But Why Must We Always Rise To One Another? In Praise Of Flat Places

 

At the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust centre in Slimbridge, Gloucestershire, children zigzagged between the duckponds like bees performing a cryptic private dance. The sound of children screaming makes my hands judder, in half-remembered horror. But today I could bear it, because there were geese to feed; they ran after me, pistoning seed out of my hand and leaving crescents of mud behind. As we left the feeding area, birdwatching hides rose up from the path: dark and shady, with silence inside and long windows giving out on to the marshy flatlands around the Severn Estuary. This was more like it.

Very quietly, we unhooked the wooden window clasps and let the pane down. My friend settled in with his binoculars, while I, chin-on-arms, watched the flat landscape – the low, ironed green, sprinkled with buttercups; the patches of water like gleaming fallen coins. We’d come in summer: a bad time for wetland wildfowl, my friend told me. In wintertime, godwits and dunlin and grey plovers come in from northern Europe and Russia to nibble on Britain’s mudflats. But when the weather gets warmer, many of these nice solid wading birds go back to the Arctic Circle, and leave Britain’s flat landscapes to themselves. That was OK with me. I was really here for the bare, stretched horizons of the wetlands. The flat places with nothing much to look at.

So I looked. And gradually the noise in my head got quieter. It always does, when I’m in a flat place. Something in me stills and lines up with the horizon.

Flat places are the ground that my mind is built upon. Wetlands, fenlands, stretches of shingle: I never get tired of their clear, straight horizons. Whenever I stand in a flat landscape, I feel myself becoming weightless. Without mountains or hills, there’s nothing to catch on my vision, or distract me. I’m freed from hindrance. I could rise up, I think, into the air and float.

This isn’t a popular view, I know. I’m aware that people often find flat landscapes alienating. They can seem bleak, boring, even terrifying, because there’s nowhere to hide, and everyone can see you for miles. There’s no landmark to fix your gaze upon, and this makes it difficult to orientate yourself. That’s why people tend to prefer breathtaking mountains or lush forests or plunging valleys. Scenes with texture, that steer your vision comfortingly as you move from detailed foreground to rising background. People know where they are in varied, hilly landscapes. And they know who they are.

The experience of elation or awe in the face of a mountain is as old as literature. Gods lived on Mount Olympus, in ancient Greece. The Romantic poets climbed Mont Blanc to enthuse and gush. Loving a mountain means that you join a whole long line of mountain-loving humans, well-documented in novels and poetry and drama. Loving a mountain joins you to something bigger than yourself. I understand those preferences. But I am different. It is flat spaces that make me come alive. The lack of landmarks makes me feel I could do anything, or go anywhere I wanted. Uncontrolled and uncoerced: unsteered by other people’s beliefs or priorities. In a flat space, there are no focal points to fixate on, to force me to see some things and miss out on others. Looking out at the flat wetlands of Slimbridge, that summer’s day, my mind spilled out across the space like water over a floor: expanding, becoming sensitive and alive again, where life and work and other people had shut it up close.
 
My life has made me strange. I don’t mind admitting that. I was born and raised in an odd house in Pakistan, dominated by an arrogant and grandiose father. He was a celebrated doctor, and he had big ideas: so big that they absorbed us all and left no room for anything else. He was a genius, he told us. Other people were stupid: we should stay away from them. Especially other Pakistanis. He saw them as benighted by religion. My father was a Pakistani in love with the West, with the very surface layer of its cultural touchstones: Mozart, Vincent van Gogh, Gilbert and Sullivan. He painted a copy of The Dance Foyer at the Opera on the rue Le Peletier (1872) by Edgar Degas, five foot by three, which he hung in the living room: the arms of the ballerinas bare and provocative and just a bit wrong in the elbows, where he’d misjudged the angles. Yet my father didn’t like British people any more than he liked Pakistanis; they didn’t defer to him in the way he thought he deserved. So he kept us away from everyone. We weren’t to speak to the neighbours, or visit friends from school. Our whole world was inside that house, our eyes trained upon him, braced for anything to happen. He might bring home chocolate. Or live turkeys. Or come in roaring and grabbing and throwing things. Anything could happen. And anything happened all the time.

Or maybe it was nothing. It felt like nothing: those long days cooped up in the hot dazed rooms. My father went out, and we didn’t. We were driven to school and driven back, and that was all. In the summers, when school was out, we went nowhere. There was nothing to do or look at or think about, except the floor, and the books we’d read and reread over and over, with the sound of the traffic shouting outside, and my uncles and aunts and grandparents shouting downstairs. Life was a bare landscape with nowhere to hide. I knew the other children at school didn’t live like this, but I couldn’t explain what this was. I lived my life in a daze. I wished there was more space.

‘You’re lucky,’ my mother said. White and British, she had moved to Pakistan to be with my father. All day she mopped and cooked and scraped up vomit. She roamed through the house, back and forth and back again, even more trapped than we were. ‘You’ve got enough to eat. You go to school. Do you know how many girls don’t go to school in this country? Should we take you out of school and just marry you off, so you can scrub floors for your in-laws all your life?’

I was lucky. And I went on getting luckier. I was lucky when my father disowned me, two weeks before my 16th birthday, and I fled with my mother and sisters to Britain. I was lucky when I got to go to school again, near my grandmother’s house in Scotland, and chose what I wanted to study, and could walk in the street by myself for the first time, and look at the sea and the grass. I was lucky when I got into Oxford to study English, floated by government grants and equal opportunity bursaries. But for some reason, throughout my 20s, my body didn’t seem to know I was lucky. It cried, and hurt, and clouded over, and numbed out. It was terrified of other people. It wouldn’t come close to them, wouldn’t be drawn to them, wouldn’t be caught up by passion. I kept falling asleep. I couldn’t want anything. And I couldn’t explain why. When I tried to share my feelings with other people, they couldn’t see what I saw. They couldn’t see the nothing of my life, which burned a thick stark line across my mind.

