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.

Defoliated

arborescent

Only a few weeks after these statements were uttered in the British parliament, four hundred separate attacks had been staged across Cyprus. British, Turkish, Greek blood was spilled, and the earth absorbed it all, as it always does.

Humans find mice and rats nasty, but hamsters and gerbils sweet. Doves signify world peace, whereas pigeons are nothing more than carriers of urban filth. They proclaim piglets charming, wild boars barely tolerable. Nutcrackers they admire, even as they avoid their noisy cousins, the crows. Dogs evoke in them a sense of fuzzy warmth, while wolves conjure up tales of horror. Butterflies they look on with favour, moths not at all. They have a soft spot for ladybirds, and yet if they were to see a soldier beetle, they would crush it on sight. Honeybees are favoured in stark contrast to wasps. Although horseshoe crabs are considered delightful, it’s a different story when it comes to their distant relatives, spiders … I have tried to find a logic in all this, but I have come to the conclusion that there is none.

prevarications

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.

What we think is impossible changes with every generation.’

Throughout my long life, I have observed, again and again, this psychological pendulum that drives human nature. Every few decades they sway into a zone of unbridled optimism and insist on seeing everything through a rosy filter, only to be challenged and shaken by events and catapulted back into their habitual apathy and listless indifference.

‘The world is unfair,’ said Meryem. ‘If a stone falls on an egg, it is bad for the egg; if an egg falls on a stone, it is still bad for the egg.’

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.