































The Trees Speak for Themselves: How Non-
Human Narrators in Fiction Influence 

Multispecies Encounters 
Bella Hughes

• •  • •

Multispecies Encounters

 Elif Shafak’s 2021 novel The 
Island of Missing Trees de-

scribes fictional events that occur on 
the real island of Cyprus during the war 
between the Greek and the Turkish in-
habitants of the island. This story is told 
from multiple points of view at various 
points in time in both Cyprus and Lon-
don, where the characters move to and 
live following the events of the war and 
their families’ disagreements with their 
relationship. What is unique about Sha-
fak’s storytelling is her use of a fig tree 
as a primary narrator of events. While 
the use of non-human narrators is not a 
new strategy, most of these occurrenc-
es involve animal speakers rather than 
plants or objects. In delivering a fiction 
narrative from the point of view of a fig 
tree, Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing 
Trees introduces readers to multispecies 

encounters by providing an example of 
how arboreal figures communicate and 
experience history alongside humans in 
an anthropocentric world, and further 
encourages prosocial behavior between 
human and non-human species. Based 
on Shafak’s novel, theories of attentive-
ness and slow-violence, and studies on 
the effect of non-human narrators on 
readers, including these “non-living” 
narrators in widely accessible pieces of 
fiction not only informs audiences of the 
multispecies encounters that occur in ev-
eryday life, but also opens more avenues 
of multispecies conservation. 

©2024  Hughes. The Digital Literature Review, 11, 25-40. doi: 
10.33043/72qzyray5. Shared with CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Liscense.



26

 Our planet has existed for about 4.5 billion years, and in that 
time, five mass extinctions have occurred. Thanks to human ac-

tion—and the lack thereof—Earth must now suffer through the sixth mass 
extinction in its history (Ceballos et al.). From rising temperatures to in-
creasingly severe weather due to greenhouse gas emissions, human impact 
on the environment and biodiversity has never been more visible (United 
Nations). While there are debates over the definite start of this age of hu-
man influence, experts agree that Earth has entered the Anthropocene Ep-
och, a geological era marked by human activity that will be observable far 
into the future (Lewis and Maslin 171). Although it is true that many peo-
ple learn of things like climate change and environmental systems from 
news reports and social media, a less popular and lesser-known source of 
information comes in the form of fiction stories. Fiction offers an avenue 
of learning without the pressure that comes from taking on academic texts 
or journalistic articles. In particular, fiction provides a place to showcase 
the world from non-human perspectives. This is demonstrated well in Elif 
Shafak’s 2021 novel The Island of Missing Trees. The novel is a fictional 
account of the Greek-Turkish war in Cyprus, told from multiple perspec-
tives, but most memorably from the perspective of a fig tree. As explained 
in a review of the novel, “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...a sense of longing for wholeness, one-
ness, and harmony, not only between people but also between all elements 
of the wider ecosystem” (Atayurt-Fenge 76). In delivering a fictional nar-
rative from the point of view of a fig tree, Shafak introduces readers to 
multispecies encounters by providing an example of how arboreal figures 
communicate and experience history alongside humans in an anthropocen-
tric world, and further encourages prosocial behavior between human and 
non-human species. By including these “non-living” narrators in widely 
accessible pieces of fiction, authors can not only encourage attentiveness 
and inform audiences of the multispecies encounters that occur in every-
day life, but also open more avenues of multispecies conservation. 

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27

 Before exploring the possibilities of narrative fiction, it is important 
to understand multispecies studies and the theory of attentiveness. Multi-
species studies considers the encounters between species and “the multi-
tudes of lively agents that bring one another into being through entangled 
relations” (Van Dooren et al. 3). The purpose of a multispecies approach is 
to confront ecological challenges using a myriad of disciplines and bodies 
of research, achieving a deeper understanding of the causes and effects of 
issues touching countless species. With this approach, multispecies schol-
ars can take existing knowledge of one species and apply it in the context 
of the other species it encounters.  In contrast to other fields like ecocriti-
cism, which often only uses how humans interact with nature and how we 
perceive it as a way to encourage change, multispecies studies expands 
beyond the world of humans and pays attention to the intricacies of other 
species, exposing us to other perspectives besides our own. This attention 
to how other species perceive and interact with the world is why the mul-
tispecies approach is the best way to analyze The Island of Missing Trees, 
whose narrator is not a human reporting how human action has changed 
the environment, but a tree sharing how it has experienced war, migration, 
and connection with all of the species it interacts with from its point of 
view.  
 Taking a multispecies approach requires paying attention to the ac-
tions, reactions, and interactions among species, both human and non-hu-
man. Part of this attention comes from “ask[ing] how specific worldings 
come to matter, and to matter differently, for given beings” (Van Dooren et 
al. 13). When one is exposed to the lives and histories of other species, one 
can develop the “art of attentiveness” and begin to gain more awareness of 
other beings that function alongside the realm of human activity. As Van 
Dooren et al. explain, “attention to others is vital to responding appropri-
ately” (16). Thus, if one hopes to encourage multispecies relations and 
ensure mutual conservation, one must first attempt to understand the com-
plexities of other species and their ecosystems. While there are many ways 
to learn attentiveness, reading fiction narrated by non-human characters 