My life in Pakistan, full of painful nothing, had left a flat landscape inside my head. Not a bleak, dead one. That would almost have been easier. This flat landscape seared with painful livingness. It wouldn’t let me look away: kept me mesmerised by its agonised, intense emptiness. And it seemed more real than any of the strange world around me. Even in safe cosy Britain, where there were consequences for hurting your children and education was free, I sensed something sinister under the gleaming surface. Something stark and painful, and utterly relentless that refused to know how much its wealth and serenity was built on the pain of others, stripped for parts by white colonisers and taught to hate themselves.

It made it hard to be around people, in their happy ignorance. It made it hard to feel safe with them. So I lived in my own world, alone with what was real to me alone. I had no words to describe any of this. I loved my friends, but I couldn’t bring them in there with me. I knew the flat place was trying to tell me something important: something that Britain didn’t want to know. I just couldn’t work out what. And it hurt that no one else could see it.

When the wading birds go home for the summer, warblers from Europe and Africa take their place, eating, breeding and shouting seductively at each other. Little brown birds, mostly: flighty, quick, difficult to glimpse and to distinguish. Cetti’s warbler, Dartford warbler, grasshopper warbler. Garden warbler, marsh warbler, reed warbler, willow warbler, wood warbler, sedge warbler. So many and so alike, and in the summer the trees grow thick leaves to hide them from view. At Slimbridge, my friend peered at the reedy edge of a pond, binoculars to his eyes, muttering about a warbler, half to himself. I had no idea what kind of warbler it might be. Between the shivers of leaves, and the everyday swell and tremble of my vision, I could barely see the bird at all.

How do we see things? Usually we see what we know: what we expect to see. If there’s a mountain in the middle of a plain, we stop seeing the plain. The mountain ‘matters’; the plain doesn’t. Our cultures tell us what’s worth seeing and what isn’t. What counts as real and what doesn’t. In a flat place, we’re told there’s nothing to see. But the life I’ve lived has made me struggle to see what I’m supposed to: to focus on the right things, and ignore the wrong ones. What I can see instead, all the time, is the flat place.

As we went on along the path, the birdwatching hides fell away. Suddenly there was a high, raised bank on the left, a little furred comb of grass along the top, joining earth to sky. I knew what that bank held back from us: the flat stretch of the Severn Estuary, too muddy to step upon. The Bristol Channel brings up armfuls of brown mud, day and night: its funnel shape and sandy base turn the water heavy with silt. But in that mud lives delicious food for wading birds. Redshank, curlews, wigeon, shelduck, dunlin all gather to feast on ragworms and clams. If you cut a square metre out of the Severn mud, just 2.5 centimetres deep – like a big thick square of turf – it would contain the same number of calories as 13 Mars bars, all in snails and worms. There’s a richness in flat places, and the birds know it.

My friend was getting excited. Wading birds are his favourite, and they’d be out on the estuary. Birdwatching is a good hobby if, like my friend, you enjoy seeking focal points, ways of ordering your experience of nature. Giving things names. Yet there’s another kind of life, which is about living alongside things that have no names: memories that can’t be explained. The day something might have been put into my shoes, to smuggle it across a border. The day something was injected into me, at home, for reasons unknown. My grandfather, roaming the corridors with wide eyes, screaming and shouting for help. The men who came to the house and had conversations in whispers. And throughout, my father: mouth stretched with rage, throwing a metal box at me – its wires dangling and snapping – with a hatred even he couldn’t name.
 
Such a nameless life means that, normally, the longer I spend around people, the more I feel like I’ve been set on fire. But my friend is good at letting me be. He carries around my world respectfully, without prying, like a very polite bellhop with a lady’s handbag.

On our right were the inland flats: a river winding through, trees assembled at the back like an audience of mixed height, watching the bare stage of the level landscape, as I was: the prickling nothing that was happening all over it. Yellow flowers waved stiffly, out of sync, like buzzing made visible.
We passed through a tunnel of trees stretching over the path, almost touching overhead, and then – suddenly – the bank, which had been blocking our view, gave out, and there was clear flat land uninterrupted between us and the Bristol Channel. Salty grassland stretched out wide and, beyond, a little strip of sea. What was the land beyond, my friend wondered? Was it Wales? Already my mind was settling into straight quiet lines. The white shine on the green land and the smooth grass felt like hands running reassuringly over my head and down my neck. My friend walked ahead, towards the sea, and I took a photo of him, tiny on the path, in his pink shirt, with the blue sky arching over.

Four years ago, none of this – light, comfort, awe – would have seemed possible. I was 29. I’d just finished my doctorate, and got an academic job that would last a whole three years. This changed my life because it paid enough for me to start weekly therapy. I went into my therapist’s office – bony, exhausted and struggling to want to stay alive – and explained that nothing had happened to me, and could she maybe help, please?

My therapist was delicate and wise. She knew when to be offhand. Almost in passing, she mentioned complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD). I snatched up the term and went straight to books, to the internet, to strip it for meaning. Complex PTSD, I learned from the psychiatrist Judith Herman and the psychotherapist Pete Walker, is different from the sort of PTSD we associate with war trauma, or attack. It doesn’t turn on a single, traumatic memory, which marks the point when, for the survivor, the world turned from OK to not OK. In complex PTSD, the world may never have been OK in the first place. Complex PTSD is caused by ongoing events – often, where it feels like they’ll never end, or there’s no hope of escape. It’s worse when the traumas were caused by someone who was meant to take care of you. It’s worse if they start when you’re very young: too little to know what counts as an ‘event’. Or what counts as something being ‘not OK’.

This explained why the flat place in my mind had no landmarks I could pick out. No single terrible thing had happened to me, yet my whole life had been filled with a nameless terror and fear since I was born. I’d learned to dissociate to protect myself – to vanish from terrifying situations that I couldn’t fight or fly from. And that had been a wise response, said my therapist, to the situation I’d been in. Now, in Britain, a new way of handling life and its terrors might be more helpful. With my therapist, I started lining up what I could see, in my mind, with what I felt: sliding them up along the same straight horizon.

