An interview with Noreen Masud
Doreen Cunningham | Tolka, Web Only, October 2023
Noreen Masud’s memoir, A Flat Place, explores the flatlands of Britain, as well as reflecting on her upbringing in Pakistan and Scotland, through a mixture of literary criticism and anti-romantic nature writing. A Flat Place contains stories of brutality, the patriarchy, colonial violence and the erasure of histories of people of colour. Noreen’s experience of living with what she hesitantly defines as complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (c-PTSD) is a many-layered account of childhood trauma with no single cause or event. Noreen describes how, along with her siblings and mother, she was confined by her father inside their house, and how she found solace in glimpses of her first flat place, open fields near where she lived in Lahore as a child:
I waited, every morning, as the dawn mists rose over Lahore, for the car to round the corner and open out on to those fields. And the flat fields told me, wordlessly, that I wasn’t mad. That I knew something important. That they knew too, and would reflect it back to me whenever I needed.
Flat landscapes have always given me a way to love myself.
I find comfort in flatlands, too. As a child, the outdoors became a refuge from my mother’s extreme and unpredictable mood swings. I spent a lot of time lying down in fields, enjoying their unspectacular nature, which was both undemanding and unlikely to attract attention. These flat places incidentally did the work of avoiding other humans on my behalf and, if anyone did approach, ensured they were visible to me. Noreen’s celebration of the flat within and without captivated me. As she maps her internal world across the landscapes of the UK, what emerges is a vital alternative to well-trodden narratives of exploration and how we relate to the spaces around us. I wanted to ask Noreen whether there was a lesser-known tradition of writing about flat places that had encouraged her, given that mountains seem to dominate the literary landscape.
Noreen and I met first on social media and then in Bristol when she came to one of my book events. My climate memoir, Soundings: Journeying North in the Company of Whales, is set partly in a flat landscape, on the Arctic sea ice, where I found an unprecedented sense of belonging, while living and hunting with a family of Indigenous Iñupiaq whale hunters in 2006. We camped on the sea ice, miles from land, for weeks, watching and waiting for bowhead whales. Totally reliant on the generosity and expertise of the hunting crew for my survival in this beautiful, unfamiliar and deadly landscape, I was temporarily freed from my past and, eventually, accepted on an authentic level:
You could see people clearly on the ice, their actions, their intentions, how they held their space. There was no room for artifice. I felt pared down to my bones and concentrated hard on each moment as it came.
Noreen and I followed up our meeting with a video call and I asked first why, in her view, flat landscapes are so often overlooked. Noreen’s response began with a foray into Romantic and Victorian literature.
Noreen Masud (NM): I think there are several reasons why flat landscapes are overlooked. A convenient place to start is the Romantic period. Romantic poets like William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge and Percy Shelley are going up mountains, admiring them and feeling full of rapture. They really solidified our cultural sense that mountains are what matters, that the height of mountains corresponds to ecstatic feelings, which are the feelings that we most value. That’s partly because they are the feelings that capitalism values most. Capitalism is very invested in us desiring things and striving and conquering things; it’s quite interesting the way that the poetic and the capitalistic converge in our feelings about mountains.
Flat landscapes completely defy that. Obviously that there are no rises and falls, there are numbed feelings, there is a lack of desire or failure of desire. There is nothing to orientate yourself in relation to, and therefore no way of mapping oneself onto the landscape as a kind of capitalistically coherent life course. The other thing is that both capitalism and cultural Protestantism, which is so much a part of my encounter with Britishness, are all about the fetishisation of effort and hard work and striving. A mountain is effort, pain, all of those things that are valued in this culture. Whereas a flat landscape is one that holds disabled people, people who can’t walk very far, the elderly, the very young – the people who aren’t valued in this culture. Flat landscapes don’t challenge us in the ways that our cultural nexus of capitalism and certain models of Protestantism have, historically.
There are also things that we might think of as basic physiological reasons. In a flat landscape there’s nowhere to hide. You’re very exposed, exposed to predators. Metaphorically there is also a sense of not being able to hide psychologically in a flat landscape. We’re very into hiding things and secrecy and there’s no privacy in a flat landscape. You can see for miles and you can be seen for miles, but that sense of radical exposure is precisely one of the things that’s very comforting if you’ve lived a life that is full of secrets or unknown things, or lies and deception. Conversely, if you have a sense that there are truths that maybe everyone else is ignoring, the landscape isn’t going to hide anything from you.
