“Memory Shot Through Holes”: The Idea of Postmemory in Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees

Abstract

ABSTRACT The emergence of postmemory in recent decades has opened various tangents around which the frameworks of memory, trauma, and nostalgia can be reimagined and reexamined. The notions of memory and postmemory and the complex relation underlying their mutual interaction is a recent development in memory studies. In this light, the questions arise: What happens when people with traumatic memories are forced to flee their homelands? How do the subsequent generations of the survivors deal with the traumatic intergenerational memories of the past? Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees is set in Cyprus, a place divided by a border, destroyed by ethnic conflict, and years of violence and bloodshed. Shafak not only incorporates the idea of inherited pain and silence but also further explores the ways in which families with traumatic histories transfer these experiences of suffering, grief, nostalgia, and melancholy from one generation to another. Through the character of Ada, the daughter of Kostas and Defne, the researcher attempts to delve into the terrain of intergenerational memories and further attempts to analyze the various tenets of the notion of postmemory by undertaking a textual analysis of The Island of Missing Trees.