And I started going for walks in flat places. Morecambe Bay, in the northwest. The Cambridgeshire fens. Suffolk. Orkney. I dug my toes into mud, traced shapes in shingle, and stared at long gorgeous horizons in places that held themselves unapologetically in their strange refusal to be conventionally attractive to viewers, seducing them with hidden turnings or mystical peaks. In such places, I could be strange too: inscrutable, solitary, refusing to fit into an easy story that rose to a climax and fell to a satisfying ending. What was inside me found its counterpoint in the fens and mudflats. I was no longer alone.

From those flat places, drained and bare and empty, and which hid nothing – which, like me, couldn’t stop showing their damage – there rose up stories of more migrants from Asia and Africa. Not birds, this time, but cockle-pickers, farm-workers, a human zoo, a labour battalion. Migrants whom Britain does not know how to see; whom it prefers not to see. I wrote about these walks in my book, A Flat Place (2023). I put the flat place inside me on to paper, made it into a solid flat rectangle bound between boards, so that it didn’t need to surge up under my eyes any longer. I could show it to friends who loved me.

There were little birds out on the mud. I could see them but I didn’t know what they were. My friend had his binoculars out, and was muttering.

‘What do you think that is?’

As we relaxed into the space between us, birds started slowly to come into focus for me. I leaned in, peered through his binoculars.

‘I can see grey,’ I said. ‘And a bit of black. And maybe brown? Near the head?’

There was a pause.

‘Oh,’ said my friend. ‘It’s a wigeon.’

The plural of wigeon is either wigeons or wigeon. The males have brown-russet heads, peach chests, grey bodies.

We’d seen almost no one since we left the main centre, but now we stopped near a man who’d set up his camera on a tripod. His friend was sitting on the ground, nearby. They were both talking, neither of them listening to the other.

‘I was hoping we could have the soup at the centre,’ said the friend. ‘But I saw on the board, it’s tomato. I can’t stand tomato.’

‘Either a curlew or a whimbrel,’ said the cameraman, curving the lens round. ‘Earlier, the way it was moving made me think curlew. But now I’m not so sure.’

‘So I suppose we’ll just do sandwiches,’ said the friend. ‘I don’t know what they’ll have in the way of vegetarian though. If it’s just egg…’

‘This would be the right time of year for whimbrel,’ said the cameraman.

How can we ever know each other? How can we even know what we are seeing?

My vision ran over the clear brown land, mirrored with blue and white where the water had come in. It ran and ran as fast and as far as it wanted. It ran over the tiny birds, unseeing, over the wigeon and the curlews or whimbrels. It was the flatness I could see, bigger and better than anything else in that landscape, full of brightness and clarity. It didn’t have an existence for anyone but me, that day. But I could see it and felt I knew what it was.
 
Right at the end of the big map, printed on boards throughout Slimbridge, was a kingfisher hide, facing a river. When we got there, the hut was full, so we hovered waiting for a seat to become free. Who wouldn’t want to see a kingfisher? They are so beautiful and elusive: a rare, jewelled handful of blue and orange in among Britain’s collection of little brown birds. I’d seen a flash of blue down at a river, once, the year I was bones, but that was the closest I’d come. Once we were seated, my friend leaned next to me. This was allowed, because we were friends.

Intimacy is very, very hard for me. This is one of the most powerful and painful parts of cPTSD. At its root, complex trauma is relational trauma. It comes from being totally dependent on someone, for a long time, and being catastrophically betrayed by them – so catastrophically that they distort your sense of other people, and what they will do to you. Complex PTSD can mean feeling that other people aren’t real, or safe. That you are fundamentally different from them and can never share a world. Or, worse, that you are essentially defective and repulsive, and wise people should stay away from you.

Yet the only way out of cPTSD is relationship. It’s a cruel irony. The only way to start feeling better is to get close to people, and trust them: to have the experience of them not betraying you. It’s difficult, because everyone is busy and human and distracted, and makes mistakes. A little slip on their part will prove, beyond doubt, that you were right to be suspicious in the first place.

My experience of cPTSD made it hard for me to imagine that anyone would want to be near me, ever. I always marvelled when my friends leaned in close or hugged me. But when I’m sure it’s safe and allowed – that I won’t harm them, or disgust them – I can’t take my hands off them. I drape myself over them, poke my chin into their clavicles, touch their heads. I’m sold. I’m theirs. I touch them again and again, to check they’re still real.

My friend put his binoculars over my head, and the lady sitting next to me told me where to look. The kingfishers were coming in and out of that little hole in the bank, she said. I tried to find it through the lenses. Twice everyone in the hide gasped and started clicking cameras, while I waved the binoculars frantically, unable to see what they were seeing. The third time – at last – I saw it. The kingfisher came out of the hole; it sat on the twig. I saw its orange tummy. I saw its little head turning, taking everything in, at peace.

I looked and looked until I felt guilty, and held the binoculars up to my friend. But he shook his head. ‘This is your first proper kingfisher,’ he said. ‘I’ve seen them before, lots of times. You enjoy it.’

I turned back to the bank, and went on seeing what everyone else could see, till the kingfisher went back into its hole and the moment was broken.

What I call the flat place inside me, now, is the feeling of intensity, of angry stubbornness: of knowing that I am real, and that what I know is real, even if the world can’t see it. I know what people can do to each other. What parents can do to their own children. Although the good moments get more and more frequent – when my friends and I find, even briefly, that we’re seeing the same thing at the same time – in the end, I wouldn’t trade the flat place for anything. Even if it means living mostly in my own world, alone with the memories without names that draw my eye endlessly but never rise into focal points in the flat place inside me. Shoes. A metal box. The scratch of a needle. The things I alone can see.

Flat places. By Noreen Masud.  Aeon, September  28, 2023.

Who and what do we love? And why?

