Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF ENGLISH STUDIES, 2025 (AHCI, SSCI, Scopus)
Published in 2021, the novel The Island of Missing Trees by Turkish-British author Elif Shafak interlaces themes of love, loss, conflict, and struggle through alternating narrators both human and nonhuman, while switching geographically and temporally between Cyprus, both before and after the partition, and modern-day London. Within this multi-layered narrative structure, the reader is introduced to a number of characters whose stories of survival or demise unfold the damaging effects of war and the traumatic impact of migration. Among these experiences, two female registers stand out: those of a conscious fig tree and the love-lorn Defne, both of whom witness the horrors of atrocity and bear the scars of war intensely. Thus, this study examines the interconnectedness between these two characters within the framework of material ecocriticism with an emphasis on nomadic subjectivity to explore how the novel approaches the experience of migration as an entangled process. In the light of a discursive theoretical reading of the impact of migration on the human and nonhuman worlds, this work argues that both Defne and the fig tree share a common gendered experience of uprooting that empathetically intertwines the human and arboreal storyworlds represented in the novel.