51 pages • 1 hour read
Paul HardingThis Other Eden
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Trees
Content Warning: This guide includes depictions of racism, discrimination, forced eviction, eugenics, nonconsensual relationships, and rape.
In This Other Eden, the motif of trees represents the legacy of the islanders, their lives together on Apple Island, and their connection to the land. The community itself was founded by a man seeking to plant an apple orchard to reconnect with the memory of his mother, and trees play an important role in the stories of the islanders’ ancestors. When a hurricane threatens to wipe out the entire Honey family, it is a Penobscot pine that provides the refuge. As the water rises across the island, the Honey family climbs the tree and clings to it for survival. The tree stands firm, not toppling in the flood and providing the Honeys with a strong anchor to wait out the flood. While not all the Honey’s survive the storm, Patience, Benjamin, and the baby Patience holds do survive, and all Honey descendants owe their lives to the tree.
Trees are also homes to the residents of Apple Island. Whether they live in a tree, such as Zachary Hand to God Proverbs does, or in a house constructed from the wood of a tree, like the Honeys do, trees continue to provide shelter and protect the residents like the Penobscot pine once did in the hurricane. Eha comes to realize the connection he shares with Zachary over trees when he disassembles his family’s cabin:
That tree they’d cut [...] was now the house at which Eha stared and in which he and his family had now lived for decades and so he lived inside a tree, too, even if it was now the cut, shaped, strapped, nailed, joined, planed planks, logs, beams of wood that had once been the tree (176).
Both the Honeys and Zachary live under the protection of a single tree. The entire cabin is built from one tree, and Eha brings it with his family as they leave the island in search of a new home.
Patience Honey’s Flag
Patience Honey is the first matriarch of the Honey family on Apple Island, and in the community’s early days, she sews a flag that becomes a symbol of the community’s unique identity and its drive to survive. The island’s residents come from across the world, with homes in Africa, Europe, and across the United States. The diversity of the community is immense, and she seeks to capture that in her original design: “the homemade flag she’d stitched together from patches of the stars and stripes and the Portuguese crown and golden Irish harp shaped like a woman […] and the faded, faint squares embroidered with Bantu triangles and diamonds and circles” (16). The flag is a collection of different places and identities collected by the Honeys and a symbol of their diversity within a single family. When the hurricane hits, Patience takes it with her to the Penobscot pine, and as the water rises over her head, she hoists it into the air, and only then does the water recede. She brandishes it proudly and for a moment, it is the only piece of the Honeys above the water.
The flag represents the community’s will to survive. It not only becomes a legendary piece of the Honeys’ story as the flag that stopped the flood but also becomes a symbol of the resident’s survival after their eviction at the conclusion of the novel. The flag is not seen throughout the novel, but as Zachary wades across the channel for the final time, a gravedigger sees the flag in his hand. The community of Apple Island is disbanded, but Zachary has Patience’s flag and flies it as he leaves, taking the symbol of their community with them. He is also described as pushing against an incoming flood, drawing a comparison with Patience’s initial flying of the flag during the hurricane flood. Once again, the residents of Apple Island hold strong under their banner in a time of crisis.
The Mother Owl
The legacy of family is important to the Honeys of Apple Island, and at various points in the novel, it is as if their ancestors live on through them. The legacy of their ancestors manifests in the symbol of the mother owl, who represents Patience Honey and her continued duty to watch over her family. Patience is described as the Honeys’ first mother and the matriarch of the island. Even over 100 years later, she watches over the island and its residents as the mother owl: “Eha hooted low and husky to them, like the mother owl. The mother owl hooted back from the Penobscot pine and the happy children sailed away in their different directions and dissolved in to the dark” (43). Eha watches the Lark children play at night and communicates with them, hooting like an owl. The mother owl hoots back, also watching the children and responding to their games. The mother owl watches from her perch on the Penobscot pine, where Patience once watched the island flood, and her family and others wash away. It is the highest point on the island, giving the owl, and Patience, the best view of the community.
The mother owl watches over the island and its residents. She is cognizant of the individual residents and the conflicted emotions they may feel, such as when Ethan struggles with his coming departure. The night before he leaves, the mother owl watches over and connects with him:
As he lowered into sleep the salty breeze and cricket songs and schools of stars poured into and birled around his brains so the night became his mind and his mind became the night and the mother owl watching over him swooped down from her tree and through his dreams (102).
Again, the mother owl is described as having her own tree and nesting in the Penobscot tree, the tree that saved the Honeys. She watches Ethan from her perch and swoops down over him and into his dreams. The mother owl is the legacy of Patience, a caring and ever-watching mother surveying the community she helped to create, watching over her descendants from her perch, waiting to scope out any danger that could come.