In the 2007 video "In My Language," the writer and controversial activist Mel Baggs performs the repetitive actions associated with their autism. (Baggs died in April 2020.) Society often views these repetitive stims as evidence that the autistic person is cut off from the world. On the contrary, Baggs explains in subtitles, these actions spring from a profound responsiveness to their environment. They cannot, and will not, differentiate between the trivial, the inanimate, and the socially acceptable. Baggs responds with tender fascination to a stream of water in the same way as a neurotypical person might to a human face or speech. They bat at a string, rattle a door handle, run their finger over a corrugated chair seat, rub their face and head between the pages of a book. All the time they sing, in a beautiful drone which reminds me both of a bagpipe sound and of Pakistani classical music.

“…the way that I move when responding to everything around me is described as "being in a world of my own". Whereas if I … only react to a much more limited part of my surroundings people claim that I am "opening up to true interaction with the world". They judge my existence, awareness and personhood on which of a tiny and limited part of the world I appear to be reacting to.

 […] I smell things. I listen to things. I feel things. I taste things. I look at things. It is not enough to look and listen and taste and smell and feel, I have to do those to the right things, such as look at books and fail to do them to the wrong things or else people doubt that I am a thinking being…”

I read about Baggs's work in the spring of 2020, when the coronavirus lockdown was firmly in place, and I'd been alone and happy in my flat for a long time. I stopped reading, looked up the video and watched it through. After, I lay on my back on my red rug in the middle of the living room with my hands pressed into my eyes. The revelation vibrated through me; I could feel it in my teeth. Not because the idea of a relationship with inanimate things was new to me. But because, in fact, it had never occurred to me that one might not engage deeply and absorbedly with unalive things. A strand of me seemed to shake itself loose and offer itself as distinct, as graspable.

I'd long experienced something of what Baggs described. Complex trauma, sustained throughout an isolated and cultish childhood in Pakistan, meant that I'd struggled to feel attuned to human faces (whether my mother, my friends or strangers), preferred to be alone, and avoided strong stimuli, like crowded places or loud voices. Instead, I'd always cleaved to objects – stones, red tripods in pizza boxes, the cut sides of a raw potato – with a rapt affection that I struggled to explain to those around me.

My book "A Flat Place" is about the flat landscapes of Britain and Pakistan, and my intense, fascinated love for them. Flat landscapes aren't a popular thing to love. The bare expanses of prairies, fenlands, wheatfields and marshes can seem boring, bleak, even frightening. Their horizons have no landmarks to hang on to: nothing to orientate yourself toward. That's why we hate them or fear them, mostly, in Western culture. It's hard to find the point of them, in a very literal sense.

 But I love them in the same way that I love stones and bones. They are hard, inert, inscrutable. Busy being themselves, in a way I can't stop watching. Because they have no landmarks, I can't grab onto them — can't orientate successfully toward them — and so I could look at them forever.

I think about my sexuality in the same way. It is unfocused, self-enclosed, directed toward strange things. The critic Sara Ahmed turned on a light for me in her book "Queer Phenomenology." She picks up on the "orientation" in "sexual orientation." To be orientated in space is to be directed, or find yourself directed, to someone or something. Thinking in these spatial terms was revelatory to me. My queerness comes from not being orientated to anyone I've met, so far, in a way that's consistent, mutual and survivable: in a way that I can disentangle from my trauma.

How do I explain this? Because of course, you do have to explain yourself in this world. We live alongside other people, and language is all that we have. I don't mind. I say that I am gay; when I am being most accurate, I say I am queer. Not because, as some people think, "queer" affords mobility between socially normative and non-normative gender and sexual presentations. For me, "queer" allows me to move between desiring women, and not desiring anyone at all. Mostly I want to be alone, or with cats: swimming in cold water, until my eyes go blurry. I want to hold clean bones and fossils; I want to look at a plant until I feel like I'm becoming part of it. I want my friends to hug me and help me hold my body together. And I'd like a girlfriend, please, if it's convenient. But don't touch me there. Or there. Ever.

There are other words I could use for myself, apart from "queer" and "gay," but I find I'm not interested in them either. It's not that I don't like labels. Labels are very useful. It's more that I am happy for my murkiness to constitute my sexuality: happy to be one big mess of loves and fascinations which don't separate out neatly. The writer Callum Angus has a short story, "The Swarm," which I double-dog-eared when I read it. A woman gives birth to a swarm of insects. "As it grew," Angus writes, "the swarm's head filled with a constant buzzing sound, its skin was always crawling, and it devoured entire fields of corn in a single afternoon" (105). I am happy to be a swarm.

My book "A Flat Place" makes a case for description rather than summary and conclusions. There's so much we can't know. There are so many ways in which our possibilities of knowing are trapped by the cultural channels available to us. Our conclusions, in general, are not much good. At this point I find it most helpful to describe rather than sum up: to stay on the surface of the flat landscape, and look at what is right there, rather than digging for absolute answers.

And like a flat landscape, I am content, sometimes, to be without feeling. To want nothing. Capitalism tells us that we must always be wanting: that when desire ends, we somehow lose our humanity or distinctiveness. And one of the ways we understand our desires is through landscape. People often use landscape as a way of noticing, describing and validating their feelings. Mountain ranges, or textured rivers — landscapes full of variation — seem appealing because they elicit and reflect the heightened feelings of ecstasy and despair that we're most entranced by: that we think of as representative of "real" human experience. In contrast, we continue to resist the idea that we might love things and spaces which signal their passive inanimateness: a blank stone, a chair seat, or a flat landscape. To feel flat, or to love in a flattened way, or to love flat things, is one step, we're taught to think, from deathliness.

 But there are all kinds of reasons why one might not distinguish, in one's loving relationships, between alive and unalive things. For me, it comes from a sense that a living creature might not have much to offer me. Or rather, they offer me something I can't rise to meet.

But why must we always rise to one another?

How much better, I think sometimes, to know that one can never understand another. To sit alongside them, or it, in unbridgeable difference.

In praise of flat places: On queerness, landscapes and understanding our desires. By Noreen Masud.  Salon, June 24, 2023. 

From Pakistan, two flat landscapes stay with me. One outside our house, one inside it.

