“The shadow of another land”: multiple belongings and nomadic subjectivity in The Island of Missing Trees

Reviewed by: The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak Zeynep Z. Atayurt-Fenge ELIF SHAFAK The Island of Missing Trees New York. Bloomsbury. 2021. 368 pages. SHORTLISTED FOR THE Women's Prize for Fiction 2022, Elif Shafak's thirteenth novel, The Island of Missing Trees, revisits Shafak's much-frequented topics of identity, memory, and gender. Divided into six parts and preceded by a prologue, the novel features a multilayered and polyphonic narrative, stylistically reminiscent of her previous novels, including 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World (2019). Within this subtly knitted narrative structure, Shafak portrays different ways of life, expressed through the stories of various life-forms and connected to each other under the common denominator of grief—namely, grief for the loss of home, lover, and grief for the loss of biodiversity. Yet the novel is also about a sense of longing for wholeness, oneness, and harmony, not only between people but also between all elements of the wider ecosystem. Foregrounding the notion of relationality, The Island of Missing Trees interweaves the Anthropocene with the ecological system, creating a narrative that promotes a holistic vision of posthumanism while situating human suffering side by side with the distress experienced by the ecosystem due to the atrocities visited upon it by the human world. To this end, she presents a mythical arboreal point of view, rendering the theme of ecological consciousness as a stylized expression that lays emphasis on the notion of multiplicity. And around this ecological consciousness, Shafak interlaces the themes of love, [End Page 76] hate, and death through a double narrative structure that alternates between 1974 and the 2010s, and geographically between Cyprus and London, bridged at the center by the narrative of a conscious, speaking fig tree. The historical vein of the narrative deals with the period before and after the partition of Cyprus and its damaging effects on people and the landscape. While depicting this political and military crisis, Shafak avoids giving precedence to any particular group by referring to the inhabitants of the island only as "islanders." Thus, the impartial tone prompts an empathetic insight toward a harmonious coexistence, not only among the members of different ethnic groups but also between the human and the nonhuman world. This stance is infused into the contemporary narrative, which is set in north London a few days before Christmas. The festive mood of the holiday season is overshadowed by the prospect of a cyclone and also a familial trauma involving a teenage schoolgirl, Ada (whose name means island in Turkish), her Turkish Cypriot archaeologist mother, Defne (a Turkish name with Greek origin, meaning laurel tree), and her Greek Cypriot ecologist and botanist father named Kostas, working on the role of fig trees in restoring biodiversity. Within this multilayered structure, the narrative discloses the troubling experience of each character with the theme of loss—respectively, loss of a mother, loss of a spouse, loss of roots, and loss of natural habitat. Through Shafak's incisive storytelling, these stories of the human and the nonhuman world grow into each other and create a saga on whose surface various forms of sorrow are inscribed. The reciprocity between the human and the nonhuman world is further made evident in the way the novel structurally alludes to the botanical process of burying and unburying a tree, a beautifully constructed symbolic trope that both warns against digging up the past in an antagonistic fashion—thus unearthing conflicts—and proposes reconciliation and reconnection with one's roots no matter how tangled they are. In this regard, the novel points to the impact of revelations on personal as well as social levels, and through these revelations it is not the feeling of anger that is communicated but understanding of grief, an emotional state described in the novel as "a language" that is universal. Although this language might seem relevant only to human beings at first sight, Shafak makes it equally pertinent to the nonhuman world in her narrative, offering an aestheticized construction of the ecosystem by drawing attention to the ornate patterns in nature, including the behaviors of flies, mosquitos, ants, bees, and butterflies. Accordingly, she constructs a fig tree as a major...