Doreen Cunningham (DC): But flat landscapes are also where everything happens because you can build on them, you can have battles on them, hunt on them, so there’s this big contradiction, isn’t there? And then archaeology and investigation become important?
NM: You are so right that there is an almost oppositional sense in our relationship to flat landscapes. The reason there are so few left is that they get used: cities get built on them, they get used for agriculture. They are so useful, as you say, and it corresponds in my mind that if mountains are poetry, flatlands are prose. They are kind of boring and we don’t respect them in the same way that culturally we’re told not to respect our mothers in certain sorts of ways, the mothers that hold us up uncomplainingly. They’re predictable and they’re reliable, and therefore we despise them. We’re taught to despise them. So yes, faced with a flat landscape and equipped only with our cultural beliefs about what our options are for engagement with something, the instinct is archaeological, to dig, we go down because that’s the only way you can go. I found myself really trying to work through in the book how I felt about the archaeological tendency, and I felt what was most interesting was the idea of not seeking those answers but staying on the surface as much as possible, of having the sense that there might be answers, but maybe they weren’t for me. They were things that maybe existed or are possible to find but weren’t things I could find, and learning to be OK with that.
DC: You uncover histories in the flat landscapes you visit, often the lives of people of colour whose stories have been erased or dismissed. As we accompany you, A Flat Place became what felt to me like a really vital investigation, for a collective understanding of Britain’s racism and colonial violence, historical and contemporary. I wondered if you knew that was going to happen, if it was intentional.
NM: Such a good question. I’ve been researching flat landscapes in very small ways since 2015 but, then, in a much larger way since about 2018, and I’m writing an academic book about flat landscapes in twentieth-century English literature. Most of the flat landscapes I focus on in that book are not British landscapes. They are the flatlands of Australia and America associated with colonisation.
DC: Landscapes depicted as empty, as an act of colonial violence against Indigenous people, like what was done in the Arctic for instance.
NM: Absolutely. The Indigenous people were there and have always been there. It was a really deliberate erasure. I did a lot of research, thinking maybe I could use Indigenous literature and bring it into conversation there, and I found out two things. I found out, first of all, that it should not be me; it should be Indigenous scholars supported to do that work. And, secondly, Indigenous knowledge is not something to be packaged up and made comprehensible to me. I necessarily cannot understand Indigenous knowledge because I’m not a member of a particular language group, I’m not a member of a particular community. That knowledge is not for me. That’s a very particular challenge for me as both an academic and somebody who has been raised within a postcolonial and then a British education system, the idea that certain knowledge is not for you. That there is knowledge there, but I’m going to hold back from trying to get it. That actually became part of the project of A Flat Place. Like, yeah, there are things I could do to find out more, but it’s not for me to do and it wouldn’t change anything.
DC: How did that apply to the landscapes in Britain? For instance, when you were talking about the cockle pickers who died in Morecambe Bay in Lancashire? [When more than twenty Chinese immigrants were drowned by the incoming tide.]
NM: That is a particularly interesting landscape when it comes to that question of the role of people of colour in landscapes. I wasn’t in this country when the Morecambe Bay cockling disaster happened. I think it was 2004 and I came in 2005, so I didn’t have those cultural associations with the bay, but whenever I said to people, ‘I’m going to Morecambe Bay’, they’d heard of the cockling disaster. It was something that had installed itself successfully in peoples’ minds as a catastrophe and, I think, as a racialised catastrophe as well, so in that sense it was something that was known about and talked about. But it was a piece of knowledge that hadn’t made any difference. We are now nearly twenty years after the disaster and things have only got more abusive for undocumented migrants and people of colour. We have an assumption that as soon as we have revealed a terrible fact, something will be done about it, but you see it all the time, don’t you, with climate change: that the terrible fact has been revealed over and over and over again, and yet that revelation doesn’t change anything in terms of what is done. So, then we have this kind of crisis about what knowledge is for.
DC: It’s interesting that you bring up climate. I was thinking of how part of the trauma you write about is the fact that it has been normalised and has been made acceptable. In that very tender picture in your book, of you and your mum travelling in search of flat places in the Orkneys, you talk about the sense she gives of ‘nothing to see here’, because the unacceptable has been diminished and normalised over time, so it isn’t recognisable even to the person who has experienced it. It struck me as similar to what many people must be experiencing now. We are living with changing weather patterns, crops failing, catastrophic floods, forest fires, heat waves, loss of life and this is all unacceptable but we are somehow treating it as acceptable and bearable. It made me wonder whether the world as a whole is suffering from complex PTSD in some way.