Outside: The green misted fields glimpsed from the car window, stretching out wide and far away, on my way to school.

And inside: the flat stone floors of the house. I can still feel them against my cheek, under my hands. Caramel-coloured marble blocks, each just under a metre square. They were embedded with grey and white and pale blue pebbles, and sheared perfectly smooth: joined together with dark grey frosted glass. In the heat of the day, every day, I lay on that cold floor, moving my hands over it slowly, in small circles and in large ones.

When I stare at any flat landscape now, I get the same feeling of coolness: in my throat, in my hands, and at the back of my neck. My gaze loops over and over the stark surface. It feels like rubbing my hands over a smooth table, or a cold sheet of ice. But very few things in nature are truly, perfectly flat. As my eye roves, I know I’m seeking something. Will there be a flaw, a knot, a gnarl, to break the surface? Half of me hopes I’ll never find one. Half of me goes on searching, uneasily.

Something went wrong in my life, years ago. A knot or a gnarl, embedded somewhere, which must have sent everything strange. But I can’t seem to find it.

The memory theorist Douwe Draaisma argues that we only remember things that are aberrations from the normal. I can’t remember what happened to me because it was the substance of my normal. But one of my clearest memories is of lying on that stone floor. Ants crawled across it, just as lizards crawled up the walls and cockroaches roamed the bathroom, and frogs sheltered in the kitchen cupboards. I put my hands flat on the ground, index fingers and thumbs forming the shape of an ace of spades, trapping an ant. It blundered around this new wall, trying to find a way out until eventually it gave up and climbed up onto my hand. I lifted my hand and watched the ant crawling down my arm, round and round. My hair prickles at the memory of it biting, again and again.

It’s important to say that my life in Pakistan was unusual. It was an odd life compared to British lives, but for Pakistan, too, it was an unusual life. My father put his two big hands on the ground around us, and we crawled around inside. If I remember the floor more clearly than anything, it’s because for thirteen years that was my world. The cold marble; the fluorescent lights; the dusty smell of the chicken wire over the windows. In the summers, when there was no school, months could go past without us leaving the two rooms on the upper floor of our house. My mother, my three sisters, and me: Rabbit, Spot, and Forget-Me-Not. Those aren’t their real names, but I think you could have guessed that.

 No one else I knew lived like this. Many, many Muslim and Pakistani women have rich, juicy, vital lives, integrated with other people, fulfilling their ambitions. But also, many don’t, because Pakistani society lets things go both ways. In particular, it turns a blind eye to anything that happens between fathers and daughters.

My father was a doctor, and the eldest son in his family: in charge at work and at home. He specialized in diabetes, which afflicts nearly a fifth of the Pakistani population. By all accounts, he did it very, very well. ‘Oh, you’re Dr. Anwar’s daughter!’ my teachers would exclaim. I squirmed. His intelligence was impatient, fitful, and indifferent to rules; he skirted and tore through the tedious twists of bureaucracy which colonization had left hanging around our country like cobwebs. He became known as a genius, a maverick, doing what he thought best and never asking for permission, in the way that men are allowed to do all over the world. Anyone who disagreed with him, he thought, was stupid and ignorant. And he had a specific disdain for Pakistan: what he saw as its inefficiency, slowness, and superstition.

‘I don’t worship Allah,’ he used to say, smiling. ‘I worship my god, Apollo.’

My father was an Anglophile who despised most other Pakistanis. It became part of his mythology. ‘Dr. Anwar is so rude,’ his patients would say lovingly, ‘but such a great man.’ He wore very fine Western suits, and leather shoes which he would have me fetch and polish and slide onto his feet. He shaved his beard and trimmed his mustache; he took the top off a water cooler and used it to brew illegal cider in our bathtub. He made us taste the results. The alcohol ran warm down my throat and pooled in my stomach.

The great man was a megalomaniac and a fantasist. He’d done work for the president, he told us. For the army. When you’re as good as I am, he said, you can do whatever you want. And ironically, despite my father’s Westernization, only Pakistan would handle him deferentially enough for his tastes. Only its glitching, dropping rhythms—lurching from crisis to crisis—would let him dodge through the system without answering to anybody.

Other people don’t understand, my father told us. Stay away from them. He loathed the weddings, the visits, and the community relationships that formed the glue of Pakistani society. If we spoke to the neighbours, or went to our friends’ houses, they’d only start asking for favours and taking up his time. So that wasn’t allowed.

To his credit, he never complained about having four girls and no boys. ‘My girls are my boys,’ he used to tell people who hinted delicately at our family’s tragedy. We would be every bit as good, he decided. We’d be doctors and engineers and mathematicians. Our hair was cut short, straight across our heads, and we were kept away from other children. Instead, shut inside, we were tested. Maths. Physics. Lateral thinking. And more abstract things: Can you identify your sisters by the scent of their pillows? Can you solve this riddle? If I put you up high, so high that you freeze with fear, can you work out how to climb down?

I always failed.

The Flat Places of Pakistan: Solving the Riddle of Childhood. By  Noreen Masud. Psychology Today, June 6, 2023. 

 In 2019, I went to a therapist because I was very thin and very sad and really not wanting to be alive, but too tired to do anything about it. There was something inside me that was screaming, but I couldn’t explain it to anyone.

I’m better at explaining it now, or not explaining it. I write about it in my new memoir, A Flat Place. Here are some bones: I’d been born and raised in a strange family in Pakistan, headed by a father convinced that he was the answer to all the country’s problems, and probably all of God’s problems too. He’d kept us inside, banned us from talking to the neighbours, and put us through physical and psychological tests. A month before I turned sixteen, he’d disowned my sisters and me, and my (white) mother took us all to live with her mother in Scotland.

Now, fifteen or so years later, I was a postdoctoral fellow at a top university in the North of England, trying to write a monograph on flat landscapes in literature. I’d done well in my career but I felt terrible. I only wanted to be alone, but even that wasn’t enough. Most days I spent lying flat, with my cheek on the floor.

I couldn’t solve the problem of loving and being loved, of holding and being held. And I didn’t know how to live in the world either with or without love.