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can prove to be a particularly impactful practice. 
 Due to the broad interpretations of the terms “non-human” and 
“non-living,” understanding how they will be used in relation to Shafak’s 
novel is important. In their article “Towards a theory of nonhuman nar-
rative,” Biwu Shang breaks down non-human narrative into four distinct 
categories: narrative about natural things, narrative about supernatural 
things, narrative about artificial objects, and narrative about artificial hu-
mans. While each category includes multiple examples of non-human spe-
cies, the fig tree of Shafak’s novel falls into the category of natural things. 
Because this category also includes animals, narrators like the fig tree are 
referred to as non-living in this analysis. Non-living in this case refers to 
species that are inanimate, that is, not alive in the way humans and ani-
mals are perceived to be. Trees and other non-humans that are not insects, 
animals, or things that are obviously living are still coparticipants with us 
living on this planet. Scholarship has tended to look at animal life rather 
than other natural objects, and while it might raise questions to refer to 
trees as non-living, this is deliberate in this essay to call attention to how 
we largely ignore objects that we do not classify as living. In this way, 
non-human narratives can “deconstruct anthropocentrism” and teach hu-
mans about their varied roles in “the more-than-human world” (Shang 70). 
It is through these non-living characters that humans can become exposed 
to other perspectives of the world, perspectives that serve as a reminder 
that the world is not a solely human one. 
 Though the world is “more-than-human” in reality, the non-human 
aspects of the world hold little stake in the scheme of human life, accord-
ing to most humans. However, as discussed by Rob Nixon in his book, 
Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, the goings-on of 
the non-human realm are real and pertinent for humans to acknowledge. 
Nixon defines slow violence as “violence that occurs gradually and out of 
sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and 
space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” 
(2). The questions that Nixon asks us to consider revolve around bringing 

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the truth of slow violence to masses in one form or another and making it 
interesting enough that something may come of it. This can be challenging 
when one considers how the stories of slow violence “are anonymous and 
... star nobody” (3). Nixon suggests creative solutions, “ways of drawing 
public attention to catastrophic acts that are low in instant spectacle but 
high in long-term effects. To intervene representationally entails devising 
iconic symbols that embody amorphous calamities as well as narrative 
forms that infuse those symbols with dramatic urgency” (10). I argue that 
Shafak does just that in her novel The Island of Missing Trees through her 
use of compelling non-human narration to tell the story of multiple species 
over years of growth and hardship. 
 The Island of Missing Trees follows the story of war-torn Nicosia, 
Cyprus in 1974 and the lives that the conflict touches. Partially narrated by 
a fig tree growing in a tavern in the divided capital, the novel covers the 
ways the war impacted nature alongside the secret love between Kostas, a 
Greek Christian, and Defne, a Turkish Muslim, and later the grief felt by 
Kostas and his daughter, Ada, following Defne’s death in London. Shafak, 
who has a personal connection with Cyprus after growing up in Turkey, 
has wanted to tell this story for many years, but “could never dare” until 
she “found the fig tree” (Penguin Books Limited Editor).  According to 
Shafak, the fig tree was a “calmer, wiser” narrator of events, able to nav-
igate the complexities of borders, inherited trauma, and civil war better 
than a human narrator on the Greek or Turkish side might have. Due to its 
relative recency, there is not much literary scholarship on this novel. What 
scholarship does exist approaches the novel’s commentary on inherited 
trauma, generational grief, diaspora, or displacement rather than its use of 
trees and multispecies encounters. This essay expands discussion on this 
subject by looking at the tree’s role as narrator and further considering 
how wars in distant places can affect our own lives and futures. 
 Beyond simply being entertainment, fiction can be beneficial to 
promoting multispecies attentiveness because the act of reading narrative 

