Must a Novel Take a Side?
Bobuq Sayed on Elif Shafak
‘The great epochs of our life are where we win the courage to rechristen our evil
as what is best in us.’
—Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
Literary fiction has never been a barometre of morality. Readers are not meant to idolise Humbert Humbert, the tragedy of Pecola Breedlove is not a roadmap for child rearing, and Never Let Me Go doesn’t vouch for human cloning despite placing it on display. Nabokov, Morrison and Ishiguro attained cult status because their books tease out power dynamics in enduringly nuanced and compelling ways. Stories that are too explicit with an argument, meanwhile, are more akin to childhood fables, whereby characters become representative of some larger social force. Be diligent like the tortoise, not ostentatious like the hare. Don’t judge a book by its cover. Remember the villagers who stopped believing that bad bad boy who falsely cried wolf?
It is not hard to see how these moral lessons function as digestible scripture. The dog who mistakes his shadow in the water for another dog learns to practice self-restraint. When winter comes, the playful grasshopper dies of hunger while the hard-working ants survive. On and on the list goes. The characters in these fables are rewarded for their virtue and punished for their vice, supplying a firm illustration of how good God-fearing people are supposed to behave. Someone atones for their sins and they find salvation. Happily ever after, the end.
Disney’s sanitised narratives follow a similar script. Ursula the sea witch is vain. She bargains for Ariel’s voice to steal her beauty. She is jealous, and it is her jealousy that she is punished for in the end. Jafar is ambitious. He craves the glory of the Sultan, whereas our scrappy young street urchin is pure of heart and desire. The viewer is trained to understand these characters as vessels of internally coherent morality—they allocate their empathy accordingly. In the original films, Maleficent isn’t granted a backstory and it is crucial to her characterisation that she be cruel of nature even beyond her loathing of Aurora. Stories of good and bad undergird our culture; many people—especially children—tend to think in these terms. Maybe a fledgling brain can be afforded such pithy simplicity. If only all children outgrew the taste for such binaries.
But the advent of the Superhero Movie Industrial Complex carved out a whole new market in which the fable’s moral framework is largely unmitigated. Assailant and protector. The threat and the defender. The moral evil and the champion of good. The faces, races and names are switched up (Ms. Marvel is Pakistani-American, for instance, and Zoe Kravitz plays Batwoman) but the same formula is essentially recast again and again. A didactic thread of religious virtue remains tethered each time. Love thy neighbor, not the marauding foe from another planet! The spiritual power was inside you all along. Righteousness prevails.
Perhaps these oversimplified narratives are so popular because they are salves—they create a fantasy where the forces of good predictably overcome the forces of evil. A more cynical perspective might consider the saturation of moral binaries in mass entertainment as having fomented the conditions for blatantly reductive political assessments. The War on Terror was framed as a battle of ‘good versus evil’: Osama bin Laden (a bad guy), attacked America (the good guys), out of nowhere, or so the story goes. The millions of Iraqis and Afghans killed, displaced, and harmed were seen as casualties of the U.S. and its allies, Australia included. In this real-life story of Good versus Evil, the occupying force was seen as defending themselves.
It’s clear that this binary logic is inherited from religion, via the project of nation-building. A novel that capitulates to this same script would be considered feeble because one of the strengths of the novel form is that it facilitates a breadth of complexity that showcases the messy and at times contradictory multitudes of real life. Overly virtuous protagonists are uninteresting, and inherent goodness is an unrealistic motivation for anything. Enough holy books have been written already, or orated depending on who you ask. Fiction can do something else.
More commonly, a novelist orients their moral compass around whose story they choose to tell. Art Spiegelman’s Maus triumphs as a piece of war literature because it intimately examines the memories of the author’s own father, a Jew who survived Nazi concentration camps. Spiegelman draws on the fable’s technique of using anthropomorphic animal characters for subversive political ends—perhaps first popularised in George Orwell’s Animal Farm—to showcase the enduring legacy of trauma and its reverberations across borders. In Maus, the Germans are cats, the Jews are mice, the Americans are dogs, and so on. The reader naturally sympathises with the survivors, and the text displays how political power can be manipulated to cause harm. Spiegelman gestures towards morality but crucially resists the impulse to supply the cat with interiority; it would be foolish and historically inaccurate for him to adopt any neutrality on the subject. Millions were slain and there is no moral to this story, only the unimaginable pain of survivors and the heartbreak of permanently displaced families. There are no happy endings.
Early into Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees, it becomes clear that the novel intends to approach the long history of political conflict on Cyprus without taking any sides. The novel revolves around a couple, Defne and Kostas, a Turk and a Greek, who fall in love against their family’s wishes. They are separated by civil war and reunited years later by their steely bond. The story of a second couple, Yusef and Yiorgos, who are also Turkish and Greek, runs parallel in the text, except that they also face homophobic aggression. A love story that perseveres despite the staunch disapproval of family is a tale as old as the warring dynasties of Montagues and Capulets, though there are even older instances of the same trope in Scheherazade’s The Arabian Nights. What distinguishes Shafak’s story, however, is that the rival ethnic groups are both native islanders, and the anguished separation of Defne and Kostas is preceded by the very real political violence of twentieth-century Cypriot history, such as the coup d’état to oust the democratically elected Archbishop and the bombing of the Presidential Palace in Nicosia.