My therapist let me sit with my face on my knees, or stare out of the window, for weeks. She was too sensible to argue with me. I was really bad, I’d warned her, at being told what to do; it made me want to run away. So we talked about my mother and my father, and my work, and the bare, scalded landscapes inside my head. I told her: the world felt like I was walking through a flat, burned-out wasteland, and no one could see the horrors all around us except me. Flat landscapes had always given shape and meaning to my thoughts, and I described them to her in detail.

The therapist listened to the images of flat places I described, and let them become the main language between us. And it was only in passing, casually, that she mentioned complex post-traumatic stress disorder or cPTSD. It gave me a jolt. In my head I imagined war veterans: like my father, who’d seen his best friend blown up next to him in the Pakistan-Bangladesh war of 1971, when he was just seventeen. Post-traumatic stress disorder seemed a ludicrous thing to associate with that cramped, febrile house back in Lahore.

I stewed over the term ‘complex post-traumatic stress disorder’ for a while. I Googled it when I got home. Complex post-traumatic stress disorder, I learned, didn’t turn on a single shocking event, like regular PTSD. It described the results of trauma that occurred over a long period of time, usually perpetrated by people who should have looked after you, in a situation where you felt no hope of escape. Symptoms included: physical pains (like the aches which crawled through my stomach and legs and hips and chest, every day, and choked me), dissociative symptoms (like the way I went numb and let the world become unreal around me), suicidal feelings, a sense of worthlessness and permanent damage, finding friendships and relationships very difficult. Yes.

I went back to my therapist and brought it up again, half-belligerently. The therapist said: yes, this was one of the words which might make sense in the context. Another might be ‘developmental trauma’. We could use either of those names if we wanted, but we didn’t have to use any names at all. I relaxed. This left me free to move whichever way I wanted, like a queen on a chessboard.

And gradually, after sitting next to it for a long time, I decided that I was okay with the term ‘complex PTSD’. Sometimes it helps to have a word. It didn’t have to fit me seamlessly; there were things about the term which still itched, or felt strange. But words are for communication, and this helped me communicate.

And having a word was a way, strangely, of realising: I wasn’t alone. Lots of people had had similar experiences with similar results. Part of my horror and loneliness was the feeling that no one could ever understand what had happened to me, and what it had done to me. But actually, I was just a normal human being like other normal human beings, being shaped by my life in the way that everybody was, and finding my way through.

I started to use the term ‘cPTSD’ when it felt right. And now, sometimes I use it and sometimes I don’t. And I started to write my book A Flat Place, about the way that my life felt like a flat landscape with no landmarks: nothing to point to as a single, searing explanation of ‘what happened to me’. And I wrote about how that hurt but could also be beautiful: could be a way of seeing things with a brightness and intensity which was all my own.

The term ‘cPTSD’ gave me a little ledge to stand on, a place to begin, with the project of putting my world into language. I don’t think it’s part of my identity, exactly. It’s a tool, like any other, to help make myself clear to other people. No one can ever be perfectly understood: that’s part of the dilemma and the despair of being human. But using the term is a way of having faith that sometimes the act of connection is more important than the detail. That an imperfect, smudged seeing of each other might still be worthwhile.

The term ‘cPTSD’ may not always be useful to me. But for now, it is. I wrote A Flat Place to become more okay with trusting other people and trusting language to hold me.

In the stairwell outside my therapist’s office, thick red letters were propped up on a windowsill next to a diffuser, spelling LOVE and HOME. I couldn’t bear it at first: I swapped around the letters so that they read VOLE EMOH. But they were put back in their right place, every time, when I returned. LOVE. HOME. And gradually, I started leaving them alone. Words can be absurd and embarrassing, but so are we.

 

I Was Sad and Did Not Want to Live. By Noreen Masud. Psychology Today, June 7, 2023. 

A Flat Place is a surprising and lyrical journey—part memoir, part nature book—meditating on the meaning of "flatness" and its literary tradition to find ways to understand ourselves and our trauma in one of nature’s most undervalued wonders. Masud combines memoir, nature writing, and literary reflection to explore what can be drawn from these powerful places, and to understand her own experience of complex trauma and post-traumatic stress, as well as grief and loss. A Flat Place is a book that drives to the heart of what it means to experience place — bodily and psychologically — and the healing properties of literature and landscape.

Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her research covers all kinds of bases: flatness, spivs, puppets, leftovers, earworms, footnotes, rhymes, hymns, surprises, folk songs, colours, superstitions. She work mostly on twentieth-century literature, but makes forays into Victorian and Romantic literature too. Carissa Potter talks with Masud.

Noreen Masud on finding comfort in flat places. Bad at Keeping Secrets, June 8, 2023. 

 

Website Noreen Masud

Memoirs have sometimes been considered a form of fiction, not as false accounts but by being enriched with the layering of symbols, place, and affable narration. Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place: Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma picks up these tools and employs them to full effect, as she takes the reader further and further into these vast, empty-but-not places to share her experiences.

“The world was a flat plain with nowhere to hide…Nothing was all right…Flat landscapes have always given me a way to love myself,” are just a few of the achingly honest and intriguing lines Masud shares in her introduction. It helps frame and give shape to this work, in understanding the three main focuses therein: her perspective as a Pakistani immigrant in the U.K., her diagnosis of complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD), and her fascination and feelings of safety in flat places. This is all woven together throughout the memoir, giving a textured and intimate portrayal of a woman who has come into her own, but is unwilling to let any of the past go without giving it a name or story—“We tell stories to make them visible. Or we tell stories so that we don’t have to look at them any longer.”

The complexities of Masud’s highly controlled and abusive childhood are brought into focus from the start but skews dwelling on it, choosing instead to highlight what came after. Her sharp words and mind cut through the chaff of what commonly bloats memoirs. She describes playing with ants as a child and makes the comparison to upbringing, “My father put his two big hands on the ground around us, and we crawled around inside.” The we here speak of herself and her sisters. The relatively simple line, set up by the preceding paragraph, encapsulates the claustrophobic nature of her rearing. One line succinctly summarizes a whole breath of feelings and experiences without her belaboring the point. There are passing mentions in later chapters but the foundation has been laid.

