What the Trees Remember: Memory and Time in “The Island of The Missing Trees”
As humans, we tend to understand life as a linear continuum, confined to the space between birth and death, with our experiences unfolding in chronological order within these seemingly fixed boundaries. Books often reflect this pattern, their plots following the ebbs and flows of human consciousness. However, I recently stumbled across a book that rejects this notion of a chronological storyline, instead building a multifaceted and nonlinear narrative around one of the longest-living forms of life on Earth: the tree.
In “The Island of Missing Trees,” Elif Shafak constructs a magical and breathtaking tale of love, loss, war and hope, centered around the regenerative and cyclical life of a fig tree. She draws a distinction between rushed and linear “human time” and “tree time,” or arboreal time, which is cyclical, nonlinear and perennial. Just like a tree’s trunk — composed of concentric circles of wood, progressively getting older as it moves towards the center — arboreal time is built from “circles within circles,” blending the past and present together in one enduring organism. This arboreal perspective reflects how generational trauma and memory operate within the novel; pain does not dissipate over time, but echoes and resurfaces as the years pass and the trauma calcifies.
The question of why Shafak chose the nonlinear life of a fig tree to serve as the backbone of her story is beautifully addressed in the beginning of the novel. She writes that “in real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between.” What initially appears to be a disjointed collection of stories gradually reveals itself as an intricately connected narrative.
The story is split between a Romeo and Juliet-esque love story unfolding amid political upheaval in 1970s Cyprus, where Greek and Turkish Cypriots are embroiled in violent conflict, and modern-day London, where a girl and her father struggle to live with the repercussions of their history. Kostas, a Greek Cypriot, and Defne, a Turkish Cypriot, engage in a forbidden romance, secretly meeting in a tavern called “The Happy Fig.” Co-owned by both a Turkish and Greek Cypriot, the tavern reflects the one location where the two communities could coexist despite the conflict surrounding them. Years later, Kostas and Defne reunite and move to London, where they raise their daughter, Ada. Yet the trauma of their past follows them, shaping their family and ultimately leaving Ada struggling to understand a history she feels the repercussions of, but has never experienced herself.
An ancient, anthropomorphic fig tree planted in the center of the tavern is the thread that weaves this multigenerational story together, bearing witness to tragedy and coming close to death before being rescued and replanted in London. The fig tree, as a central narrator throughout the novel, offers a unique perspective that intertwines human experiences with botanical observations and environmental concerns.
The fig tree’s position as an observer also challenges conventional notions of how history is remembered; it holds no political allegiance to either side of the conflict, unlike the humans around it. It does not understand the island of Cyprus through the rigid divisions of Greek or Turkish, victim or perpetrator. Viewing the conflict through arboreal time, it simply watches and records what it experiences without privileging any single moment or event as the defining feature of the island’s history. In this way, Shafak uses a nonhuman narrator to expose the limitations of human historical narratives. The tree’s observations preserve the experiences of individuals whose stories might have otherwise been obscured by competing national histories. Thus, the story becomes a sort of archive in which memories that complicate the narrative of both sides of the civil war are recorded.
While the fig tree preserves the memories of what occurred in Cyprus, the human characters spend much of their lives trying to escape them. Defne, haunted by the violence and loss she experienced on the island, seeks to bury her past rather than confront it. Yet, her silence does not protect her daughter from the consequences of that history. Ada grows up knowing little of her family origins, but nevertheless inherits the transgenerational trauma of a family devastated by war and bloodshed. Her struggles reflect the paradox of her place in the family chain; she is inextricably linked to generations shaped by pain and loss, but remains largely unaware of the history that has shaped her own identity. In contrasting both Defne and Ada’s relationships with memory, Shafak illustrates how trauma refuses to conform to the linear boundaries of human life, instead passing between generations even when the stories themselves remain untold.
Shafak’s brilliance lies not only in her ability to masterfully articulate the fragmented nature of memory, but in her decision to structure the novel around that very fragmentation. As the narrative shifts between generations, locations and perspectives, the reader is forced to put together the story themselves, with the fig tree serving as the thread connecting characters and events that initially seemed unrelated. The reader’s experience thus mirrors the very act of remembering, in which isolated fragments of the past slowly coalesce into a larger picture. Shafak’s ability to transform this seemingly unconventional narrator into the emotional epicenter of the novel is perhaps her greatest achievement.
Ultimately, “The Island of Missing Trees” challenges readers to reconsider the boundaries of their own existence. While humans measure their lives in years, defining their stories through clear beginnings and ends, Shafak’s fig tree offers the perspective of arboreal time, in which the past is never entirely gone and the present is inseparable from what came before it. By framing the story through this concept, Shafak offers readers a chance to understand the true scope of human existence in this world. Our lives do not begin when we are born, nor do their effects decline in significance when we die. Instead, we are links in a continuous and multilayered chain, shaped by the trauma, love, triumphs and failures who came before us, just as we shape the lives of those who will come after. The sooner we acknowledge that our lives are not isolated from the past but heavily intertwined in it, the sooner we can begin to confront inherited trauma and create a future that is not defined by it.
The fig tree thus reminds us that, although our lives may be fleeting, the memories we create and the stories we leave behind endure long after we are gone, influencing and shaping future generations, ad infinitum.
Photo Caption: One of the longest-living life forms on Earth: the tree
Photo Credit: Unsplash / Johann Siemens
