UNMASKING HYBRID IDENTITY:A POSTCOLONIAL STUDY OF DIASPORIC LIFE IN THE ISLAND OF MISSING TREES BY SHAFAK

Abstract

The issues of belonging and identity are central to the postcolonial discourse where the culture and subjectivity of the postcolonial world are still constituted by heritage of the migration, colonialism, and displacement. This paper discusses Shafak’s latest published novel The Island of Missing Trees to unveil the issue of hybrid identity in the diasporic existence. It examines the bargaining of belonging that is influenced by displacement, cultural memory, and intergenerational trauma and shows how individual accounts are connected with the overall history of the political unrest in Cyprus. Still reaching into the diasporic space of Britain, Shafak, a novelist, has shown how fragmented identities are transformed across geographical and temporal distances. The novel’s dual narrative voices, the human and the non-human one, creates a stratified imagery of the diaspora that cuts across the traditional time, place, and species barrier. Through foreshadowing the hybridity, the cultural legacy, and the continuity of the ties with ancestors, the novel portrays diaspora as a place of breaking and creation. This paper concludes that Shafak believes that identity is fluid, resilient and in the process of constant reimagination by way of memory and cultural negotiation.