Bu makale Faruk Duman’ın “Ve Bir Pars Hüzünle Kaybolur” (2014) ve “Sus Barbatus” (2018) romanlarında karakterlerin doğa ile kurdukları bağı ve karakterler ve insan dışı dünya arasındaki maddesel ve metafiziksel geçişkenlikleri Posthümanizm kuramı altında kendine yer bulan ekofeminist Stacy Alaimo tarafından ortaya konan Bedenler arası geçişkenlik teorisi üzerinden değerlendirip ekoeleştirel açıdan bu geçişkenliklerin mümkün kıldığı çözümleri araştırmayı planlamaktadır. Sus Barbatus 80 darbesi öncesi Türkiye’sinde geçer, siyasi kaosun hâkim olduğu bir atmosferde insan ve doğa arasındaki kaybolan bağa odaklanır. Kenan’ın hamile karısı Zeynep için bir domuz avlayıp evini geçindirme çabasıyla başlayan hikâye toplumun farklı kesimlerinden insanları bir araya getirmeye başlar. Roman boyunca tüm karakterleri birbirine bağlayacak olan doğadır. Bu bağ Sus Barbatus’un Aysel’in bedenine girmesiyle metafiziksel bir hal alır. Bu durum aynı zamanda dünyadaki fiziksel ve metafiziksel var oluşun sekteye uğramadığının da bir göstergesi olarak romandaki karakterlerin insan-dışı dünyadan ayrı düşünülemeyeceğini irdelemesi açısından önemli bir noktadır. “Ve Bir Pars Hüzünle Kaybolur’da” Ceren’e abisi şiddet uygular ve taciz eder. Diğer taraftan, anlatıcı gencin geçmişiyle ilgili travmatik dünyasına tanık oluruz. Anlatıcı gencin travmatik geçmişinden kurtulmasının ve Ceren’in ailesinin zulmünden kurtulabilmesinin yolu yine insan-dışı dünyadan geçer, bu dünyada bedensel olarak bağ kuracakları her ikisinin de farklı zamanlarda ormanda karşılaştıkları parstır. Her iki romanda da yazar bedenler-arası geçişkenlik (trans-corporeality) kavramı ile açıklanabilecek romanlardaki kahramanların ve insan-dışı dünyadaki bedenler ile aralarında kurulan edimsel (performative) bağ aracılığıyla bir çıkış yolu sunduğu iddia edilecektir. Bu savla hem bir çözüm ve farkındalık yaratılmaktadır hem de bedenler arası geçişkenliklerin ekolojik olarak insanın insan-dışı dünyadan ayrı tutulamayacağı ortaya konmaktadır.

Foregrounding the disabled and vulnerable bodies in British writer Indra Sinha’s novel Animal’s People (2007), this article contends that the disability and vulnerability of the human body provides an approach for re-thinking the relationship between the human and non-human world in the Anthropocene. The article seeks understandings about how conceptions of corporeal disability are intertwined with ideas about the non-human world; it also analyzes the vulnerability of the human body to toxic environments. “Disabled and vulnerable bodies in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People” offers a close reading of various disabled and abnormal bodies in Animal’s People through material ecocriticism to question dualisms that pervade our thinking about corporeality and to suggest that the differences between human and nonhuman are not as great as we like to pretend in the Anthropocene.

This study explores human attitude towards non-human world in Ernest Hemmingway’s The Old Manand the Sea. The narrative in Hemmingway’s masterpiece The Old Man and the Sea integrates human and non-human world. However, in this paper, I assume that Hemmingway displays contradictory attitude towards non-human world. The study uses post humanism as a theoretical lens. It employs the critical insights forwarded by Deleuze and Guattari, Val Plumwood, and Donna Haraway as the theoretical parameters to analyze the selected text. The study involves the exploration of the nature of the relations between the entities human and animal. Besides, the study seeks relationality, the interspecies connection, along with the recognition of embodiment, instinct and finitude as the shared ontological grounds in the selected narrative. The study suggests that Hemmingway offers both anthropocentric and biotic attitude towards non-human world.

