The Island of Missing Trees

by Elif Shafak

A map is a two-dimensional representation with arbitrary symbols and incised lines that decide who is to be our enemy and who is to be our friend, who deserves our love and who deserves our hatred and who, our sheer indifference. Cartography is another name for stories told by winners. For stories told by those who have lost, there isn’t one.

They know, deep within, that when you save a fig tree from a storm, it is someone’s memory you are saving.

People assume it’s a matter of personality, the difference between optimists and pessimists. But I believe it all comes down to an inability to forget. The greater your powers of retention, the slimmer your chances at optimism.

Because that is what migrations and relocations do to us: when you leave your home for unknown shores, you don’t simply carry on as before; a part of you dies inside so that another part can start all over again.

Where do you start someone’s story when every life has more than one thread and what we call birth is not the only beginning, nor is death exactly an end?

She remembered, as she had done countless times these past months, her mother’s touch, her mother’s face, her mother’s voice. Grief spooled itself around her entire being, tightening its grip on her like a coil of rope.

True, carob trees are worldly-wise, they have been around for more than four thousand years. They are called keration, ‘horn’, in Greek; keciboynuzu, ‘horn of the goat’, in Turkish (at least that’s one thing Greeks and Turks can agree on). With sturdy branches, thick, rough bark and extremely hard seeds, shielded by an impermeable hull, they can survive the driest climates. If you wish to know just how tough they are, go watch them at harvest time. Humans have the strangest way of collecting carobs, smacking at the pods with sticks, fibre nets spread wide underneath. It’s a violent scene. So yes, carobs are strong. I give them credit for that. But, unlike us figs, they are devoid of emotion. They are cold, pragmatic and lacking in soul. There is a perfectionism to them that gets on my nerves. Their seeds are almost always identical in weight and size, so uniform that in the olden times merchants used them to weigh gold – that’s where the word ‘carat’ comes from. It used to be the most important crop of this island, its main agricultural export. So you see where I’m coming from: there is a bit of a competition between carobs and figs. Figs are sensual, soft, mysterious, emotional, lyrical, spiritual, self-contained and introverted. Carobs like things to be unsentimental, material, practical, measurable. Ask them about matters of the heart and you will get no response. Not even a flutter. If a carob tree were to tell this story, I can assure you it would have been very diffe...

if a cat wants to eat her kittens, she’ll say they look like mice.

While religions clash to have the final say, and nationalisms teach a sense of superiority and exclusiveness, superstitions on either side of the border coexist in rare harmony.

If your beard is on fire, others will light their pipes on it.

He found old sorrows there, some his own, others of the land where he was born, the two inseparable now, layered and compressed like rock formations.

Some day this pain will be useful to you.