Metaphors of Ashes and Rebirth: Existential Healing and Ecological Regeneration in Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees

Abstract

Recent trends in literary criticism demonstrate a continued interest in the intersections of trauma, memory, and ecology, particularly in postcolonial and diasporic narrative traditions. In The Island of Missing Trees, Shafak’s novel situates individual and collective grief within a living, breathing world of ecological presence, especially from the fig tree’s “non-human” narrative voice. This study examines the novel’s exploration of existential crisis stemming from cultural dislocation, intergenerational pain, and postcolonial identities. It explores how metaphors of ecology operate not merely for semiotic flourish but for narrative purpose, mediating grief, memory, and continuity rather than mere separation or division. At its most fundamental, the research project endeavors to understand how Shafak’s ecological narrative practice reshapes the notion of trauma as a process with non-human temporalities. Focusing on textual critique using principles of existential humanism, trauma theory, and ecocritical approaches, the project examines explanatory narrative events mediated through silence, migration, and memory using the fig tree’s narrative voices. In so doing, the text connects personal to collective memory through the fig tree’s voices against the spatial, temporal shifts between places and time. In doing so, it becomes evident from this research that the fig tree stands not merely for passive meaning but is instead a constitutive factor initiating events from crisis spaces towards opportunities for continuity rather than closure. By so situating, this research projects a healing practice from belonging, relational, and ecological frameworks. By maintaining a narrative interface between memory and ecology, this research project continues the work related to postcolonial literary study, trauma narrative study, and environmental humanities to recognize the capacity for literary practice regarding postcolonial narrative traditions towards coexistence with responsibility for past historical, environmental experiences.