How to bury a Fig

"First generation immigrants talk to their trees all the time - when there are no other people nearby, that is. They confide in us, describing their dreams and aspirations, including those they have left behind like wisps of wool caught on barbed wire during fence crossings." Elif Shafak

I read Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees in a single sitting. I usually take arboreal time. Reading books over a week, even two. But I had a weekend and Shafak's story of back and forth, across the oceans, of love and grief, stitching the generations which geography had torn apart, seduced me into an orgy of reading.

This is astory narrated by a fig tree. Uprooted from its natural home in Cyprus and replanted in London. Born in the centre of a tavern, owned by a Turkish and Greek Cypriot couple, the tree sees life and death, and bears witness to the growing violence which eventually rips Cyprus in two. The tavern is forced to close, its owners tied together and dropped to the bottom of the well, shot dead.

People scramble to leave. A man leaves his lover behind. Forbidden love. Twenty years later, he returns from London to find her. They make a life in London, nurturing a fig tree as memory.

The story twists and turns, hanging like a tendril on a branch, swaying between Cyprus and London. The fig tree asks us to feel what it is like to be uprooted? To be constantly thinking that you will be singled out as an alien species and dug up once more. To be transported to a detention centre, papers demanded. Is not a tree a paper? An identity?

There is a wonderful interlude. Ada, the archetypical Londoner contends with her aunt, Meryem from Cyprus. Roots. Bloodlines broken and restored. And then the fig tree begins to speak. Of pain. Of sorrow. Of growing and loving. Once more. "Humans think they know with certainty where their being ends and someone else's starts. With their roots tangled and caught up underground, linked to fungi and bacteria, trees harbour no such illusions. For us, everything is interconnected".

We were all uprooted. Once. It is as old as biblical times, the search for a promised land. Older. And there will always be those to say the land is theirs. To try and ask for your papers. To mark your home and business with an X.

Every society needs the Other to blame. It allows the rulers a free pass for their neglect, their corruption, their blue lights. How did Cavafy put it in Waiting for the Barbarians:

"...night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.

And some of our men just in from the border say

there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?

Those people were a kind of solution."

The fugitive and the fig live through history. Now is the time for us to speak to each other about entanglement rather than separateness, about protecting and loving your neighbour, ripening friendship across borders.