The Island of Missing Trees
The Island of Missing Trees
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Elif Shafak on The Island of Missing Trees
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A subject too charged to enter, until a tree showed the wayCyprus was not an abstract political subject for Shafak: it was a presence at the family dinner table, and a one-sided one. Growing up in Turkey, she absorbed a version of the island’s story that she understood, even then, was a mirror image of what Greek Cypriot families were absorbing on the other side.
In our house, Cyprus was an important subject — we grew up with stories about the island, usually speaking negatively about the other side. And I’m sure there were many families on the Greek Cypriot or Greek side who have experienced the opposite.
That intimacy with the subject blocked her for years. She visited Cyprus multiple times and read widely on its history, but every narrative angle she tested collapsed back into the very tribalism she wanted to refuse. The fig tree resolved the formal problem she could not otherwise solve.
How do you tell the story of a divided land without yourself falling into the trap of tribalism or without yourself falling into the trap of nationalism? As a storyteller, I could never find an angle, an opening, until I found the fig tree. So this might sound weird, but I feel grateful to the fig tree because it gave me a completely different perspective, and only then I was able to sit down and start writing the novel.
The specific image of a fig tree buried for winter had been lodged in Shafak’s memory since her time in Michigan, years before the novel existed. It returned to her during the pandemic lockdowns, when months of enforced stillness pushed her reading toward ecology and made nature feel urgent rather than decorative.
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.
Behind the Cypriot plot lay a preoccupation that runs across Shafak’s entire body of work: what passes between generations without being named. She watched this pattern in immigrant communities and in her own family, where silence was a form of protection that accumulated into inheritance.
I’ve always believed in inherited pain. It’s not scientific, perhaps, but things we cannot talk about easily within families do pass from one generation to the next, unspoken. In immigrant families, the older generation often wants to protect the younger from past sorrow, so they choose not to say much, and the second generation is too busy adapting, being part of the host country, to investigate. So it’s left to the third generation to dig into memory.
How she wrote it
Finding a narrator older than the warOnce Shafak committed to a tree narrator, the structural logic followed: a consciousness centuries old could witness the 1974 conflict without belonging to either community, and without the false neutrality of a human observer pretending not to take sides. The decision was gendered from the start.
She — my tree is very female — gave me a chance to look beyond tribalisms, nationalisms and other clashing certainties. She also gave me the chance to think about roots, both in a metaphorical sense, and a literal one.
Shafak had also been thinking about what a tree-narrator could carry that no human narrator could: geological time, the patience to watch a landscape absorb a catastrophe and begin recovering. The choice of narrator was, at the same time, a choice about how to tell the story of displacement through the metaphor most native to it.
I wanted an observer that lives longer than human beings. Trees have this longevity. They were here before us, and they will most probably be here long after we humans have disappeared — but also to think more closely about issues like, what does it mean to be rooted, uprooted and rerooted? So if you’re telling the story of immigrants, people have experienced displacement, either within the island or outside. Then to think this through roots and uprootedness was an important not only metaphor but an important emotional attachment for me.
Shafak described the years she spent unable to find a way into the Cyprus material, testing angle after angle, before the fig tree finally offered a vantage point entirely outside the conflict’s political lines. The video interview at The Conduit captures her explaining why that exteriority was the precondition for the whole book.
Shafak described the long struggle to find an entry into the Cyprus story without herself falling into the trap of nationalism, and explained that the fig tree gave her a perspective from entirely outside those clashing certainties — a voice older than the conflict’s human lines, indifferent to which community owned the soil, and present through the entire catastrophe. [paraphrased from audio]
The novel’s layered timelines (Cyprus in 1974 alongside London in the 2010s, held together by the tree’s long, non-linear memory) were not planned in advance. Shafak’s process is intuitive: she writes toward the story rather than from a map, and lets structure reveal itself in the act of writing.
I like to write by intuition. I like to be as of a little bit drunk when I’m writing, not to know what comes next. The form comes with the story and every story brings their own form and their own structure.
That willingness to stay lost in the material is also, for Shafak, a discipline: keeping anticipated reception out of her head while writing meant she could follow the fig tree wherever it led, even into the emotional difficulty of the 1974 violence.
The personal thread
Shaped by silences she was never toldShafak’s conviction about inherited pain is not just a theme she chose for this novel; it is a belief she held before the novel existed. Her own family’s relationship to Cyprus modeled the exact dynamic she wanted to examine: loud on one side of the story, silent on everything else.
We do not only inherit our noses or cheeks or hair colour from our parents or great-grandparents. We also inherit sorrow and melancholy, even if we might not know their stories in full, even then, we are shaped by silences.
Ada, the teenage protagonist born in London to a Greek Cypriot father and a Turkish Cypriot mother and named after the Turkish word for island, is Shafak’s direct test of this proposition: a person whose parents have said almost nothing about Cyprus, and who senses the gap anyway. Shafak has written about displacement across her career, but she has described Ada as the character who most nakedly embodies what it costs to carry a history you were not given.
You carry a place in your soul, even through the stories you were not told. You can sense the void. The past matters, because it shapes us, whether we know it or not.
On what the book is wrestling with
Memory as obligation, identity as motionAda’s position (British-born, bicommunal, unsure which inheritance to claim) gave Shafak a way to press on something she sees as a political failure of the present moment: the pressure on people to resolve themselves into a single, stable identity when their actual experience is layered and fluid.
Can we not think of identity not as a static, singular thread, but can we think of identity as multiple belongings, more fluid, like, concentric circles, local, regional, international and global? That’s the thing that is never encouraged in this age.
The book’s engagement with memory is not nostalgic. Shafak grounds her argument in the Committee on Missing Persons in Cyprus, a bicommunal organization where Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot archaeologists work together to identify the dead from 1974. That fact, which she encountered while researching the novel, gave her a real-world model for what she means when she says memory can be turned forward.
I see memory as a responsibility, not in a way to keep you stuck in the past. But to learn from the past, to recognise and respect the stories, and then learn from the mistakes and try to build something better and more peaceful. Without the knowledge of the past, I don’t think healing is possible.
The novel also runs an argument about whose stories get counted as history. Shafak wrote the 1974 sections from the margins of the official record, attending to what was lost by people who did not end up on the winning side.
The history that we know has been written by winners. But what about the stories of those who are regarded as defeated? What about their stories?
That question presses hardest in the chapters set inside the fig tree’s memory: the tree watched the same soil change hands, watched the same violence from the same roots, and kept no record of who was right.
What she wants us to sit with
The living world is not the backgroundThe ecological argument in the novel is not ornamental: the 1974 partition was a catastrophe for Cyprus’s whole ecosystem, and Shafak wants readers to feel that the tree’s perspective is not a literary device but a genuine moral reorientation toward the non-human world.
We must reconnect with trees; they are much more alive than we tend to think they are. It’s such a shame that we pretend that trees are just passive, as if they just exist in the background. They are not at all.
Shafak has said that she never allowed herself to think, while writing, about how the novel would land. The discipline that kept her going was not confidence in the subject but commitment to the practice, and she wants readers who pick up the book to understand that this loyalty to storytelling over reception is what made the difficult material writable at all.
I couldn’t dare to write about it because it’s such an emotionally charged subject. It was only when I found the voice of the fig tree that I felt free to rise above, a little bit, these conflicting nationalisms and tell the story.