The Island of Missing Trees

by Elif Shafak

rootedness. But, then again, anyone who expects love to be sensible has perhaps never loved.

Most arboreal suffering is caused by humankind.

Trees in urban areas grow faster than trees in rural areas. We also tend to die sooner.

Trees might not have eyes but we have vision. I respond to light. I detect ultraviolet and infrared and electromagnetic waves.

Arboreal-time is cyclical, recurrent, perennial; the past and the future breathe within this moment, and the present does not necessarily flow in one direction; instead it draws circles within circles, like the rings you find when you cut us down.

Arboreal-time is equivalent to story-time – and, like a story, a tree does not grow in perfectly straight lines, flawless curves or exact right angles, but bends and twists and bifurcates into fantastical shapes, throwing out branches of wonder and arcs of invention.

Despite all this, it would take me seven years to be able to yield fruit again. 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?

I once heard Defne say to Kostas, ‘People from troubled islands can never be normal. We can pretend, we can even make amazing progress – but we can never really learn to feel safe. The ground that feels rock hard to others is choppy waters for our kind.’

‘What, that’s it? You’re not eating any more?’ ‘Sorry, I’m not a breakfast person.’ ‘Is that a separate group now? Aren’t all people in the world breakfast people? We all wake up hungry.’

‘Later is not the same thing,’ said Meryem. ‘One must have breakfast like a sultan, lunch like a vizier, dinner like a mendicant. Otherwise the whole order is broken.’

Yet there was also a timidity to their moves, even as every caress, every whisper, made them more tender. For it is a land without borders, a lover’s body. You discover it, not at once, but step by anxious step, losing your way, your sense of direction, treading its sunlit valleys and rolling fields, finding it warm and welcoming, and then, hidden in quiet corners, running into caverns invisible and unexpected, pits where you stumble and cut yourself.

activity. As you tunnel deep down, you might be surprised to see the soil take on unexpected shades. Rusty red, soft peach, warm mustard, lime green, rich turquoise

… Humans teach their children to paint the earth in one colour alone. They imagine the sky in blue, the grass in green, the sun in yellow and the earth entirely in brown. If they only knew they have rainbows under their feet.

Healthy, loamy dirt is more precious than diamonds and rubies, though I have never heard humans praise it that way.

contagious. In a tavern named The Happy Fig, with a blooming tree at the centre, it was hard not to feel hopeful.

And I want you to understand a fundamental rule about love. You see, there are two kinds: the surface and the deep water. Now, Aphrodite emerged from foam, remember? Foam love is a nice feeling, but just as superficial. When it’s gone, it’s gone, nothing remains. Always aim for the kind of love that comes from the deep.’ ‘I’m not in love!’ ‘Fine, but when you are, just remember, foam love is interested in foam beauty. Sea love seeks sea beauty. And you, my heart, deserve sea love, the strong and profound and enchanting type.’

doing. It touched me, his/her kindness, the sheer simplicity of it. For kindness always is – direct, naive, effortless.

Wisdom consists of ten parts: nine parts of silence, one part of words.’

‘This castle was named after a saint from Palestine – Saint Hilarion. He was a hermit.’

If families resemble trees, as they say, arborescent structures with entangled roots and individual branches jutting out at awkward angles, family traumas are like thick, translucent resin dripping from a cut in the bark. They trickle down generations. They ooze down slowly, a flow so slight as to be imperceptible, moving across time and space, until they find a crack in which to settle and coagulate. The path of an inherited trauma is random; you never know who might get it, but someone will.

It matters to me though and, so long as I am able to tell this story, I am going to include in it the creatures in my ecosystem – the birds, the bats, the butterflies, the honeybees, the ants, the mosquitoes and the mice – because there is one thing I have learned: wherever there is war and a painful partition, there will be no winners, human or otherwise.

The upbeat melody was as familiar to him as the scars on his body, though the lyrics were a puzzle.

Humans, especially the victors who hold the pen that writes the annals of history, have a penchant for erasing as much as documenting. It remains to us plants to collect the untold, the unwanted. Like a cat that curls up on its favourite cushion, a tree wraps itself around the remnants of the past.

Think about it – when we were younger, if someone had told us the island would be partitioned along ethnic lines, and some day we would have to look for unmarked graves, we wouldn’t have believed them. Now we don’t believe it can ever be united again. What we think is impossible changes with every generation.’

It is a map, the body of an ex-lover, pulling you into its depths and bringing you back to a part of yourself that you thought had been left behind sometime, somewhere. It is a mirror, too, though chipped and cracked, showing all the ways you have changed; and, like every mirror, it dreams of becoming whole again.

Our island, with its blossoming trees and lush meadows, was an ideal place to rest and recharge from the butterfly’s perspective. Upon leaving Cyprus, she would wing her way to Europe, whence she would never return, although some day her descendants would. Her children would make the journey in reverse, and their children would take the same route back, and thus it would continue, this generational migration, where what mattered was not the final destination but to be on the move, searching, changing, becoming.

Because in real life, unlike in history books, stories come to us not in their entirety but in bits and pieces, broken segments and partial echoes, a full sentence here, a fragment there, a clue hidden in between. In

For they remembered. Memories as elusive and wispy as tufts of wool dispersed in the wind.

deserved. But even those who would never be found were not exactly forsaken. Nature tended to them. Wild thyme and sweet marjoram grew from the same soil, the ground splitting open like a crack in a window to make way for possibilities. Myriad birds, bats and ants carried those seeds far away, where they would grow into fresh vegetation. In the most surprising ways, the victims continued to live, because that is what nature did to death, it transformed abrupt endings into a thousand new beginnings.

When you have something precious to give to the universe, a song or a poem, you should first share it with a golden oak before anyone else.

If you are feeling discouraged and defenceless, look for a Mediterranean cypress or a flowering horse chestnut.

And if you want to emerge stronger and kinder from your trials, find an aspen to learn from – a tree so tenacious it can fend off ev...

If you are hurting and have no one willing to listen to you, it might do you good to spend...

If, on the other hand, you are suffering from excessive self-esteem, do pay a visit to a cherry tree and observe its blossoms, which, though undoubtedly pr...

To reminisce about the past, seek out a holly to sit under; to dream about the future, choose a magnolia instead.

And if it is friends and friendships on your mind, the most suitable companion would be a spruce or a ginkgo. When you arrive at a crossroads and don’t know which path to take, contemplating quietly by a sycamore might help.

If you are an artist in need of inspiration, a blue jacaranda or a sweetly scented mimosa could stir your imagination. If it is renewal you are after, seek a wych elm, and if you have too many regrets, a weeping willow will offer solace. When you are in trouble or at your lowest point, and have no one in whom to confide, a hawthorn would be the right choi...

For wisdom, try a beech; for intelligence, a pine; for bravery, a rowan; for generosity, a hazel; for joy, a juniper; and for when you need to learn to let go of what you cannot control, a birch with its white-silver bark, peeling and shedding layers like old skins. Then again, if it’...

Whereas Daphne was transformed into a tree in order to avoid love, I transmuted into a tree in order to hold on to love.