The Island of Missing Trees

by Elif Shafak

was it also possible to inherit something as intangible and immeasurable as sorrow?

not quite at ease in their surroundings. Both eternally grateful for the chances life has given them and scarred by what it has snatched away, always out of place, separated from others by some unspoken experience, like survivors of a car accident.

there was so much pain everywhere and in everyone. The only difference was between those who managed to hide it and those who no longer could.

Trees are never lonely. Humans think they know with certainty where their being ends and someone else’s starts.

the tree of good and bad, light and dark, life and death, love and heartbreak.

still carry the island with me, though. The places where we were born are the shape of our lives, even when we are away from them. Especially then.

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.

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.’

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

‘Because the past is a dark, distorted mirror. You look at it, you only see your own pain. There is no room in there for someone else’s pain.’

‘But no one knows that. Neither me, nor your father … we only grasp bits and pieces, each of us, and sometimes your bits and pieces do not match mine and then what’s the use of talking about the past, it’ll only offend everyone.

People my age aren’t afraid to ask questions. The world has changed.’

wondered if this is why islanders, just like sailors in olden times, are strangely prone to superstitions. We haven’t healed from the last storm, that time when the skies came crashing down and the world drained of all colour, we haven’t forgotten the charred and tangled wreckage floating around, and we carry within us a primeval fear that the next storm might not be far off.

We are scared of happiness, you see. From a tender age we have been taught that in the air, in the Etesian wind, an uncanny exchange is at work, so that for every morsel of contentment there will follow a morsel of suffering, for every peal of laughter there is a drop of tear ready to roll, because that is the way of this strange world, and hence we try not to look too happy, even on days when we might feel so inside.

and the earth absorbed it all, as it always does.

Political and spiritual leaders who reached out to the other side were silenced, shunned and intimidated – and some were targeted and killed by extremists on their own side.

Food is the heart of a culture,’ replied Meryem. ‘You don’t know your ancestors’ cuisine, you don’t know who you are.’

After that day, he would no longer talk about fruit bats and how important they were for the trees of Cyprus, and hence for its inhabitants. In a land besieged with conflict, uncertainty and bloodshed, people took it for indifference, an insult to their pain, if you paid too much attention to anything other than human suffering. This was neither the right time nor the right place to carry on about plants and animals, nature in all its forms and glory, and that is how Kostas Kazantzakis slowly shut himself off, carving an island for himself inside an island, retreating into silence.

I can tell you one thing about humans: they will react to the disappearance of a species the way they react to everything else – by putting themselves at the centre of the universe.

Humans are strange that way, full of contradictions. It’s as if they need to hate and exclude as much as they need to love and embrace. Their hearts close tightly, then open at full stretch, only to clench again, like an undecided fist.

How easy it was to deceive parents, and even if you couldn’t deceive, to keep them behind the walls of prevarications you had erected. If you really put your mind to it and were careful not to leave any loose ends, you could do so for quite a while. Parents, especially those as distracted as her father, desperately needed things to run smoothly and were so inclined to believe the system they had created

was working fine that they assumed a normality even when surrounded by clues to the contrary.

thrilled to be back home in familiar skies, until frost gathered on tree branches and they had to return once again to the waters down below, where they would feel safe but never complete, and thus it went on and on, the cycle of fish and birds, birds and fish. The cycle of belonging and exile.

shone with an impassive beauty, like a cold gem against dark velvet, not at all interested in the human pain down below.

Today, I think of fanaticism – of any type – as a viral disease. Creeping in menacingly, ticking like a pendulum clock that never winds down, it takes hold of you faster when you are part of an enclosed, homogenous unit. Better to keep some distance from all collective beliefs and certainties, I always remind myself.

wherever there is war and a painful partition, there will be no winners, human or otherwise.

A butterfly island. Beautiful, eye-catching, adorned with a splendour of colours, trying to take off into the air and flutter freely across the Mediterranean, but weighed down, each time, by its wings encased in broken bones.

What we think is impossible changes with every generation.’

But, on average, men who lose a spouse remarry way faster than women in the same position. Women mourn, men replace.’

You must understand, whenever something terrible happens to a country – or an island – a chasm opens between those who go away and those who stay. I’m not saying it’s easy for the people who left, I’m sure they have their own hardships, but they have no idea what it was like for the ones who stayed.’

‘The ones who stayed dealt with the wounds and then the scars, and that must be extremely painful,’ said Kostas. ‘But for us … runaways, you might call us … we never have a chance to heal, the wounds always remain open.’

Islands had a way of deceiving people into believing that their serenity was eternal.

other names to grief because we are too scared to call it by its name.’

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,

The cruelty of life rested not only on its injustices, injuries and atrocities, but also in the randomness of it all.

this generational migration, where what mattered was not the final destination but to be on the move, searching, changing, becoming.

sometimes what you called a perpetrator was just another name for an unacknowledged victim.

Knowledge is nobody’s property. You receive it, you give it back. In this way, a colony remembers what its individual members have long forgotten.

All those tourists who travel to the Mediterranean on holiday, they want the sun and the sea and the fried calamari. But no history, please, it’s depressing.’

He had always believed there was no hierarchy – or there should be none – between human pain and animal pain, and no precedence of human rights over animal rights, or indeed of human rights over those of plants, for that matter.