NM: I think you’re absolutely right that complex PTSD does precisely give that sensation of something being true, and terrifying, and unignorable, and people behaving as though it’s not. It’s not just emotionally devastating, it’s sanity shredding and it makes me really angry. We have this new phrase climate grief or climate anxiety as though it’s a diagnosis, so it’s something pathologised rather than an absolutely legitimate and sane response to something insane. One of the things I talk about in the book is the way that complex PTSD is only a disorder when you’re out of the context which caused it. The behaviours that come from complex trauma, are the ones that were useful to you at the time.
DC: They are a means of survival.
NM: Yes. That’s why I see PTSD is increasingly part of the conversation, because it’s a set of affects a lot of people find very recognisable.
DC: What other work helped you, when you were starting out with A Flat Place, in forming the thoughts and giving you the courage to stay with it?
NM: The very first work I did on flatness was on Stevie Smith, the poet I did my PhD on, whose phrase ‘not waving but drowning’ has become a core part of the language, and is recognisable even if you don’t know her work. Her work is full of flat landscapes. She is constantly daydreaming about the flat landscapes of Norfolk and she associates them with a place where she can lie down and rest. Stevie Smith is always tired, and I’m always tired, and the protagonist in her Novel On Yellow Paper is always tired, so I had a great sense of recognition. All her daydreams are about ways in which she gets to go to sleep, being allowed to go to sleep. There is a great daydream she has when she’s walking along the road and gradually everything falls away - the trees, the hedges, the houses - until she’s just walking through a flat landscape. She walks and she walks and she walks, and she finds a house and everything is ready for her in the house. There’s no one there, she’s all alone, but everything is ready for her, so she has the comfort of solitude plus the pleasure of being catered for. Then she finds a bed and the description of the bed is very key, it’s described several times: the high flat bed. Then she gets up on it, lies nice and flat herself and goes to sleep. And that’s the end of the daydream. Whereas other people might have sexual fantasies, this novel’s fantasising about flatness and being allowed to be flat, it’s so great.
DC: Did you find that you fitted into a literary heritage or a particular line of thought?
NM: There are very few books that are interested in flatness in a positive way. I adore Samuel Beckett but the way he uses flatness is not one of the most interesting things about him; it’s desolation, apocalypse. Everything else he does is superb and intricate, so we can allow him to be basic about this one thing. My academic book is about D. H. Lawrence, Willa Cather and Gertrude Stein, and they have slightly different takes on flatness. Stein says in one of her books, that flatness allows a kind of generous and accommodating forgetting which allows you to make art. Willa Cather goes to Nebraska as a little girl in the late 19th century. She was from Virginia and was really horrified at first by the plains, but grows to love them, and I am interested in how Cather finds in flat landscapes the feeling of ‘jamais vu’, also known more commonly as having something on the tip of your tongue. I’m arguing in my book that there is a literary tradition of people doing interesting things in flat landscapes.
DC: When did you know this was going to be a memoir?
NM: I’ve been trying to write the story of what happened to me for a long, long time. I started trying to write when I was fourteen. I found it tremendously difficult to write about what happened because I couldn’t get me into it. I was very frightened of putting me back in that situation. I had to give myself lots of pseudonyms. In the most recent attempt to write about what happened to me, before A Flat Place, I had to be a fish called X that was a little minnow. A little minnow that could move really fast and get away if it needed to. That was the only way I could cope with writing about things. My agent helped me to stick with it. The profound gift that my agent and my publisher gave me was being able to write about things and also to be there myself, a way of showing up in my own story.
DC: I think that one of my flat places is the sea. And part of the comfort that I found in the sea was that it was indifferent to me and also to the people who made my life so difficult as a child. Does indifference factor in this feeling of solace for you?
