In dealing with trauma, academic and author Noreen Masud uses barren landscapes as both metaphor and salve
Noreen Masud, a scholar of twentieth century literature, recently published her first commercial, non-fiction book, “A Flat Place,” a blend of writing about flat spaces, both natural and mental. She is an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker 2020, and a Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol. In an interview with Seema, Masud describes what makes her tick.
Tell us about yourself, Noreen, the person other than the thinker, academic, and writer.
I’m a queer, mixed-race white and Pakistani woman, 33, who lives in Bristol, U.K., where I work. I was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, and I moved to the U.K. with my mother and sisters a month before my sixteenth birthday. When I’m not writing or teaching – or answering emails – I like swimming in the sea, collecting bones and stones, making puppets, making jokes, reading, and being alone.
What was your journey to becoming an author, broadcaster, academic and AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker?
I never expected to end up doing work I loved so much. I still have to pinch myself sometimes to check it’s real. When I was little, my father’s expectation was that I would study science or medicine. But I managed to do an English Literature O-Level, supported by my wonderful teachers in Pakistan wherever they could help. My father disowned me before I started my A-Levels, and I came to the U.K., able to forge my own path.
Miraculously, I ended up studying at Oxford for my BA, and received funding to do my M.Phil and D.Phil at Cambridge and Oxford respectively. I then did a postdoc at the University of Durham. I applied for the New Generation Thinkers scheme – and was amazed to be accepted! The scheme supported me to do broadcasting on BBC Radio 3. My agent Matt picked me up from the annual list of New Gen Thinkers, and proposed a trade book. I’ve been unimaginably lucky in my life!
Can you give us a brief overview of your memoir, “A Flat Place,” and what inspired you to write about trauma, particularly touching upon your own?
My childhood in Pakistan was not like that of the other families I knew, either British or Pakistani. Our household was isolated, frozen and frightening. We weren’t allowed to speak to neighbors or go to friends’ houses. Things happened there which I can’t even tell you now, or share in the book. Things happened which even now I don’t understand. Adults repeatedly told me: this is normal, this is just how things are, there’s nothing to tell. But I knew that wasn’t true. So an image became very important to me: some flat, empty fields on my way to school in Lahore.
They came to sum up this sense of an intense but unsharable truth, which was there – which was mine – whether or not anyone else believed me or understood. Flat spaces, without landmarks, came to represent this sense of a compelling and fascinating space, which nevertheless didn’t have anything that flagged itself as “important’” or “significant” or “tellable.” My childhood was like a flat space. I couldn’t stop looking at it, but I couldn’t justify my interest. So in “A Flat Place” I travel round Britain’s various flat landscapes – Orkney, Morecambe Bay, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk – and I seek, in those spaces, a kind of visual form for a story which doesn’t seem to be tellable.
In the book, to quote your website, “she weaves her impressions of the natural world with poetry, folklore and history, and with recollections of her own early life.” There’s a lot going on there. Did this approach come naturally to you, or was it a measured and deliberate effort?
Poetry, in particular, is one of the most important lenses through which I view the world. When I was little I learned poems by heart as a way of feeling centered and safe. If things got scary, I could just go into my head and repeat a poem to myself. So I know hundreds of poems by heart, and snatches from them pop up in my mind at unexpected moments. My brain makes connections between what I’m experiencing in a particular moment, and the poems and memories in my head, in a way that’s startling but also illuminating, I hope. Illuminating to me, certainly!
And I think there’s something about a flat landscape that sends the brain a little wild. Because there are no landmarks to focus on, the brain has to occupy itself with other things. It has to supply other connections, images, ideas. In the book, I describe how – walking through the Cambridge fens – my brain kept getting muddled. At one point I look at some mud and in my mind I think “buffalo wallow” quite naturally, because my brain is mixing up this landscape with the buffalo wallows near my grandfather’s farm in Punjab. Flat landscapes can seem so similar, on the surface, that past and present landscapes get muddled up!
How did you approach the balance between sharing intimate details of your personal experiences and maintaining your privacy?
One major issue for the book is that my personal experiences are not mine alone. They are bound up with the stories of my sisters, and not all those stories are mine to tell. So I tried to be quite honest, in “A Flat Place,” about places where I could go no further: where a hole had to remain in the centre of the story. And that became part of the project of the book: how do you tell stories where parts of them – for whatever reason – are simply unavailable? How do you tell stories where the “climax” is missing, or perhaps never existed?
I think it’s brave to write about complex post-traumatic stress disorder, considering how going over the details of traumatic experiences can be triggering. How did you cope? Are there any particular moments or chapters in the memoir that you found particularly difficult to write? How did you work through them?
I don’t think there were any single, difficult moments. It all felt the same – like a flat landscape, no particular landmarks stood out as overwhelmingly difficult. Many passages, in fact, I’d written long before, in an attempt to work through unbearable episodes of pain. I cope with pain by trying to find form for it: an image or a metaphor or a narrative. Once pain has form, it becomes a kind of object which can be handled and put into perspective. So being given the opportunity to write the memoir was truly a blessing.
I’m intrigued by the eclecticism of your interests: particularly puppets and nonsense. What draws you to them?
I love things which we don’t know how to value, or which we tend to dismiss, because we think we already know everything that there is to be said about them. Flat landscapes, for instance, we tend to dismiss as boring, bleak or frightening – but I find them so fascinating. The same with puppets and nonsense. They seem clear-cut, but they have effects on us which we overlook. I’m really interested in the difference between the way we think we react to things, and the way we actually react, sometimes, if we pay proper attention. There is a further link between puppets and flat landscapes. Both involve blank or “expressionless” surfaces that can have strange and unexpected effects on us. The way we relate to those surfaces can tell us a lot about how we relate, or might relate, to other people.
Finally, what’s next for you? What are you working on?
I’m finishing an academic book on flat landscapes, and have some research irons in the fire around puppets and face blindness. But for my next trade book, I’m thinking about a creative reworking of the “Baital Pachisi.” It is the Arabian Nights-like set of stories, within a frame story, originally written in Sanskrit, which so little known outside the subcontinent. One of my only reasonably good memories of my father is him telling us those stories. “Reasonably” good, because some of the stories are so terrifying and disturbing!
