Buket Uzuner’s Fire and Sacred Trees: An Interview and Impressions

Abstract

Buket Uzuner’s construction of iconography of nature, especially her integration of arboreal bodies in her novels, reveals anxiety mixed with the sense of accountability and responsibility she feels as we all face climate change. This work contains the interview that we conducted with Uzuner and an exploration of her conceptualisation of arboreal complexities in the age of climate change, especially discussing her upcoming work Fire. Our interpretation is informed by Paul Ricoeur, who approached different levels of hermeneutic adaptation by giving weight to both the transparency and opaqueness of the meaning of icons and metaphors.