Published Online:March 2025
Product Name:The IUP Journal of English Studies
Product Type:Article
Product Code:IJES090325
DOI:10.71329/IUPJES/2025.20.1.112-117
Author Name:Samikshya Pattnaik
Availability:YES
Subject/Domain:Arts and Humanities
Download Format:PDF
Pages:112-117
The Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak’s novel The Island of Missing Trees deals with a multigenerational story covering a time duration of almost 25 years from 1974 to 2010 during the Civil War between the Greek Christians and the Turkish Muslims, and moving between the island of Cyprus and London. Shafak narrates the tragic memories of the war experienced by the fig tree, using fabulation as a mode to address the trauma because she believes that certain experiences in life cannot be expressed by using the traditional mimetic devices or literary forms available. This paper is a textual analysis of the novel with due emphasis on the sociocultural aspects of the time in which the novel is set to explore multigenerational trauma caused by war in human beings as well as in arboreal beings. Moreover, Shafak highlights the dire consequences of the modern-day war which goes on between human and nonhuman beings on a regular basis because of the anthropocene attitudes of human beings in recent times.
Elif Shafak’s novel The Island of Missing Trees explores the themes of love, trauma, belongingness, dislocation, identity crisis and nostalgia. The author has aptly dedicated the novel to “the uprooted, the re-rooted, the rootless, and to the trees we left behind, rooted in our memories”.