Forbidden love and fig trees in Cyprus

Elif Shafak’s latest novel focuses on Cypriot identity

Elif Shafak is Turkish novelist who writes in English and Turkish and lives in London where she is free to express herself fearlessly. It is embarrassing that a writer like her does not feel free to express herself in Istanbul. But the question for Turkish Cypriots is whether they are able to celebrate with her the notion of a Cypriot identity in her latest novel, The Island of Missing Trees in which she skilfully navigates the ethnic conflict in Cyprus without being judgmental.

Elf Shafak’s novel is about forbidden love in Cyprus in which a fig tree is both a character and narrator. Apparently, fig trees can be male or female; this tree is female and as the story unfolds, she is transplanted from Nicosia where she is dying to be reborn in London, where forbidden love of every variety thrives.

The hero in the novel is Kostas Kazanzakis. He is a sensitive Greek Cypriot boy who falls madly in love with a feisty Turkish Cypriot girl, Defne, in the spring of 1974 – not a good time to be sleeping with the enemy.

They have trysts at The Happy Fig Tavern in Nicosia somewhere along the Green Line run by a gay couple Yiorghos and Yousouf who go missing in the war. The novel is about forbidden love of which there are two varieties: between persons from warring tribes like Romeo and Juliet, and between persons of the same sex. Both feature in this novel and are woven into one another although the Kostas-Defne relationship is paramount.

It would spoil the novel if I reveal too much of the story except what the author herself chooses to tell the reader at the outset about Kostas and his life in London at present. He eventually marries Defne and they have a daughter Ada, who is a teenager growing up in London with little knowledge of her background except the enmity between Greeks and Turks. “Come on Dad, I’m not a child. I get it. You’re Greek, Mum’s Turkish, opposite tribes, blood feud. You upset some people when you got married, didn’t you?” Ada Kazanzakis tells her Dad.

Although my own father was Turkish and my mother Greek I never felt as though my parents’ marriage upset anybody and neither did I sense the atmosphere the novel evokes of such forbidden relationships.

As my mother famously said on being impertinently asked by a journalist how she came to be married to a Turkish guy, “by the time I realised he was Turkish, it was too late.” So there you have it in one phrase: love happens. I know that she was as proud of being Greek – of the classical rather than byzantine variety – as he was of being Turkish of the Kemal Ataturk variety – like most Turkish Cypriots President Erdogan notwithstanding.

Relationships transcend nationality without diminishing identity. That I am afraid is a problem for the offspring to sort out and the way my parents chose in a time of ethnic strife in Cyprus was to give us a third identity – a British cultural identity, which these days lots of British Cypriots including Elif Shafak’s Ada Kazanzakis have by birth in the UK but which we acquired when Cyprus was still British.

On my interpretation of Elif Shafak’s novel, her fig tree can thrive in London even though the weather is not ideal because she can be loved here rather left to die in Cyprus in an abandoned taverna on the Green Line.

The author tells us that the name Defne is the Turkish version of the Daphne of Greek mythology, and Ada is Turkish for island and that she would have been called Nisos, Greek for island, if she were a boy.

Names are important to identity although overrated – a rose by another name smells just as sweet. Lots of liberated women readily give up their surname for that of their husbands, and almost all Turkish Cypriots chose a surname after 1974 in accordance with identity requirements from the Turkish mainland. Greek Bishops and the Bishop of Rome also choose theirs. Thus Mihalis Mouskos is better known as Archbishop Makarios and Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI.

But Elif Shafak offers no reason for her very deliberate choice of Kazanzakis as her hero’s surname. Perhaps because it is obvious – it is after all the name of the great Greek novelist Nicos Kazanzakis who wrote Zorba the Greek.

Perhaps she just fancied the sound of the name. I admit that it grated a bit with me; it would not matter at all but for the fact that Greek surnames ending in -akis suggest Cretan not Cypriot ancestry.

The composers Mikis Theodorakis and Manos Hadjidakis, and the well-known economist and political pundit Yiannis Varoufakis all have Cretan ancestry. Of course there may be Cypriots of Cretan origin but their names would not have been my choice of an authentic Greek Cypriot surname.

I would have chosen a name like Hadjimatheou as in Chloe Hadjimatheou who is one of the BBCs top journalists and whose name BBC announcers manage to pronounce perfectly compared to members of the English judiciary.

But just as you can’t judge a book by its cover, you can’t judge it by the names the writer chooses to give his or her characters. Franz Kafka chose Joseph K for his hapless hero in The Trial which enhanced the power of the book, but it could easily have been some other letter of the alphabet.

A good read despite my reservations about the authenticity of the surname Kazanzakis as a Greek Cypriot name.

Alper Ali Riza is a queen’s counsel in the UK and a retired part-time judge