The Island of Missing Trees

by Elif Shafak

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...