elif shafak

Elif Shafak’s latest novel, The Island of Missing Trees, is a story she has been wanting to write for a long time, she tells me from a book-lined room in her house in London.

It focuses on two lovers – Kostas and Defne – from different sides of the divide in 70s war-torn Cyprus, and flashes forward to the life of the couple’s teenage daughter in London in the late 2010s.

It is also, improbably but effectively, partly narrated by a fig tree. This device enabled the Turkish-British novelist to broach the subject of the Cypriot conflict.

“I couldn’t dare to write about it because it’s such an emotionally charged subject,” she says. “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.”

The tree in question is in a tavern in Cyprus frequented by Kostas, a Greek Christian, and Defne, a Turkish Muslim. When Kostas leaves the island in 1974, he takes a cutting from it which he then plants in London and which, as it grows, creates a physical link for the couple’s daughter between her life and her parents’ past.

The Island of Missing Trees is Shafak’s first novel since her 2019 Booker-shortlisted 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, about a murdered Istanbul sex worker. She is Turkey’s most widely-read woman writer, but her activism and outspokenness have meant that she no longer feels safe visiting the country under President Erdogan’s government.

Now 49, Shafak has lived in London for more than a decade since her 2007 novel The Bastard of Istanbul was put on trial for “insulting Turkishness”. Though acquitted, she nonetheless faced the prospect of a three-year prison sentence.

“In Turkey, everything can be an issue,” she says. “You talk about history, that can offend the authorities; you talk about today [contemporary life] and that can offend the authorities; you talk about sexuality, that can offend the authorities and you can be put on trial, prosecuted for anything.”

The political situation in Cyprus discussed in The Island of Missing Trees has a personal dimension for Shafak, who grew up in Ankara.

“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,” she says.

Writing the novel took a heavy toll on her.

“Emotionally, it was a very difficult subject. For me as a storyteller, I had to think about how to approach this, but I’m also very drawn to silences,” she says. In the novel, Ada – Defne and Kostos’s daughter – starts to untangle her parents’ troubled history. “There are intergenerational silences or intergenerational trauma that I wanted to unpack,” she explains.

For Shafak, novels are the opposite of the binary thinking she opposes on the political stage.

“Authoritarian mindsets don’t like nuance or ambiguity, it’s very much, ‘We’re right, they are wrong.’ But that is not the approach of the artist or a writer. You have to treasure those blurred lines, those nuances. For two pages, I put myself in the shoes of a Turkish Cypriot auntie, but in the next two pages, I become the Greek Cypriot mother. Cognitively, you have to be a nomad to tell a story. Literature can help us to rehumanise people who have been dehumanised systematically in the mainstream narrative.”

In the novel, Shafak returns again and again to the idea of “islanders” from Cyprus, rather than Greek Cypriots or Turkish Cypriots. This was a way of emphasising their similarities. “It’s a divided island, but whether you are from the north or the south, you have so much in common, whether it’s the culture or the history, the food, the idioms or the superstitions,” she says. “While religions divide, superstitions easily cross the border like migrating birds.”

Shafak’s experiences with the Turkish authorities mean she is not entirely immune to fretting about potential responses to her work, but she tries not to second-guess things.

“If I worry too much about how books will be received, I can never write,” she says.
“I have to prioritise something else and the thing that I prioritise is my love for the art of storytelling – that keeps me going.”

What I’m reading now

The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell

“I enjoyed this tremendously when re-reading it. I have zero talent in the kitchen but I love reading about food, too.”

What I’m reading next

Summerwater by Sarah Moss

“I like Moss’s writing, her sense of rhythm and the atmosphere she creates so deftly.”

This interview originally appeared in the i paper