The Island of the Missing Trees references the Greek junta that sent Archbishop Makarios into hiding, the installation of Nikos Sampson as de facto president of Cyprus, and the ‘heavily armed Turkish troops [that] landed at Kyrenia, 200 tanks and 40,000 soldiers, marching steadily inland.’ But the narrative frame does not linger there. Instead, Shafak turns her attention to the impacts of this violence on people, families and relationships. Kostas’s mother, Panagiota, a Greek jam maker, loses two of her sons to the war. Defne’s father and uncle are stopped and terrorised on a bus by armed members of the Greek paramilitary force, EOKA-B, because of their Turkish Muslim names. Shafak suggests that this violence is the human toll of ideological differences, border disputes and nationalist rivalries, insisting always on the sacredness of the granular. War makes a fool of heroes, the old proverb goes, and a hero out of everyday men.
Shafak built a name for herself as a feminist author concerned with subject matter seen as controversial by the more conservative sections of Turkish society. In 2006, Shafak was tried and acquitted of ‘insulting Turkishness’ due to her treatment of the Armenian genocide in The Bastard of Istanbul 1 More than a decade later, in 2019, Turkish prosecutors launched an investigation into Shafak because of the child abuse and sexual violence that appears in her work, namely The Gaze and Three Daughters of Eve. These legal repercussions are a red herring, as they almost always are in censorship campaigns. Turkish authorities despise Shafak precisely because of the enduring power of her work and the role she holds in Turkish society, particularly among women whose civil rights have diminished under the autocratic reign of Erdoğan. Hijab-clad students on the metro system pore over her pages. Mothers trade Shafak’s work in parts of the country where it is difficult to access it. Booksellers in major cities see copies of her books fly off the shelves and, more recently, her notoriety has been reaching international audiences–her 2020 novel 10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World, a humanising portrait of a sex worker and her chosen family, was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize.
Naturally, a place as politically contested as Cyprus warrants the attention of an author like Shafak. The island has undergone various nationalist bids for power. The United Kingdom retains two sovereign bases there, a legacy of the British empire, and a buffer zone is still administered by the United Nations between the Turkish north and the Greek-controlled south. Yet—and surprisingly—Shafak as political adjudicator or moral arbiter is all but absent from the novel. She attempts this pseudo-neutrality by giving voice to a Ficus Carica—the edible common fig tree—which casts a long shadow over the household belonging to Kostas, Defne and their mixed-race teenage daughter, Ada. A central character in the novel, the fig tree’s omniscience underwrites the present action of the plot, which chronicles Ada’s struggle to cope with the recent loss of her mother. The tree’s root system connects her to stories and lands that transcend borders, and it is not difficult to glean the placement of the impartial tree narrator as a warning about the follies of man. ‘Families lost their loved ones, abandoned their homes, villages and towns; old neighbors and good friends went their separate ways, sometimes betrayed one another,’ the fig tree muses. ‘It must all be written in history books, though each side will tell only their own version.’ The tree is a pacifist. The tree asks us to lay down our weapons.
Shafak’s decision to employ this kind of narratological strategy is a risky one. It bears mentioning that the most canonical instance of a sentient tree in literature is Shel Silverstein’s classic The Giving Tree, a book written and illustrated for children. Silverstein’s tree functions as a vessel of morality in the way characters in all fables do: she withers from neglect the more the child ignores her. The giving tree stands in for an ancient life force, wise and selfless, and runs counter to the individualist priorities of the child. As an adult work of literary fiction, the same conceit might easily become gimmicky, which is a pitfall that Shafak encounters here.
Critical theorist of aesthetic forms Sianne Ngai defines gimmicks as ‘overrated devices that strike us as working too little (labor-saving tricks) and working too hard (strained efforts to get our attention).’ 2 Indeed, the omniscient fig tree is the most striking feature of the novel, punctuated in eponymous sections scattered throughout the book. Like the family it revolves around, the tree originates on Cyprus but is later uprooted and taken to England after its home, a tavern belonging to the gay couple Yusef and Yiorgos, is torched and ransacked by militants.
