“Religions clash, but superstitions travel well across borders,” she says.
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The past matters, because it shapes us, whether we know it or not.” This kind of longing, she believes, is often triggered by food, which is one reason why her novel is full of enticing descriptions of Cypriot dishes (as you read, you may find yourself longing for a slice of sticky baclava, the “correct” recipe for which is almost as hotly contested as that of hummus). Their mothers and fathers tell them: ‘This is your home, forget about all that.’ But for them, identity matters.”Ĭan a person be homesick for a place they’ve never been, or knew only briefly? She believes that they can: “You carry a place in your soul, even through the stories you were not told. I’ve met many third-generation immigrants who have older memories even than their parents. So it’s left to the third generation to dig into memory. In immigrant families, the older generation often wants to protect the younger from past sorrow, so they choose not to say much, and the second generation is too busy adapting, being part of the host country, to investigate. “It’s not scientific, perhaps, but things we cannot talk about easily within families do pass from one generation to the next, unspoken. “I’ve always believed in inherited pain,” says Shafak. Religions clash, but superstitions travel well across borders. But it also represents a physical link between past and present for their teenage daughter, Ada, who was born in London, and who, when the book begins, understands nothing of her parents’ secrets and shared trauma. It grew originally in the taverna where Kostas, a Greek Cypriot, and Defne, a Turkish Cypriot, used to meet as teenagers – a restaurant that was reduced to rubble when it was bombed in 1974 – and thanks to this, it knows everything that they’ve been through: the pain of separation, the melancholy of exile.
Grown from a cutting that was smuggled from Cyprus to London by its owner, Kostas, after he and his forbidden love, Defne, left the island in search of a new beginning, it has seen it all, this little fig. And while her new novel, The Island of Missing Trees – her first since the Booker-shortlisted 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World – is certainly political, its themes to do with violence and loss, it’s also a passionate love story, one of whose most important characters just happens to be – yes – a gentle and sagacious tree. Gentle and warm, her voice is never emphatic she smiles with her (green) eyes as well as her mouth. In person, however, you get no immediate sense of this. A fierce advocate for equality and freedom of speech, her views have brought her into conflict with the increasingly repressive government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Shafak, who is sometimes described as Turkey’s most famous female writer, has a reputation for outspokenness. A sycamore or horse chestnut-induced sense of perspective could be just what the pair of us need.
We’re both slightly anxious, I think, Shafak because she arrived for our meeting a tiny bit late, and me because this cafe in Holland Park is so noisy and crowded (we can’t sit outside because yet another violent summer squall has just blown in). Perhaps they can help us to have a calmer, wiser angle on things.” In unison, we turn our heads towards the window. I f trees could talk, what might they tell us? “Well,” says the Turkish-British writer Elif Shafak, smiling at me over a cup of mint tea, her long hair a little damp from the rain.
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