The Fig Tree Remembers The Fig Tree Remembers
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The Fig Tree Remembers

A Lesson in Co-Existence
Paulina Wilk
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time 5 minutes

When a bomb explodes, no one notices the tree that catches fire from a spark. Absorbed by their own losses, people do not see the suffering of other creatures. In her 2021 novel, Elif Shafak reverses the roles. She gives voice to the plants, and they are the ones who tell a story about migration, memory, and the end of a certain world order.

This story is both little and big. It concerns a few people, one tree and two European islands. But it’s about all of us, too: humans, bats, and mosquitoes alike, the reflexive silence of plants, their relationships with genies, and the relentless movement that connects all life on Earth, despite the multiple divides we so violently entrench.

The Island of Missing Trees, the Turkish writer’s most recent novel, is a meditation on co-existence, as well as one of the first examples of how ecological ethics can change literature from within. When so many authors fill in the narrative gaps of our times by writing long-neglected herstories or creating the anticipated, queer narrators,

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The Republic of Friendship The Republic of Friendship
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The Republic of Friendship

Closeness on the Margins
Paulina Wilk

Her name is Tequila Leila and she is dying. She chose that name for herself, but not the circumstances of her death. She lies in a rubbish bin somewhere on the outskirts of Istanbul, where she reminisces.

The time she has left is 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, as the title of Elif Shafak’s new novel reads. The brain gives up more slowly than we used to believe. Canadian researchers have come across a case in which the process of the brain’s individual functions ‘switching off’ took over 10 minutes from the moment death was called. This intriguing fact allowed Shafak, currently the most renowned Turkish writer, to create a vibrant tale about life after death, but also about the life of the outcasts and undesirables who every day teeter on the brink of non-existence. Nobody cares about them, nor their happiness – nobody will claim their desecrated bodies. Leila was a prostitute. Or rather, she is one: as long as her memory serves and while she can still take us on a journey through her tragic and reckless life story.

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