NM: Absolutely, I don’t think I use the word indifferent, but I really recognise that since I talk a lot about the flat landscape being absorbed in itself. Precisely like me it is busy doing its own thing, and I think indifference is one of the ways of putting that. I think of these encounters almost as social situations, you know, like - what does the landscape want of me and what do I want of it? The mountain appears, I feel an obligation to react emotively to it to suitable extent, to think it is as beautiful as it is and relish it, maybe climb it, whatever. And with a flat landscape you have no responsibility, partly because it’s less spectacular but also it doesn’t care about you. A flat landscape is what you get up at the beginning and in the end of things. A flat landscape is what you get before anything is built. And there’s a reason that you see it over and over in apocalyptic art like Mad Max. It’s a sense of something being totally over, and almost the relief of that: that there is nothing more to be done and that your intervention will change nothing.
DC: Have you ever been to the sea ice? It’s an incredible expanse of flat.
NM: No, I don’t travel much. I’m not a great traveller. I feel really weird about going on planes these days. Also long travel can make me feel unwell so it’s always quite an undertaking when I travel. I’d love to go to the salt flats of Bolivia and Turkey and Utah and I would love to see the ice, but I sort of increasingly think that the best thing I can do for natural places to stay away from them.
DC: Yes I understand that completely. Your friendships are also a really beautiful thread in the book, friendships with humans, nonhumans and inanimate objects. Can you tell me a bit about how you use the word friend?
NM: I think the word friend is a really beautiful one. It has this very long history and has meant all sorts of things. Around the 18th century one meaning was a kind of benefactor, a guardian or patron, someone who might be a support financially. But ‘friend’ has all these other meanings that were quite ambiguous. Looking at 19th century literature, it’s a word that can be an erotic word just as much as an unerotic one. You don’t have to modify it with ‘boyfriend’ or ‘girlfriend’, just the word ‘friend’ absolutely covers the whole spectrum of erotic and semi-erotic and not erotic ways of relating to each other. I love that - I find it incredibly comforting because I don’t really understand ever what I’m feeling. Or the way I’m feeling will show up to me in not useful ways, like a colour or something. I know what it means to me but what does it mean to other people and how do I translate it? Friend is necessarily and historically an elastic and forgiving word.
DC: Your cat Morvern is a very important friend in your book. I have definitely learned important lessons from other, non-human, animals. When I followed the grey whale migration with my toddler, observing them taught me a great deal about how to be a mother. Can you tell me about your relationship with Morvern and what she gave you?
NM: I think she saved my life. Things were very bad when I got her. The crunch year for me was 2019 when a lot of things came to a head and I became very thin and in crisis about how to love and how to be loved. It was in late September that year that I got her and it was really decisive. I’m not joking when I say it was like how people describe to me the sudden physiological necessity for them of having a child that just can’t be argued with. I absolutely had that with her. There were so many reasons not to do it, but I felt like I wouldn’t be able to get up in the morning unless I got a cat, so I did. She was a rescue cat and the first night she crawled into bed with me. That was a really key moment because I was like: OK, I really can’t die now because what would happen to her? She was my insurance against my own death. She died in August after a long illness that started in February 2022. It was her kidneys. Many cats have kidney problems, and we think she was probably older than the shelter had realised when I adopted her. She allowed me to build up the kind of internal muscle of practising in a daily way what it might look like to want to stay alive. The kind of the drudgy necessity of it and inevitability of it. I was talking to my best friend, of whom I ask constant questions about things I don’t understand about how other people feel, and I said, ‘So you don’t think about killing yourself every day?’, and she was like ‘No, you don’t, like life is really hard but it’s just not something you do.’ So that idea of almost taking a mental option off the table is a good thing to have had all of that time practising. And that was the opportunity that Morvern gave me. And she’s gone now but that muscle that I’ve built up has stayed there.
My friends, whether they are humans or objects or animals, are those who have been very capacious with me. They have allowed me to just be who I am and often to experiment with ways of being with them, and to them, and I’m so grateful for that.
Noreen Masud is a creative non-fiction writer, academic at the University of Bristol, and AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker 2020. Her first academic book, Stevie Smith and the Aphorism, came out with OUP in 2022; her memoir-travelogue A Flat Place was published by Hamish Hamilton (UK) and Melville House (US) in 2023.
Doreen Cunningham is an Irish/British writer who worked in climate reseach and storm modelling before working as an international BBC radio presenter, reporter and producer for 20 years. Soundings, her climate memoir-travelogue is published by Virago (UK), Scribner (US) and Rowohlt (Germany) and won the Royal Society of Literature Giles St Aubyn Award.
Photo credit Joanna Szymkiewicz
