Arborealities, or Making Trees Matter in Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees

Shafak’s Island of Missing Trees (2021) is a vital contribution to the imaginative work the Anthropocene demands. Focalising its narrative through a talking fig tree that witnesses nature’s suffering and the trauma of a partitioned Cyprus, the novel unfolds a deeply ethical arboreal aesthetic, or arborealities, in which a literary text generates a language of trees such that we come to regard the tree as a subject with agency and sentience. Attending to the novel form’s world-making capacities, and its arboreal intertexts including Ovid, I argue that it releases new epistemologies and ontologies that help us recognise trees as kinfolk.