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Part 3, Chapter 6: Fig Tree
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Island of Missing Trees, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Generational Trauma
Nature and Interconnectedness
Love and Displacement
Solidarity, Tribalism, and Political Division
History and Silencing
Summary
Analysis
After the bomb explodes at The Happy Fig, Panagiota writes a letter to her brother, Hristos, in London. In the letter, she says that Cyprus is no place right now for a boy to live, especially one who is as sentimental as Kostas. Even more than that, though, Kostas is in love with a Turkish girl who is a Muslim. “A Christian cannot marry a Muslim,” Panagiota writes. “It offends the eyes of Our Lord.” And she is worried about what Defne’s family, or other Greek people, might do to Kostas if they find out about him and Defne. She writes that she is begging Hristos to take Kostas into his home.
Panagiota aims to send Kostas to England, displacing him from Cyprus, due to the rising violence. She is especially afraid of the threat of intercultural violence in light of Kostas’s relationship with Defne, who is Muslim while Kostas is Greek. Based on Panagiota’s letter to her brother, it seems that she does not realize how much Defne means to Kostas and that separating Kostas from her will mean depriving him of the kind of love he needs to feel meaningfully alive.
Active
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