Love was central to
the story from the beginning, but so was war, conflict, trauma, memory, displacement, partition. How can you tell the story of a divided land? It wasn’t easy. Love gave me a door into the story. There are two types of love in this novel, the first one is the love between humans, and then there is the love between humans and trees, the love humans feel for their land, for their roots, their memories, the love immigrants feel for lost homelands.
Kostas and Defne are an unlikely couple, not because she is Turkish and he is Greek but because their personalities are strikingly dissimilar. Do you see their story as one of togetherness forged out of conflicting nationalisms and religious identities?
I believe there is something utterly beautiful and moving when people from different backgrounds, races, religions and/or personalities manage to build a loving, caring and compassionate relationship together, despite all the odds. Love can triumph over hatred. Just like solidarity and sisterhood can triumph over polarisation and extremism. But I am also aware that none of this is easy to achieve. And yet we must keep trying. Especially now, more than ever before. Our planet is burning, our only home, this earth is burning. We have massive global challenges ahead, from the climate crisis to pandemics. Neither ultranationalism nor religious fundamentalism is the answer. Any ideology that takes us away from critical thinking and divides humans into boxes and tells them to hate ‘the Other” is misleading, wrong. We have entered a new era when we need global sisterhood, international solidarity and cooperation, a new kind of egalitarian, inclusive humanism that respects diversity and basic human dignity. We must all work together to save our planet and our common humanity.
The novel is structured around the act of burying and unburying the fig tree, and is rooted in ecoconsciousness. How did you settle on the structure and the narrative device that alternates between the authorial third person and the voice of the fig tree, and what did the latter allow you to do?
I have been wanting to write about Cyprus for many years now, but I could never dare, because I knew it was not an easy story to tell. This is such a beautiful island. And yet there is a lot of pain — accumulated pain, intergenerational trauma and loss and distrust and ethnic partition. The wounds are still open, unhealed. I could not find a voice. How do you tell the story of a divided land without falling into the trap of nationalism? Only when I found the voice of the fig tree, only then, I could dare to start writing. A Ficus carica. The idea of the fig tree came to me during the pandemic and the lockdowns. I had been reading about nature and ecology for a while, but it was the pandemic that really encouraged me to walk firmly in this direction. Like many of
us, I felt the need, almost the urgency, to reconnect with nature, to think about the environment and especially about trees and
forests. Also, trees were important to me in a metaphorical sense. As an immigrant myself, I think about roots a lot. What does it mean to be rooted or uprooted or rerooted?
Roots are important throughout my writing. I care about issues like belonging, non-belonging, motherland, adopted land, exile.
Sorrow runs as an undercurrent in the lives of your characters. What draws you to grief and melancholy?
I come from a land of pessimism. The Balkans, Anatolia, the Levant… we are not a very optimistic people in general, you know. There is a lot of sorrow in our history, there is melancholy or duende. So the stories that I write reflect the culture that I come from.
However, I have always believed there is also a strong element of humour in my writing. I really love and respect humour, especially the compassionate kind. Not the kind of humour that looks down upon people, not like that, but the kind that understands both the weakness and resilience, the complexity and simplicity of being human.
So I guess in a nutshell what I am really drawn to is the dance of humour and sorrow, the dialectical relationship between melancholy and hope, between pessimism and optimism.