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fiction can be crucial in the development of morals and empathy (Johnson 
et al.). This development comes primarily from the imagery that is gen-
erated when reading, that is, the way the reader becomes immersed in the 
experience of the characters they are reading about and thus interprets the 
world from another perspective. Through this practice, readers can devel-
op affective empathy, which is “an individual’s ability to feel for another” 
(Johnson et al. 306). Additionally, recent studies in social learning theory 
and the general learning model indicate that narrative fiction that includes 
prosocial behavior can influence readers to behave similarly (Johnson 
et al.). To use an example from Shafak’s novel, Kostas, one of the main 
characters and an expert in studies of trees and certain animals, shows an 
attentiveness and responsibility toward non-human species on multiple 
occasions. From reading about Kostas’s interactions with these species, 
the reader can be inspired to take on similar behaviors in their own life. 
Fiction has historically been used by organizations and groups to promote 
prosocial behavior toward animals. A previous example of this is the book 
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell, which is the story of the titular horse’s 
journey being owned by humans that could be both kind and cruel. What 
makes the depictions of cruelty more impactful is that the events are nar-
rated by the horse, which allows readers to experience human cruelty from 
the horse’s point of view. This tactic influences readers subtly rather than 
explicitly, placing them in situations where they might come to their own 
conclusions about issues as well as providing an avenue that is less out-
right informational and more entertaining than nonfiction (Małecki et al.). 
Within stories of animal narratives, the non-human characters detail their 
experiences of interacting with humans, “in particular, how their lives are 
changed by human activities, thus drawing readers’ attention to the impor-
tance of human-nonhuman co-existence” (Shang 64). The success of Black 
Beauty demonstrates the effectiveness of prosocial fiction, as membership 
in humane societies and laws prohibiting animal abuse increased follow-
ing its publication. Of course, that novel used non-human narration of an 
animal rather than a “non-living” object like in Shafak’s novel. 

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 One of the most important things the fig tree accomplishes as narrator 
is to raise non-human species to be just as important as humans. Most fic-
tion focuses on the impact humans feel following war or disasters, mostly, 
if not completely ignoring the other species that must also recover from 
such events. The fig tree serves as a sort of advocate for non-human spe-
cies, working to make space for their stories to be heard: 

But on an island plagued by years of ethnic violence and brutal atroc-
ities, humans were not the only ones that suffered. So did we trees - 
and animals, too, experience hardship and pain as their habitats came 
to disappear. It never meant anything to anyone, what happened to us.  
It matters to me though and, so long as I am able to tell this story, I 
am going to include in it the creatures in my ecosystem - the birds, 
the bats, the butterflies, the honeybees, the ants, the mosquitoes and 
the mice - because there is one thing I have learned: wherever there is 
war and a painful partition, there will be no winners, human or other-
wise. (Shafak 190) 

Through the fig tree’s narration, the reader is exposed to non-human sto-
ries in a form that they have seen before, but through unfamiliar eyes. As 
noted by Kostas, “the world humans saw was only one of many available” 
(Shafak 226). Humans tend to view events only in regard to how their own 
lives are changed or impacted, but that does not mean that other ecosys-
tems and species cease to exist, nor does it mean that the human world is 
the most important. However, even though some may try to speak for oth-
er species and make space for them in the conversation, as Shafak points 
out, “in a land besieged with conflict, uncertainty and bloodshed, people 
took it for indifference, an insult to their pain, if you paid too much atten-
tion to anything other than human suffering” (147-148). In Shafak’s novel, 
readers find themselves paying attention to non-human suffering simply 
from engaging with storytelling. 
 To allow readers to effectively take in the experiences of non-human 
narrators, human-like consciousness is often a necessity in the narrator. By 
projecting traits of human consciousness onto non-human beings, readers 

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can better approach unfamiliar experiences. That said, it is important to 
simultaneously remember that the narrator is not human and thus their ex-
periences “may question (defamiliarize) some of readers’ assumptions and 
expectations about human life and consciousness” (Bernaerts et al. 69). As 
defamiliarization occurs, the text becomes a tool for delivering scientific 
knowledge about the non-human species and how they perceive human 
events (Bernaerts et al.). The use of non-human and non-living narrators in 
fiction is not widespread or conventional, perhaps due to the preference to 
consider humans as the superior species rather than to place them as equal 
to non-humans. Rare as they are, when non-human narrators are utilized, 
the impact of these stories can be found in the greater defamiliarization 
and empathy produced by the reading of other perspectives (Bernaerts et 
al.). For example, in The Island of Missing Trees, the fig tree’s narration 
forces readers to pivot their perspective and view reality from another’s 
experience. In the case of the fig tree, not only does the reader experience 
the war on Cyprus and other events through the fig-tree’s eyes, but the 
reader learns valuable information about how trees feel and communicate 
with each other and other species. Because “object narrators collapse the 
cognitively basic distinction between animate and inanimate entities,” it 
is possible that the effect of defamiliarization can be felt more intensely in 
object narrators than in animal narrators (Bernaerts et al. 89). 
 While the use of objects, specifically plants, is not conventional in 
modern literature, it is certainly not a new practice. Plants have been used 
in stories throughout history and across cultures and religions. Shafak’s fig 
tree provides examples of the roles trees play across the globe: 