Tourism in national parks is on the rise and contributes to shaping notions of the non-human world (often depicted as ‘nature’). One country that is currently facing a shift towards an enhanced emphasis on tourism in its national parks is Sweden. This article aims to unravel, illuminate, and problematize ways of seeing the non-human world in tourists’ Instagram posts about Swedish national parks, and also to consider the productive effects these might have on the relationship between humans and the non-human world. In a discursive and visual cultural analysis, representations of the non-human world, how they are situated in historically inherited ways of seeing, and what implications they might have for how humans approach and understand the non-human world are traced and reflected upon. These representations construct ways of seeing the non-human world as a sublime, desolate, and physically challenging treasury of unique character. In this way, a romantic tourist gaze is constructed, which approaches the national parks as isolated enclaves and commodified havens that offer tourists an escape from humanity, grand views, and seclusion. The main implication of this tourist gaze is a sustaining of the approach to the human world and the non-human world as separated.

Shakespeare / Nature sets new agendas for the study of nature in Shakespeare's work. Offering an expansive exploration of the intersections between the human and non-human worlds, chapters by 19 experts focus on the rich and persuasive language of nature, both as organic matter and cultural conditioning. Each chapter is grounded in a close reading of Shakespeare's plays and poems and among the many themes considered are natural theology in Macbeth; the influence of the stars in Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, Hamlet and Macbeth; monstrous bodies in Richard III and The Tempest; kinship in King Henry V; places and spaces in Love's Labour's Lost, and acting sex scenes in a range of plays including Measure for Measure, Titus Andronicus and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Approaching ‘Nature’ in all its diversity, this collection explores the multifaceted and complex ways in which the human and non-human worlds intersect and the development of a language of symbiosis that attempts to both control as well as create the terms of human authority. It offers an entirely new approach to the subject of nature, bringing together divergent approaches that have previously been pursued independently so as to explore their shared investment in the intersections between the human and non-human worlds and how these discourses shape and condition the emotional, organic, cultural, and psychological landscapes of Shakespeare’s play world. Contributors approach Shakespeare’s nature through the various lenses of philosophy, historicism, psychoanalysis, gender studies, cosmography, geography, sexuality, linguistics, environmentalism, feminism and robotics to provide new and nuanced readings of the intersectional terms of both meaning and matter.

Nature poets, Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, are concerned with the natural world and the human world. Anthropocentric and Ecocentric outlooks are explored here in terms of their dominant behaviour towards environment. This paper analyzes that: To what extent do these poets go beyond the anthropocentric world to reach the ecocentric world? And do both the poets create a sympathetic attitude towards the natural world of flora and fauna? Or do they have different outlooks of perceiving nature? The dealing of these poets with environmental degradation can reveal the inherent politics of anthropocentric ideology. Moreover, their poems are concerned with the relationship of the humans to the land and other creatures of the earth and also reveal the interaction and contact between the man-made/materialistic/human and natural/non-human world. So, the focus is on how both the poets depict, present and use the natural scenario and natural world in their poems in order to depict the relationship between the human and non-human world.

In this chapter, I want to introduce some fairly basic biological ideas and theory, so that these can then be presupposed for the rest of the book. Obviously, I do not want to introduce the whole of biology, but rather those aspects which have some bearing on sociobiology. Therefore, the guiding thread at this point will be the nature of sociobiology and the way in which it is supposed to relate to the rest of biology. Possibly, some readers interested primarily or exclusively in human behaviour might regret the fullness of my treatment, and they may be tempted to skip ahead. I think this would be a mistake. Perhaps one thing, more than anything, distinguishes both the claims and the style of sociobiologists from previous writers about the biological bases of human social behaviour, namely the way in which the sociobiologists believe that they are the first to approach human behaviour backed by a solid foundation of tested biological theory. Of course, we may conclude later that the links the sociobiologists see both between their work on social behaviour in the non-human world and the rest of biology and between their work in the non-human world and social behaviour in the human world are nothing like as tight as they themselves suppose; but these are things that will have to be investigated, not assumed at the outset. For this reason, consequently, if only out of fairness to the sociobiologists, it is important to establish as solid a biological background as is possible.