The structure of A Flat Place is striking, diverging from a conventional methodology. Masud chooses locations she visits in order to frame each progression as she dives deeper into her struggles and identity. From Orford Ness to Morecambe Bay to Newcastle Moor, the reader follows as each place unfolds in an indeterminate direction, melding with the horizon. Yet, despite these locations being places of sanctuary, Masud is not naive and refuses to romanticize the past. She is self-aware, “We think of places like the fens as rural, and yet that flatness derives from intensive human intervention.” With the brief and informative sense of a crack journalist, Masud highlights the complicated history of how the English changed the very landscape she now appreciates. What was once a marsh is now rich farmland, known as Cambridgeshire, thanks to the colossal public project of draining the region. The lite-terraforming is something she traces with bittersweetness because the flatness that exists reveals a sanctuary. She also cannot avoid the coy reference that these places may soon be reclaimed by the same waters that were banished due to climate change.

The style of Masud’s writing is like that of the eels she mentions in the Fens. Her words twist and wrap around various concepts, at times in the same paragraph, challenging the reader to take her work as a whole, rather than pin it down for dissection. The concerns of her work, while innately personal and self-refectory, retain a global scope as she considers her homeland of Pakistan and her new home in England. She remains an outsider, mostly because her cPTSD forces her to be, but she cannot excuse herself from her ancestry or the empathy she feels towards those similar to her. Upon her visit to Orford Ness, an old WWII base turned historical tourist attraction, she considers the experiments and foul things created there in hopes of turning the tide on the Germans. “I’m always interested in which parts of history British people want to know more about, and which parts they’re happy to draw a veil over.”

Buried in these flat places are not only the ruins of history but the spiritual wreckage of a life repressed. Masud writes openly about the grief of her family fracturing and the inability of being able to put it back together. The hauntology that pervades these insights and the book as a whole is heavy but does not overwhelm. These feelings and circumstances continually drive her back into the wilderness, the flat plains, in order to work through them. It is only in all of these spaces she can process and connect to that which is the most broken. This combines as a challenge to the reader, although Masud is not intentionally issuing one. We, as the reader, are asked to reflect and make peace with the circumstances that we cannot change. The relationships that may never reappear or heal. The kind of open consideration that should be felt for individuals who struggle socially, mentally, physically, or economically.

It is commendable that the work does not fall into a spiral of attempting to define terms or hand-wringing around what might be more politically correct to say. Masud is careful to mention and draw the line of how various things such as the COVID-19 pandemic were beneficial to her because she was able to enjoy the time alone and inside without dealing with peer pressure to go out. One might think her authenticity and brutal honesty may leave her vulnerable to critique, but it may in some ways shield her because all of her cards are on the table. This kind of prose does not come along often and should be treasured as a rarity.

While it would be too soon to expect another work from Masud, it will be and should be demanded in the future. Too few writers are able to combine personal essays, memoir temperaments, and piercing social critique, all in the vein of unpacking and reflecting on trauma. Readers of all preferences, history, narrative, and social sensibilities will be able to take something away from the work and maybe learn something as well about themselves or others, as an excellent work of literature like A Flat Place does.

 

Horizontal Profundity: Mapping the Interior by Proceeding through the Exterior in “A Flat Place”. By Alexander Pyles. The Chicago Review of Books, June 12, 2023. 

Flatlands can be places of unnerving paradox. There, you can’t be taken by surprise, but nor can you hide; any feeling of liberation tends to be constrained by a barb of danger; and while you may be granted a glimpse of the infinite, you’re also made to feel hyper-aware of your own body. For Noreen Masud, a lecturer in 20th-century literature at the University of Bristol, “it’s as though the landscape is sending us a message that we’re unable to decipher.” In “A Flat Place,” she travels to five landscapes in England and Scotland in an effort to interpret them: the Cambridgeshire fens, the shingle promontory of Orford Ness, the tidal flats of Morecambe Bay, the Town Moor in Newcastle and the islands of Orkney. She also seeks to interpret their appeal, for while this is a kind of quest narrative, that quest’s true objective might be to answer the question: What am I looking for? And though the journeys together have something of the quality of a pilgrimage to a healing spring, Masud is too skeptical to anticipate any sort of nature cure.

“What does it feel like?” she asks her therapist. “To feel connected to another person?” The wellspring of Masud’s sense of disconnection (diagnosed as complex post-traumatic stress disorder, though she uses the term warily) is a childhood spent in near-total separation from society, enforced by a father who finally disowned her when she was 13. With her sisters and mother, she fled her birthplace, Pakistan, for her mother’s birthplace, Scotland. The abiding image of her childhood, and of “A Flat Place,” is the plains of Lahore, seen glancingly through a car window. “The fields were perfectly, shimmeringly flat. No people crossed them.” Borrowing from Virginia Woolf, Masud comes to consider that impression of a deserted, featureless land the “base that life stands upon.”

In other words, “flat landscapes … had always given meaning to a world that made no sense to me.” The British Isles, however, whose very substrate she knows to be cemented with the blood of racial injustice, are too haunted to grant her easy verities or much consolation. Surveying the old military test zone of Orford Ness, she discovers a sea wall built during the First World War by a Chinese labor force largely written out of history. As recently as 1929, Town Moor hosted an exhibition that included an “‘African village’ — a human zoo inhabited by a hundred Senegalese people.” In 2004, Morecambe Bay was the site where at least 21 Chinese cockle-pickers drowned, victims of human trafficking and of gang masters who did not understand, or disregarded, the bay’s notorious tides.

