Enlivening Entanglements in Elif Shafak’s ‘The Island of Missing Trees’

Abstract

The age of the Anthropocene calls for a renovation in ways of being human and relating with others. Elif Shafak’s 2021 novel The Island of Missing Trees features a talking tree narrator that lends itself well to exploring this topic. In the first part of the paper, I outline my arguments concentrating on entities on the move that come into focus through Shafak’s novel: multispecies storying, migrants, and languages. In the second part, I describe the background of my university students and how I am using the novel in a seminar class whose objective is to increase attention and intimacy with the natural world. In this manner, I attempt to draw into conversation the relations between language learning, literary reading and other-than-human storying. I explore how language learning might be recognized as an art necessary to living well together, especially for the attention and slowing down it requires. Finally, I propose a shift from an exclusive focus on human languages to include other-than-human multispecies players.