Vikram, the Vampire, and the Story Intizar Husain Translated by Frances W. Pritchett (bio) The future of the short story is dark because there are fewer and fewer trees in the world, and more and more people. In a world containing only people, there is room for journalism to grow, but not for poems and stories. Journalism and oratory are merely the human world’s means of expression. However, poems and stories are expressions that are born from the interaction of the human and the non-human worlds. Story was born in a time when there were more trees on this Earth, and fewer humans. When night fell, there was a handful of men and women around a fire, and beyond them only darkness and more darkness—and trees and more trees. Certain parts of the natural world can be replaced by others. Forest can be replaced by desert, and desert by high mountains or by the shore of the noisy sea. But sky-high buildings cannot replace sky-high mountains or tall forest trees. Meditation—the training of the imagination and creative action—can live in the shade of banyans, in mountain caves, in the expanses of the desert. But nothing can live within the walls of factories. Today, there is no escaping sky-high buildings, noisy factories, and row upon row of houses and apartments. The “mass man” that Jose Ortega y Gasset characterised forty years ago in the context of twentieth-century Europe is now, with the rise of industrial development, spreading in our South Asian cities also. Traffic is so great that trees are continually being cut down and roads expanded. Buses are full of people, and motorcycles and taxis are so loud that normal speech is inaudible. But even so, there are not enough vehicles to carry everyone. The problem with housing is the same. There are many houses, but more people who need them, even though new residential areas are constantly being developed. Where yesterday there was a forest, today there is a forest of houses and apartments. And yet there are not enough. An empty house is a relic of the past. Houses that remained empty for years—so that even their locks grew rusty—no longer exist. Such mysterious houses nourished the imagination and gave birth to stories. Nurturing the imagination was partly the responsibility of vacant, mysterious houses. Dense old trees, birds, and other animals were also responsible. All these were active in the life of the society. Love of humanity, no doubt—but love of humanity was not the only concern of Tulsi, Kabir, and Nasir Kazmi. Their poetry also arose from the mysterious relationship between the human and the non-human, which was the very foundation of the flourishing societies of those days. [End Page 241] But now, with our sky-high buildings, noisy factories, and massive machines, we are entering a new age of barbarism. Thanks to this barbarism, which only seems to be civilisation, the breadth of our experience is shrinking while the metropolis of facts and information is spreading. Man’s relationship with the non-human world is breaking down, and we are becoming industrialised creatures. Today the classic collection Twenty-Five Tales of a Vampire could not be written. Why not? The Vampire says to King Vikram, “It’s good to pass the time in talking of good things while travelling. So, Raja, listen to the stories I’ll tell you. But if you speak on our journey, I’ll go back to where you found me and you’ll have to start all over.” These days, we speak a great deal. Speeches, newspaper statements, conferences, discussions—our thoroughfares are full of noise. While travelling on them, conversations between a human—such as King Vikram—and a non-human are no longer possible. In the midst of constant noise, we have become hard of hearing. There are some voices that we can no longer even hear. When Raja Vikramajit spoke on the journey and the Vampire went back and hung upside down in his tree, social realism replaced storytelling. Social reform, political conditions, revolution, ideologies—these are Raja Vikram creations; or, in the words of...

As climate change materializes, legal theorists face the urgent need to develop a normative baseline for environmental regulation. Meanwhile, in the seemingly unrelated field of political exit theory, theorists have presumed that while one ought to be able to exit any polity one cannot exit all polities. This essay challenges that presumption, and simultaneously addresses the baseline problem in environmental law, by combining the analyses to develop a new human right derived from exit right theory called the primary right: a general claim-right of reasonable access to wilderness. The derivation is simple: If consent is necessary to justify political association, it is necessary to justify any amount of political association. And, if one has the right to refuse to consent to and exit any polity one has the right to refuse to consent to and exit all polities. To exit all polities completely so that the polity holds no residual power, control and influence over the person exiting would require her having access to, and therefore the continued existence of, nonpolity, or wilderness. If wilderness ceases to exist, or cannot be reasonably accessed, one has no alternative to political association and cannot be truly autonomous. Nonconsent becomes impossible.The primary right is a candidate for a revolutionary “first generation” human right to a baseline environment, a right already reflected in the core principals of liberal political philosophy, as well as domestic environmental legislation like the Wilderness and Endangered Species Acts. The primary right synthesizes these typically separate and seemingly conflicting strands of thought, liberal political and environmental theory, to recognize particular duties that can serve as the foundation for a new regime of domestic and international laws that protects both autonomy and the nonhuman world. It adds to the literature by forcing us to see the nonhuman world as a medium by which humans exert power over each other, and by proposing that the baseline for environmental law, that field of law which regulates the relationship between humans and the nonhuman world, should be the nonhuman world itself. Properly understood, liberalism values the nonhuman world because only access to it, which provides a baseline from which we can consent to the human world, can justify consensual political association.

