Arboreal
Witnesses: Ecocriticism, Nonhuman Agency, and Environmental Humanities in Elif
Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees
Krupa
D. Pandya
PhD Research
Scholar,
Department of
English,
Sardar Patel
University, Vallabh Vidyanagar,
Anand, Gujarat,
India.
Abstract: Shafak's The
Island of Missing Trees (2021) offers a profound lens for
ecocritical and environmental humanities analysis, intertwining Cyprus's
divided history with the fig tree's narrative voice to interrogate human-nature
entanglements amid ecological devastation and cultural trauma. Through the
sentient fig tree, uprooted from war-torn Cyprus and replanted in London,
Shafak disrupts anthropocentric paradigms, granting nonhumans agency to narrate
deforestation wrought by locust plagues, colonial clearances for vineyards, and
vendettas that mirror ethnic conflicts, thereby symbolizing "missing"
lives and landscapes. Ecocriticism here reveals how the novel critiques
exploitative human practices—deforestation as ecocide, paralleling the
"disappeared" during Cyprus's 1974 partition—while advocating a
relational ontology where trees embody memory, resilience, and multispecies
ethics, challenging binaries of culture/nature and human/nonhuman.
Environmental humanities expand this by weaving interdisciplinary threads: the
tree's arboreal perspective fosters "intraspecies communion,"
blending biology, history, and philosophy to highlight transformative
nature-human bonds, as forests decimated for fuelwood echo broader Anthropocene
crises of environmental justice and loss. Shafak's narrative
techniques—nonlinear timelines, ecolinguistics storytelling—invoke activism,
urging readers to confront personal complicity in planetary degradation, from
climate refugees to biodiversity erosion, and envision restorative futures
where arboreal wisdom heals fractured ecologies and societies. Ultimately, the
novel posits literature as a vital environmental humanities tool, fostering
planetary awareness and ethical responsibility by reimagining trees not as
passive resources but as co-authors of history, compelling a shift from
domination to coexistence in our shared, imperiled world.
Keywords:
Ecocriticism, Nonhuman, Agency, Environmental Humanities, Elif Shafak
Introduction
Elif
Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees, published in 2021,
masterfully interlaces the personal and political histories of Cyprus with
ecological narratives, employing a fig tree as a sentient narrator to bridge
human trauma and environmental loss across generations. The novel spans from
the late Ottoman era through British colonial rule to the violent 1974 Turkish
invasion that partitioned the island, all refracted through the perspective of
a tree transplanted from a war-torn Cypriot garden to a dimly lit London flat.
This innovative structure challenges entrenched anthropocentric views in
Western literature, where nonhuman entities are typically relegated to passive
scenery, instead positioning them as active witnesses, moral agents, and even
healers in tales of division, disappearance, and regeneration.
Central to the
narrative is the fig tree, affectionately named Defne after one of the human
protagonists, which stands as a living emblem of the "missing trees"
that once blanketed Cyprus's hills but were felled by conflict and
exploitation. Ecocriticism, as articulated by pioneers like Lawrence Buell and
Cheryll Glotfelty, scrutinizes literature's portrayal of environmental crises
and the intricate relations between humans and the more-than-human world; in
Shafak's work, it unveils a deliberate equation between ecological destruction—such
as the stripping of forests—and cultural erasure through ethnic violence. The
environmental humanities broaden this lens by integrating disciplines like
history, botany, philosophy, and postcolonial studies, revealing the novel's
urgent call for multispecies justice in the face of Anthropocene upheavals,
including biodiversity collapse and climate-induced migrations. This expanded
paper builds on the original abstract by delving deeper into the tree's
narrative agency, the symbolic weight of deforestation, interdisciplinary
insights from environmental humanities, and the activist imperatives of
Shafak's storytelling techniques. Through five extended sections, it
demonstrates how literature can cultivate ecological awareness and ethical
transformation, urging readers to rethink their place in a web of
interdependent lives.
Ecocritical
Perspectives on Deforestation and Partition
Ecocriticism
in The Island of Missing Trees powerfully frames deforestation
not merely as environmental degradation but as a profound form of ecocide that
mirrors the human "disappeared" during Cyprus's traumatic 1974
partition, when thousands of Greek and Turkish Cypriots vanished amid
intercommunal clashes and military intervention. The fig tree's vivid
recounting of locust plagues that devoured entire orchards, colonial-era
clearances that razed native forests to plant lucrative vineyards, and petty
vendettas where villagers axed trees to deprive enemies of shade or
firewood—all these acts parallel the mass graves, silenced testimonies, and
erased histories of the island's divided communities. In this way, Shafak
disrupts the rigid culture/nature binary, portraying environmental harm as
co-constitutive of human trauma: scarred tree bark echoes wounded human flesh,
felled trunks evoke buried bodies, and barren landscapes reflect fractured
families.
Shafak's
critique of anthropocentric exploitation gains potency through the tree's
unflinching voice, which laments the relentless human practices—like
opportunistic fuelwood gathering during wartime sieges—that systematically
decimated Cyprus's once-lush woodlands, forging direct links between these
local depredations and global patterns of colonial resource extraction and
capitalist overreach. This relational ontology elevates trees to resilient
repositories of memory, their sprawling root systems intertwining human
genealogies across ethnic divides; the fig tree, self-dating to 1878 amid the
Ottoman-British power transition, bears witness to successive
"uprootings" that displace both flora and families. By conferring
narrative agency upon nonhumans, the novel champions multispecies ethics,
compelling readers to perceive deforestation as akin to genocide—an assault on
kinship networks that demands collective accountability for landscapes rendered
perpetually "missing". Such ecocritical readings underscore Shafak's
novel as a clarion call against extractive logics, where every severed branch
signifies not just ecological loss but a diminishment of shared planetary
vitality.