The Bedouin settle their disagreements in our shade, the Druze kiss 
our bark reverently, placing personal objects around us, praying for 
ma’rifah. Both Arabs and Jews make their wedding preparations 
beside us, hoping for marriages sturdy enough to weather any storms 
which may lie ahead. Buddhists want us to blossom near their shrine, 
and so do the Hindus. Kikuyu women in Kenya daub themselves with 
the sap of fig trees when they want to get pregnant and it is the same 

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women who defend us bravely whenever someone tries to cut down a 
sacred mugumo. (Shafak 65) 

Despite their inclusion in previous narratives, their role has often been 
limited to acting “as metaphorical means to anthropocentric ends: to tell 
human, perhaps all-too-human, (hi)stories” (Middelhoff and Peselmann 
177). A popular example of this sort of role is found in the 2003 novel 
The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo, in which a mouse narrates his 
quest to save a human princess. The mouse and his journey stand as met-
aphors for breaking stereotypes and becoming a hero no matter how small 
you are. In this case of non-human narration, the focus is on the human 
world and how the mouse can act as human as possible to earn the love of 
the princess. Little emphasis is placed on multispecies encounters, with 
the main purpose of the novel being to entertain and deliver a message of 
individuality.  
 In contrast, the goal in using trees in stories, and what Shafak man-
ages to do in her novel, is to present the trees as characters in their own 
right, with thoughts, feelings, and agency, rather than reducing them to 
background objects in human lives. However, if trees are to be presented 
as accurate characters and narrators, authors must take care to research the 
species’ physiology and culture, ensuring that it is the trees’ stories that 
are being told (Middelhoff and Peselmann). In Shafak’s case, thorough 
research on trees has been done, so when the audience is introduced to 
the fig tree, they are interested in both learning and hearing what the tree 
has to say. Not only does this sort of narration educate readers on trees as 
cognizant beings, but it allows for a perspective on events like war that is 
separate from divisive human politics. Shafak has claimed that the narra-
tion of the fig tree allowed her a certain degree of freedom to tell the story 
of the war on Cyprus from neither a Greek nor a Turkish side, but rather 
from the side of natural objects impacted by the human conflict (O’Neill). 
One of the biggest things that sets trees apart from humans is their longev-
ity. Trees have existed longer than humans, and they will remain long after 
humans are gone. As the fig tree explains, “a tree’s rings do not only reveal 

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its age, but also the traumas it has endured, including wildfires, and thus, 
carved deep in each circle, is a near-death experience, an unhealed scar” 
(Shafak 45). During their long lives on Earth, trees have seen civilizations 
rise and fall, and felt the effects of human action. Their connection to and 
awareness of the many species in their environment allows them to recog-
nize how every action has an impact within multispecies encounters: 
A tree always knows that it is linked to endless life forms – from honey 
fungus, the largest living thing, down to the smallest bacteria and archaea 
– and that its existence is not an isolated happenstance but intrinsic to a 
wider community. Even trees of different species show solidarity with one 
another regardless of their difference, which is more than you can say for 
so many humans. (Shafak 100) 
 As evidenced in the final line of this passage, there is sometimes a 
bitterness toward humans in the fig tree’s narration that is not often appar-
ent in other forms of narration. Part of this comes from the writer’s inten-
tion; Shafak wants to indicate that humans are doing something wrong, 
while other authors might just want to tell a human story from an outsid-
er’s point of view. A tree is a good medium for communicating this mes-
sage because of the length of time they have experienced and understood 
multispecies encounters. 
 As discussed previously, Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees pres-
ents a tree as a main character, a narrator of events being experienced not 
just by humans, but by other species that are often overlooked. One of the 
most important things Shafak does to adjust readers to the narration of the 
fig tree is to give her a familiar voice, one similar yet different to our own: 
“I am a Ficus carica, known as the edible common fig, though I can as-
sure you there’s nothing common about me” (Shafak 23). Throughout the 
fig tree’s narration, the reader is able to get a sense of a personality that 
is similar to other narrations they have encountered. The fig tree shares 
her thoughts and emotions, ruminating on her environment and the other 
characters around her, as is characteristic of any human or animal narrator. 
Though there is humanization of the nonhuman object, there is still a dis-