Reviewed by: Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective by Anissa Janine Wardi Tayana L. Hardin (bio) Wardi, Anissa Janine. Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective. Gainesville: UP of Florida, 2011. Author Anissa Janine Wardi’s Water and African American Memory: An Ecocritical Perspective is an ambitious and well-researched study that investigates the confluence of water, cultural memory, and African American historical experience. Wardi undertakes this investigation through an examination of several twentieth-century cultural texts by writers Ntozake Shange, Toni Morrison, Henry Dumas, and Richard Wright; filmmakers Julie Dash and Kasi Lemmons; and blues singers Muddy Waters and Bessie Smith. Despite differences in genre and style, these texts variously depict encounters between human bodies, living and dead, and the water bodies that sustain and entomb them—encounters that, by Wardi’s account, reveal the aqueous frontier between the natural, human, and ancestral worlds. The association of the natural world with ancestral and diasporic memory is not new to critics of African American literature and cultural production, and has been the topic of conversation in academic journals, edited collections, book manuscripts, and university classrooms. Collectively, these conversations disclose an abiding interest in the way African American writers, musicians, and visual artists rely upon the natural world to structure their texts and even critique the injustices of the human world. In the three chapters and conclusion that follow the introduction, Wardi both draws from and hones the conversation by privileging water as a site of inquiry, even asserting that scholars “must return to watercourses to gain insight into African American cultural history” (10). Wardi executes this return to watercourses through engagement with what she calls “African American Ecocriticism,” a method of interpretation that builds upon ecocriticism, variously known as ecological literary criticism, green criticism, or literary-environmental studies. Wardi argues that ecocriticism, which took root as a field of critical literary study within the past two decades, has largely been limited and applied to the nature writing of Anglo writers (10). However, she posits, the premise of ecocriticism—that the human and nonhuman worlds are interconnected and mutually informed and sustained—”finds an earlier analogue in the work of African American writers, who have persistently attended to their physical environments” (11). Citing the writing of former slaves, Wardi explains how the natural world marked the boundaries between enslavement and freedom, and, furthermore, how such engagement with place and environment continues to characterize the African American literary and cultural tradition. Wardi thus conceptualizes African American Ecocriticism as a means to fulfill two different but related objectives: first, to uncover how the interdependence of the natural, human, and ancestral worlds in African American literature meaningfully expands the ecocritical canon (15); and second, to address how African American writers “evoke a transatlantic history in which language, and by extension their literary works, are given life force through water” (10). To support her mission, Wardi calls forth critical insights by writers, natural scientists, historians, and cultural critics. She then augments this theoretical discussion with close readings of Langston Hughes’s poem “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (1921) and August Wilson’s play Gem of the Ocean (2006). Hughes’s and Wilson’s texts befit Wardi’s theoretical discussion, given that each revolves around the very idea that structures this project—namely, the interrelationship between water, ancestral, and human bodies. Wardi further nuances this idea by demonstrating how characters’ [End Page 457] encounters with water sometimes trigger traumatic memory of the Middle Passage, or, conversely, serve as sites of healing and restoration. Additionally, she demonstrates how disparate waterways—such as Hughes’s rivers and Wilson’s ocean—are each carriers of memory that are perpetually channelled into and out of one another, and, consequently, always already bear the imprint of the Middle Passage. Wardi’s close reading of Hughes and Wilson leads her to a simple albeit powerful conclusion: water manifests history (29). She expounds upon this idea in subsequent chapters, which are organized around distinct water bodies. By organizing the book in this way, Wardi calls attention to the material composition of water bodies and, equally important, to the ways this materiality informs symbolism, narrative composition, and critical interpretation. Wardi’s...