It is not Pakistan, then, that is “the place of trauma, of lack, of pain.” And yet the unhappiness of Masud’s childhood makes nostalgia impossible. “The flat place,” she writes, “is what happens when one’s reality is at odds with that of everyone else.” It is also a realm familiar to every exile: neither home nor away, but a “nowhere” in between. By the end of this sorrowful, tender, sometimes beautiful book, it becomes apparent that it is not those mythic Lahore fields that Masud has been trying to find, but rather a terrestrial analogue for her own sense of desolation. Quests of this sort, as she understands, are bound to be fruitless, but in an unexpected coda we are allowed to hope that the “flat place” is not, after all, limitless.

William Atkins is the author of “The Moor: A Journey Into the English Wilderness,” “The Immeasurable World: A Desert Journey” and, most recently, “Exiles: Three Island Journeys.”

A Flat Place:  Moving Through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma | By Noreen Masud | 227 pp. | Melville House | Paperback, $19.99

From Lahore to Orford Ness, Searching for the Roots of Trauma / By William Atkins. The New York Times, June 6, 2023.

On the front cover of Noreen Masud’s startling memoir, A Flat Place, a green square of sky is scored across by a notched brown line. It represents the horizon of one of the flat landscapes through which the author travels.

Masud is, amongst other things, a theorist of the aphorism, and it is thus striking that the horizons on which she sets her sights throughout the chapters of this book are etymologically linked to this short-form wisdom: the Greek “apo”, which means “away from”, combines with “horizein”, meaning “to bound”.

 Though Masud never explicitly draws on this connection of wisdom-literature to the figure of the horizon, it represents a good way of thinking about the readings she gathers from the landscapes through which she walks. An aphorism might be defined as the shortest line to revelation. For Masud, such truths might similarly be read in the “one stark lovely line” of the horizon, and the landscapes that they delimit. Like the small form of the aphorism, which can nevertheless accommodate large truths, the horizon is both limiting and expansive. It is also a myth we tell ourselves in order to keep going.

As Masud travels through each of her six flat places – the green fields from a childhood spent in Lahore, for instance, or the eerily post-apocalyptic Orford Ness, with its hulking military buildings in rusting disuse – she dwells upon the stories that we tell ourselves of our past, and what happens when those stories deteriorate into a derealizing blankness. Masud has complex post-traumatic stress disorder, meaning the story of her early life refuses to comply with any of the narrative linearity retelling might afford. Some of the most moving points of the memoir emerge from the author’s search for a story that, like a flat landscape, refutes or refuses structure. Something of this is evident from the first walk she describes, in which she traces the landscape of the fens from Ely to Wenley. This flat land, “drained, inscrutable, rigid, balanced between the real and the mythical”, sustains “miles and miles of horizon” which tells her “with every step, that it was all right to be damaged, hurting, solitary.”

A Flat PlaceMasud uses the reflective landscape to map her own feelings of flatness. Her journeys are less ones of self-discovery and more exercises in self-placement. The concern – a search for space that can accommodate the self – extends from a feeling of being pressed up against bodies not her own and the claustrophobia of a childhood in which she had to search continually for breathing-room.

Masud and her three sisters were born to a Pakistani father and a British mother, with whom they lived in Pakistan, isolated behind chicken wire. This persisted until she and two of her three sisters were disowned by her father. Masud was 15 when, in consequence, she moved to her maternal grandmother’s house in Scotland. The cause of their father’s anger towards his daughters is met with a deliberate, powerful opacity. Masud writes that ‘[s]ome stories make less sense the more you remember’, but she is also firm about the fact that this story does not belong to her or to the book that she’s writing. It features more as an absence in the story, a “hole which is not the point but which looks like the point”:“a focal point that organizes you nowhere, towards nothing”. This story, then, has a flatness all of its own.

When she asks her youngest sister, referred to pseudonymously as Forget-Me-Not, what her epileptic seizures feel like, the latter describes them as “[l]ike the world is a circle without a centre”. The circle around the absent story is a narrative seizure, but one that brings Masud back to a world of her own. “What would it look like, to bring people into your world?” she’s asked by her therapist. She answers this by writing about a flatness that, if really looked at, can tremble with “a thousand tiny vibrations”, or where the “smooth ribbons” of low-lying rivers appear “‘as though a huge animal had stooped its head and licked a long stripe over the bay”’. The language of the memoir is a landscape: like a flat place, it creates its own beauty that refuses to be overlooked.

 In all this, Masud’s voice is decidedly aphoristic at points. She learns that “[r]eality meant living continuously up against a basic truth: the world would hide nothing from you, even if you were eight years old […] The world was a flat plain with nowhere to hide”. Such sayings initiate a radical sense of exposure. There is an idea that Masud is travelling to places where you cannot look away from the expanse, which simultaneously instigates a laying bare of the self. This refusal to look away is a pervasive theme. Her eyes fix on the horizon or fixate on the bones of a dead thing in search of perspective.

This is partially a story of Masud’s formative childhood, in which her resistance to (or even need for) memory might be lost in the expanse of a flat place. It is also, however, a story about refusing to turn one’s back on something. The writing offers us an unflinching gaze which is frequently fixed in horror on racism in Britain and its horrendous repercussions, including those for the country of Masud’s birth. The memoir is a story of herself, but it also memorialises the lost narratives that she finds embedded in the landscapes she explores. These “contain the stretched pain of people of colour”, such as the twenty-one trafficked people from China who drowned in Morecambe Bay whilst picking cockles; or the “human zoo’” that once existed on Newcastle Moor. Britain lives in a state of “terrible denial”, she shows, participating in a form of narrative erasure when it comes to the stories of people of colour as a way of protecting itself from the truth of its ongoing and dangerous oppressiveness. Masud’s anger at this courses through the book and electrifies it. The stories that we tell ourselves can either be dangerous myths or make vital ethical demands.

There are things that are withheld, still, at the end of the memoir, creating something like a longing for narrative closure – but this is precisely Masud’s point. It is a story of the feeling you get when the stories we tell ourselves refuse to disclose an essential or epiphanic message. It’s a brave style of refusal that somehow still manages to convey a ringing affirmation.

Noreen Masud: A Flat Place - reflective landscapes. By Issy Brooks-Ward.  The Arts Desk, May 9, 2023.