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tinct otherness found in the fig tree that comes from the unfamiliar ways it 
views the world.  
 Though some of the fig tree’s narration is meant to comment on the 
other main characters, each chapter narrated by the fig tree provides some 
insight into the fig tree’s world and their interactions with the other life in 
Cyprus and then in London. After being buried underground to prepare for 
winter in London, the fig tree comments on the unfathomable number of 
microorganisms that live and work within the soil and how trees can hear 
the vibrations of creatures both above and below ground level (Shafak 
80-81). The fig tree narrates an instance where another tree communicates 
with her: “I picked up an odd sound...it turned out it was my old friend the 
hawthorn tree, a native species, a gentle hermaphrodite, sending signals 
through roots and fungi, asking how I was doing” (99). Later she explains 
how “In nature, everything talks all the time” (341) indicating that there 
is a whole realm of communication and social order separate from human 
understanding. Further research into the complexity of arboreal communi-
cation is explained by the fig tree: 

Under and above ground, we trees communicate all the time. We 
share not only water and nutrients, but also essential information. 
Although we have to compete for resources sometimes, we are good 
at protecting and supporting each other...Even when we might seem 
stand-offish, growing away from others or at the edge of forests, we 
still remain connected across entire swathes of land, sending chem-
ical signals through the air and across our shared mycorrhizal net-
works. (99) 

This explanation of connection between trees beckons the idea of sen-
tience, a concept previously thought to be reserved for humans and certain 
animals.  
 Sentience, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “the 
condition or quality of being sentient, consciousness, susceptibility to 
sensation,” is typically assigned to beings that display a nervous system. 
Species like plants, fungi, and bacteria have been labeled as unconscious 

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due to the lack of nerves in their anatomy (“What beings are not con-
scious”). However, research done by German forester Peter Wohlleben 
strives to disprove this theory. In The Hidden Life of Trees: What They 
Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World, Wohlle-
ben attempts to redefine trees, displaying them as beings with intelligence 
and physical reactions to stimuli. He discusses how trees learn and react 
to pain with distressed sounds like screaming, like humans, though they 
can only be heard with advanced machinery. This is a trait that the fig tree 
also references, asking if humans would wish to know “that many plants, 
when threatened, attacked or cut, can produce ethylene, which works like 
a type of anaesthetic [sic], and this chemical release has been described 
by researchers as akin to hearing stressed plants screaming” (Shafak 45). 
While the strength of Wohlleben’s argument depends on a certain degree 
of pathos, and the presence of sentience in plants has not yet been proven, 
his assessment of tree consciousness does open the door for further studies 
into the possibility of plant sentience. 
 Aside from her commentary on the ways different species communi-
cate with each other, the fig tree also demonstrates her own understanding 
of how other species’ actions affect her own life and environment. She 
shares her sorrow at the widespread death of bats in Cyprus, referring 
to them as her friends and acknowledging their importance in the eco-
system and their close connection with the pollination of trees (Shafak 
150). When reflecting on a time a honeybee got stuck inside an office, she 
claims that she “had a deep respect for her kind. No other species embod-
ies the circle of life quite like the Apidae. If they were to disappear one 
day, the world would never recover from their loss” (294). The fig tree’s 
understanding of the importance of each species and how they work to-
gether heightens the trust a reader can place in her narration and expands 
a reader’s empathy for species that they might not have otherwise consid-
ered. This ability of the fig tree to teach and inspire empathy, and in turn 
prosocial behavior, fulfills Nixon’s recommendation for drawing attention 
to slow violence. In using the fig tree as an intriguing narrative device, 

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Shafak finds a creative way to tune audiences in to the long-term effects of 
war and human action on all species without losing interest. 
 Though narrators like the fig tree in Shafak’s novel are not found 
often in popular media, there is no doubt of their benefit to multispe-
cies studies and the understanding of multispecies encounters. With their 
unique ability to view the world from non-human perspectives, non-hu-
man narrators do the job of educating humans in the ways in which major 
events in the human realm of experience also impact the many non-hu-
man realms of experience. Humans beg for and provide humanitarian aid 
during times of strife, yet little to no aid is given to “non-living” inhabi-
tants of the planet, despite how they may beg for help in their own way. 
Texts like The Island of Missing Trees not only show us how we might 
pay better attention to our co-inhabitants, but also inspire us to act in the 
best interest of all beings, human or not. As the earth progresses into the 
Anthropocene and the climate crisis continues, texts that spotlight non-an-
thropocentric perspectives will continue to hold increasing value as medi-
ums of education and advocacy.

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