his book, innovative on the Polish publishing market, is an example of the ecocritical perspective used in literature research. It contains twenty texts written by specialists in French-language literature of the 20th and 21st centuries coming from different Polish and European universities and research centers. In their texts, arranged in five chapters, the authors look at literature through the prism of the links between man and nature. By analyzing different ways in which writers talk about non-human worlds, researchers consider key issues such as the attitude of human beings towards nature and towards the planet, the human-animal relationship, the borders between the human and non-human worlds, ecology, or the quest for a non-anthropocentric perspective.

The aim of this paper is to figure out the implications of T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Dry Salvages’ from the perspective of the environmental humanities. They urge ethical human action in the Anthropocene recognizing the relationship between the human and non-human world in a nonanthropocentric manners, and alleviating the terror that humans feel in the process. The Anthropocene environmental problems, that natural restoration is difficult to expect, demands that we relate to the non-human world in an ethical way. The studies of environmental humanities focus on various public engagements of non-human worlds. This research will provide a new direction for the public to reflect on and practice ethical actions in the Anthropocene with Eliot’s ‘The Dry Salvages.’ First of all, it captures Eliot’s perception of the non-human world beyond human consciousness and human fear based on Object-Oriented Ontology in this work. Next, it draws the meaning of natality, the hope behind death, and the method of psychological solidarity with suffering people into ways to encourage human action from this poem. In terms of the environmental psychology, it argues that the environmental humanities’ implications of this work are to encourage human ethical actions with a non-anthropocentric awareness of the non-human world and a way to alleviate the fear that humans feel in uncertainty.

This paper proposes that contained within Martin Buber's works one can find useful support for, and insights into, an educational philosophy that stretches across, and incorporates, both the human and non-human worlds. Through a re-examination of his seminal essay Education2, and with reference to specific incidents in his autobiography (e.g. the horse, his family, the theatre and the tree) and to central tenets of his theology (e.g. the shekina, the Eternal Thou and teshuvah) we shall present a more coherent understanding of Buber's notion of relationship which is developmental in nature and posits intrinsic, necessary and unavoidable relational ties to both the human and non-human worlds. This understanding of Buber's view of relationship as a developmental process will add new meaning to his central ideas of ‘bursting asunder’ the educational relationship and the educator who is cast ‘in imitatio Dei absconditi sed non ignoti’.3 Ultimately this paper wants to suggest that, for Buber, the infant is unable to become fully adult without being immersed in relationship and then coming to full awareness of it, and it is the educator who can play a pivotal role in supporting the development of this adult relationality through encounters with both individual humans and the larger non-human world.

This article offers a discussion of two eco-horror feature films, each released in 2021: Ben Wheatley’s In the Earth, and Jaco Bouwer’s Gaia. With a pandemic theme, both film fictions feature sentient woods and forests which infect humans with fungal spores. This is the non-human world enlisting human collaboration. Both films break the mould of the traditional eco-horror; invariably, the latter dramatizes how the natural world avenges itself on humankind. This storytelling mode involves the use of catastrophe narratives. Elizabeth Parker has explored the alternative genre, the ‘ecoGothic’ (), which stimulates ambiguous emotional responses to human–non-human hybrid forms. To date, there is little scholarship which analyses such hybrids through the lens of queer ecology. Therefore, I will bring Timothy Morton’s theory of queer ecology (), dark ecology () and his concept of the spectral non-human world () into dialogue with Simon C. Estok’s term ‘the slimic imagination’ (). My thesis is that both films engage an interaction between queer and slimic narratives in order to undo the catastrophe narrative. Queer slime is that which destabilizes gender binaries as a means of creating uneasy but intimate collaborations between the human and non-human world.