The Island of Missing Trees

by Elif Shafak

First-generation immigrants are a species all their own. They wear a lot of beige, grey or brown. Colours that do not stand out. Colours that whisper, never shout. There is a tendency to formality in their mannerisms, a wish to be treated with dignity. They move with a slight ungainliness, 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.

Ada sensed their fear and, for once, it felt good not to be the one who was frightened.

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.

It is a curse, an enduring memory. When elderly Cypriot women wish ill upon someone, they don’t ask for anything blatantly bad to befall them. They don’t pray for lightning bolts, unforeseen accidents or sudden reversals of fortune. They simply say, May you never be able to forget. May you go to your grave still remembering.

carobs are strong. I give them credit for that. But, unlike us figs, they are devoid of emotion.

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.

As much as I dislike carobs and their rivalry, I therefore have to include them in our tale. Just as all trees perennially communicate, compete and cooperate, both above and below the ground, so too do stories germinate, grow and come into bloom upon each other’s invisible roots.

‘I blame the menopause. All my life I’ve tidied up after my sister, my husband, my parents.

ayip.

It means “shame”. It’s the word of my life. Don’t wear short skirts. Sit with your legs together. Don’t laugh out loud. Girls don’t do that. Girls don’t do this. It’s ayip. I was always tidy and organized but lately something happened. I don’t want to clean up any more. I’m just not going to bother.’

The path of an inherited trauma is random; you never know who might get it, but someone will.

Have you ever met a pair of siblings who have had more or less the same opportunities, and yet one is more melancholic and reclusive? It happens. Sometimes family trauma skips a generation altogether and redoubles its hold on the following one. You may encounter grandchildren who silently shoulder the hurts and sufferings of their grandparents.

We are scared of happiness, you see. From a tender age we have been taught that in the air,

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, ...

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.

‘What I am trying to say is, you are young and the young are impatient. They can’t wait for school to be over and life to begin. But let me tell you a secret: it already has! This is what life is. Boredom, frustration, trying to get out of things, longing for something better. Going to another school won’t make things different. So you’d better stay.

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.

He didn’t tell the man that he could speak a bit of Turkish. The words he had picked up in his boyhood were like chipped, moth-eaten toys; he wanted to dust them off and check to make sure they worked before he attempted to put them into use.

it’s wonderful that birds are lauded for having a whopping ten thousand species, but why does it often go unnoticed that bees have at least twice that number and just as many personalities?

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.

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.’ Meryem took a sip from her tea. ‘In the past I used to get upset at that. But nowadays I’m thinking, maybe they’re right, Adacim. If you weep for all the sorrows in this world, in the end you will have no eyes.’

‘Anyway, I think you’re expecting too much of women. You want them to sacrifice themselves for the happiness of others, try to accommodate everyone and conform to beauty standards that aren’t based in reality. That’s unfair.’ ‘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.’

But even those who would never be found were not exactly forsaken. Nature

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.

some people stand in front of a tree and the first thing they notice is the trunk. These are the ones who prioritize order, safety, rules, continuity. Then there are those who pick out the branches before anything else. They yearn for change, a sense of freedom. And then there are those who are drawn to the roots, though concealed under the ground. They have a deep emotional attachment to their heritage, identity, traditions …’

love,

the only thing that humans have yet to destroy.

everything here is fiction – a mixture of wonder, dreams, love, sorrow and imagination.