Nonhuman Agency
and the Fig Tree's Narrative Voice
At the heart of
Shafak's innovation lies the sentient fig tree, which upends anthropocentric
paradigms by narrating from a distinctly arboreal vantage, seamlessly blending
ecolinguistics with elements of magical realism to humanize—and perhaps
"treenize"—nonhuman experience in ways that resonate across species
boundaries. Uprooted amid the chaos of the 1974 invasion and replanted in a
London terrarium, the tree communicates not through words but via evocative scents,
subtle whispers, and the silent testimony of its leaves, thereby fostering a
profound "intraspecies communion" that blurs the lines between human
observers and vegetal subjects. This narrative voice unveils Cyprus's occluded
histories with unflagging clarity: familial vendettas that echo broader ethnic
conflicts, where trees "bleed" crimson sap akin to human blood,
forging symbols of interspecies solidarity in suffering.
Shafak's
masterful deployment of nonlinear timelines—leaping from the damp gloom of
2010s London to the sun-baked turmoil of 1970s Cyprus—mimics the concentric
growth rings of ancient trees, layering deep-time ecological memory atop
ephemeral human events to reveal enduring patterns of loss and renewal. The
tree's burgeoning agency subverts conventional views of flora as inert
resources, recasting it as a co-author of history; tracing its lineage back to
colonial impositions, it indicts empires for clearing biodiverse forests in
favor of monocultural cash crops, just as modern partitions have cleaved
vibrant communities asunder. This nonhuman narration precipitates ethical
reckonings, as the tree's ancient "wisdom"—encoded in its cellular
resilience—heals entrenched divides, extending from intimate personal griefs to
the grander crises of planetary habitability. Through such mechanisms, Shafak
invites readers into an empathetic entanglement, where listening to the trees
becomes an act of moral reorientation toward humility and coexistence.
Environmental
Humanities and Anthropocene Crises
The environmental
humanities framework in The Island of Missing Trees artfully
weaves together biology, history, philosophy, and cultural studies,
illuminating transformative bonds between humans and nature amid the cascading
losses of the Anthropocene, from biodiversity erosion to the plight of climate
refugees. The novel's depiction of forests decimated for fuelwood during
prolonged wartime sieges resonates as a microcosm of broader environmental
injustices, where Cypriot traumas eerily prefigure global displacements driven
by resource wars and rising seas. The fig tree's arboreal perspective yields
rich interdisciplinary insights: its root networks evoke botanical metaphors
for social connectivity, while its geopolitical perch on a divided island
mirrors fractured ecosystems strained by human hubris.
Shafak mobilizes
activism via ecolinguistic storytelling, wherein tree-inflected
metaphors—leaves as tongues of testimony, branches as arms of embrace—prod
readers to confront their own complicity in ongoing degradations, from
lingering colonial legacies to contemporary carbon emissions fueling wildfires
worldwide. This expansive lens envisions restorative futures with tangible
hope: the tree, resiliently fruiting in its London exile, symbolizes
regenerative potential, where arboreal ethics knit together sundered societies
through acts of cross-species care. By reimagining trees as dynamic
participants rather than mute backdrop, the novel asserts literature's pivotal
role as an environmental humanities instrument, galvanizing planetary awareness
and dismantling logics of domination in favor of symbiotic flourishing. Such
integrations position Shafak's work at the vanguard of humanities-driven
responses to ecological peril.
Narrative
Techniques and Ethical Activism
Shafak's
sophisticated narrative techniques—fractured nonlinear plots, polyphonic
sentient narration, and lush ecolinguistics registers—collectively invoke a
deepened ethical responsibility, casting readers as active participants rather
than detached spectators in unfolding ecological dramas. The tree's voice,
saturated with multisensory metaphors (the acrid scents of smoldering war, the
bitter tastes of protracted loss), fractures linear historical progression,
mirroring Cyprus's own unresolved partitions and inviting nonlinear modes of
comprehension attuned to ecological rhythms. This stylistic alchemy fosters
genuine activism, compelling confrontation with individual and collective roles
in precipitating biodiversity collapse while simultaneously envisioning
arboreal wisdom as a panacea for societal fractures.
In the novel's
culminating arcs—from Cyprus's blood-soaked orchards to London's tentative
regenerations—literature emerges unequivocally as an indispensable tool of the
environmental humanities, empowering trees as co-narrators who mend our imperiled
world through storied empathy. Shafak scales the intimate ecocide of a single
island to the existential crises of the globe, advocating multispecies justice
via narrative immersion that bridges ethnic, ecological, and epochal chasms.
Ultimately, these techniques catalyse a profound shift, transforming passive
consumption of text into praxis for planetary stewardship.
Conclusion
The Island of
Missing Trees fundamentally
redefines human-nature entanglements through ecocriticism and environmental
humanities, symbolizing resilience amid profound loss and division. Shafak's
fig tree, as sentient chronicler and ethical provocateur, compels a paradigm
shift from exploitation to coexistence, affirming literature's transformative
power in awakening ecological conscience. This expanded analysis illuminates
the novel's enduring urgency, equipping readers to navigate our shared, fragile
world with renewed multispecies solidarity.
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