Talking Crows and a Fig‐tree Narrator

Emine Sevgi Özdamar's Ein von Schatten begrenzter Raum and Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees were both released in 2021. Both juxtapose Mediterranean islands and European capital cities, notably Berlin and London respectively, and both deal with extreme political violence. Özdamar's narrator recalls the Armenian genocide in 1915, preceding the founding in 1923 of the Turkish nation state and a population exchange that turned the Greek/Turkish populations on Lesbos and a nearby island off the Turkish coast into monolingual communities. Özdamar also looks back to the Second World War and the carpet bombing of Berlin, and a shoebox full of newspaper reports across the decades since then tracks episodes of politically motivated violence in Turkey. Shafak's novel looks back from the present in London to the ethnically based hostilities in the 1970s that split Cyprus into separate Greek and Turkish zones and to a murderous homophobic attack, the bodies thrown down into an old well: Cyprus is an island of missing bodies. Both novels include grotesque figures that are a mix of human and animal or of human and plant: Özdamar's chorus of crows and a mosquito with a Berlin accent and Shafak's fig‐tree narrator. Magic realist moments too serve to distance horror and mediate trauma through laughter

Alien · Armenian · Genocide · Politics · Population · Refugee · Turkish · Uncanny · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · Literature, Magical Realism, García Márquez