Authors like Gabriel García Márquez and Louisa May Alcott render their omniscient point of view with either an ambiguous speaker or allusions to God’s all-seeing-eye, whereas in The Island of Missing Trees Shafak displays her extensive ecological research by metonymically hinging the entirety of knowledge on Earth on this single specimen of tree, a character as equally versed on the migratory passage of the Vanessa cardui butterfly from North Africa as it is on the chemical signals that all trees share along their mycorrhizal networks. To do this, Shafak textures the tree’s voice with a tone that is at once noble and wistful, as it regards how the natural landscape on Cyprus has been mistreated since the upswing in violence. Later in the book, Kostas finds the tree neglected and on the verge of death in the old tavern formerly run by Yusef and Yiorgos and decides to transport it to England. As the tree rebounds from its physical damage and lengthy journey in a suitcase, Defne, now pregnant with Ada, reflects on how, ‘From that moment onwards, the fate of the baby and the fate of the tree merged in her mind.’ Shafak imbues the tree with a particular investment in both Defne and Kostas’s lives. The reader is to understand that the tree is both everywhere and firmly rooted in one particular backyard in north London. This is where Ngai’s formulation of the gimmick is helpful, identifying how ‘the moment in which the gimmick arouses critical response is therefore simultaneously a dissipation of criticality.’ 3
Already Shafak’s conceit of characterising a fig tree is working too hard. The conservationist impetus behind this gesture is simply too obvious. Trees are the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to metaphors gesturing towards nature and benevolence. From the book’s opening pages, the moral project that Shafak wishes to undertake is immediately clear: the story’s anti-war and ecologically-minded fig tree serves to condemn the folly of conquest, doubling as the clichéd image of a single bird flying free over a barbed wire fence writ large. ‘Wherever there is war and a painful partition,’ the fig tree bemoans, ‘there will be no winners, human or otherwise.’ The ending seeks to redeem this by revealing that the fig tree’s sentience is, in fact, the spirit of the recently deceased Defne watching over her family home. A touching detail perhaps. What is troubling, though, is how this feature undermines even the ecological commentary. Must a fig tree be inhabited by human residue, one that is English speaking no less, to deserve conservation and/or reverence? Can adult readers not invest in the inherent value of natural environments without inserting a familiar anthropocentric epistemology?
The answers to these questions demand a story that is less explicit in its virtuousness and one less neatly sorted by ethnic group. Zeyn Joukhadar’s Thirty Names of Night is a good example of a modern and nuanced eco-fable in practice. Joukhadar assigns esoteric qualities to the birds that feature prominently in the book and, though the harm of Islamophobic racism and gentrification is on display, he shirks didacticism. The characters in Joukhadar’s novel provide a firmly Arab vantage point from which to glean the valence and meaning of events as they unfold. After all, a novel is not a lecture or a sermon. Shafak seeks to highlight the enduring power of love by way of the ‘neutral’ fig tree character, but this is also where she fails to truly reckon with the backdrop of political violence in Cyprus. Sometimes love can’t save lives. Yusef and Yiorgos end up dead at the bottom of a well. The perpetrators are masked, and their identities and national loyalties remain concealed. Shafak would have the reader decry the senseless slaughter without any reference point for its perpetration. The execution of this violence takes place off the page. What the reader sees, instead, are idealistic admissions of sameness, such as in the scene where Defne and Kostas are first reunited after many years apart. While Kostas was in England, Defne started working for the Committee of Missing Persons, excavating burial sites from past conflicts. When Kostas enquires about the ethnicity of the bones, Defne responds, ‘They were islanders [...] Islanders, like us.’ A fellow worker for the same project then opines, ‘When you hold a skull in your hands, can you tell if it’s Christian or Muslim? All that bloodshed, for what? Stupid, stupid wars.’ Even these moments, distinct from the sections narrated by the omnipotent tree, are cringe-inducing in their pacifist ideological bent. The civil war in Cyprus didn’t arise because people were suddenly and mysteriously bored by peace; it occurred due to disputes over land, strategic power in the Mediterranean region, and increasingly hostile political relations between Greece and Turkey. In trying to write something so carefully balanced, aware of how her words could easily be construed as either pro- or anti-nationalist, Shafak ends up saying nothing at all.
Ada’s Turkish aunt Meryem has been largely absent from her life out of respect for her family’s decades-long effort to punish Defne for marrying a Greek, and it is suggested that this rejection informs Defne’s alcoholism and subsequent death by suicide. This is where the real consequences of war and displacement come into remarkable definition and yet, even here, Shafak resists the opportunity to ruminate on the darkness. For her, goodness must prevail. The power of love is the point, as though love can ever be enough, as though love is all that matters.
The best literature complicates morality. Characters are flawed. The resolution is messy. What is lost cannot be redeemed. Too clear in its argument and a novel’s reader will easily grow tired of infantilisation; we don’t need to be told how to feel or think. The reverse can also be true. Retreating from the responsibility of a real subject position, with the apolitical narrator of a fig tree in this case, runs the risk of cowardice. There are moments in the final pages of The Island of Missing Trees where I could predict the kind of reaction the book aims to engender, namely, a rejection of violence, or perhaps a newfound disavowal of borders. But this tendency can flatten the nuances of history and power, which risks decontextualisation. It absolves us of guilt when we conceive of trees as benevolent. What if they were vengeful? What if they spent their days gossiping and bitching along their mycorrhizal networks? When a novel attempts to take up a geopolitical conflict between two warring sides, neutrality is the greatest fiction of all.
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Bobuq Sayed is a writer, artist and cultural worker. They are the co-editor of Nothing to Hide: Voices from Trans and Gender Diverse Australia and a 2022-23 Steinbeck fellow at San José State University. @bobuqsayed