It is not often I do book reviews on the Blog. I have just finished reading Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees and I think this is a must read for any islanders as she refers to the residents of the island. Not Greeks nor Turks, not Greek Cypriots nor Turkish Cypriots but islanders of a shared homeland. And while the story has been written with its focus on Cyprus its paradigms and parallels can be applied to many broken homelands around the world.
Elif Shafak has written a story based on history and actual happenings - I know I was there for most of them - and woven into it, the love story of Kostas and Defne and their daughter Ada. Central to them however is a fig tree that takes on a human voice and is a narrator in the story. The story is dedicated "to immigrants and exiles everywhere, the uprooted, re-rooted and the rootless" (and my god there are enough of them in the world) - and to the trees left behind rooted in our memories."
She takes us back to the island's history and explores the Green Line and the division of the island. "Cartography is another name for stories told by winners. For stories told by those who have lost there isn't one."
We are introduced to Kostas living in the UK with his daughter Ada. He is busy burying a fig tree. A way to preserve it from the cold.This is a much beloved shoot from a fig tree which grew on the island and which becomes central to their love and the preservation of their love story. They are grieving for the loss of his wife and Ada's mother. Ada is troubled by the loss and unhappy in school.
The fig tree comes to tell us the story of the Happy Fig Taverna, Yiorgos and Yusuf who ran it and the love affair between Kostas and Defne in the early 1970s - they had to meet in secret as their families would never have approved of the union, one being from the Greek Community and the other from the Turkish Community.They chose the Taverna as it was a place they could safely meet. We hear of the struggles of the respective families and "how British, Turkish, Greek blood was spilled and the earth absorbed it all, as it always does."
The war wrenched the couple apart with terrible consequences and it is only years later that Kostas finally visits the island and comes across an older and bitter Defne, who is working as an archaeologist but involved in the work of the CMP, The Committee for Missing Persons. Those people unaccounted for in the war from both sides. Kostas asks "And the missing you found here were they Greeks or Turks ?" They were islanders" she said with a sharp edge to her voice then. "Islanders like us."
Defne's sister, Meryem visits Kostas and Ada in London and she is able finally to fill in the missing pieces of the story about the years the couple were apart. It is a difficult but revelatory time for Ada and she is intrigued by her aunt but also by the stories she relates, many based in her culture and folk lore. She talks about the war and the ghost town of Varosha, Famagusta. She talks about how people were uprooted and pushed asunder. For young Ada it is a time to understand the wider implications of her parents union and the sacrifices they made. Not just them but everyone in the story, the young men lost to Eoka A and Eoka B, the senseless homophobic murders, the racism and nationalism which eat into human relationships and common interactions. The loss to nature and to animals and birds through war and desolation.
It's written with beautiful imagery and meaningful sensitivity of a subject which has been emotive for so many years and constitutes what everyone knows as the "Cyprus Problem." Will it ever be solved, will people wake up to the reality that war, lines in the sand or on maps is never the answer ? That nature goes on regardless and springs forth with life where destruction once lay ? How long will it take ?
