‘A Flat Place’: A memoir of landscapes, the hometown, and complex relationships with family

Noreen Masud begins her memoir A Flat Place with a straightforward reveal: “Flat landscapes had always given meaning to a world that made no sense to me.” It is this honest and brave tone that remains with me long after I complete the book. More than observational writing, as a writer and reader, I am influenced by works that strive for care.

Masud first encountered an intense bond with flatness as a child going to her school in Lahore but it was only as a postgraduate student in Cambridge that she recognised that something was going on that did not fall in the way we are traditionally acquainted with the idea of “nature brings solace”. The fields of Lahore offered a “fantasy of space to stretch out in, and distance from the chaos at home.” The book begins with only tiny vestiges into this chaos, which may be familiar to many South Asian communities, but there are undercurrents of panic everywhere. There is also no nostalgia to meet you. Everything is so interwoven with conflicting memories that to write anything about it feels like trespassing. So even as the desire of being one with landscapes is given voice to in these pages, it becomes very tough to write anything about the book without not being able to examine our own personal afflictions with nature, family and the politics that we are being influenced by on a daily basis.

Environmental memories

As careful as Masud is about broaching the topic of family abuse with her sisters or her mother, she is also aware of the traumas it can ignite in its readers. The passages even coax us to read between the lines. She writes in small sentences initially, revealing a lot of that uncomfortable past through her humour and nuanced comments. Even when Masud is traversing landscapes in the UK, her lyrical writing makes us walk through her life in a household in more than one place. The nuanced commentary about the influence of families on our psychosocial space reminded me of another memoir Educated by Tara Westover, a deeply reflective account of understanding the grief that comes with severing the closest of ties.

It is true that our parents and caregivers influence our lives long after they are gone. Those who have the privilege of being born into a family that leaves them no scars are few. But the interest of A Flat Place is not in reliving those tales. It extends that empathetic prism to how environmental memories tend to hold out support to those who are grieving and scarring. The flat fields offer sights that bring Masud joy and offer her a way in which she could love herself. But they also bring searching memories of her history with her father. What is being done here is extremely difficult: examining the most personal things of our life – family and nature.

The complicated history with the family is examined while going back to the experiences with the land. Reading it made me wonder about my own obsessions with the landscapes and how much of that is due to my family, our oppositional worldviews, the society I live in, and my personal choices. Sometimes moving out is the best decision. Sometimes it is not. But this is not a story about forgiving people. It does not hand out prescriptions for dealing with nasty relatives. It is a story of looking back not necessarily at the conflict or a longing for home but a longing for the land.

The healing power of nature

It is like seeing someone take baby steps into building trust and friendships. As much as I admired the honesty in her prose, I was also quite relieved to see how considerate the writer was towards the unknown – a recognisable panic of an incoming calamity. In order to understand why her life in Pakistan continues to grip her so tightly, Masud begins to understand the complex post-traumatic disorder and the various idioms that it offers with the flat landscapes. It might feel like flat landscapes are a metaphor for the way complex post-traumatic disorder functions. Many books talk about the healing power of nature especially when the suffering is internal. Much of this concern comes from the place to heal oneself by giving voice to the abuse-afflicted. But as Joan Didion says in her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking the process of healing is never straightforward. There is no manual that embarks upon communicating conflicting memories about abuse and the terrain of grief that follows afterwards. These are difficult terrains to navigate but the flat landscapes, as Masud explains, “quietened the thing in me that was always crying”.

With archaeological dexterity, Masud studies the landscapes by digging deep. She walks, takes solo journeys, searches Lahore’s fields on Google Earth only to find no record, and converses with her distant friends, sisters and mother about the conflicting past. The mother-daughter trip is one of my favourite scenes in the book: the two women taking a trip together, trying to understand themselves and find themselves. As much as the book is about exploring the flat landscape of the United Kingdom, it is also about making sense of one’s own life at one’s own pace.

Childhood is a difficult age to survive. The reality of the world keeps hitting us when we are in no place to take any action. For some of us, childhood might feel like a time devoid of any base but this does not make it a “jubilant-floating time”. It rather evokes constriction in me when I think about that time of floating. It felt like being in two places at the same time, but those places were not geographical. Rather, it was like inhabiting two very different times – like I could see the blood flowing towards my heart but also how my hands learned to become comfortable while holding a pencil, simultaneously. Reading this memoir felt like I wasn’t the only one. It comforted me in the most bewildering sense even when it was saying that not everything about its ingenuity rested on my life's state.

Masud empathises with the landscapes without thinking about their utility for her well-being. She observes how “romantic poets rhapsodise over the magnificence of dramatic landscapes.” She calls her life undramatic, just like a flat landscape. She begins to understand her “puzzling love for flatness” by comparing different levels of rhapsodies reserved for different geographies, where mountains entice everyone but flat lands don’t. She finds solace in ruins, holding rocks, searching for bones while wandering on these flat landscapes, without being preoccupied with the beauty of it or delving into the utility aspect of the environment. But I wondered if all this is not a privilege. Can I imagine being grateful for the heat in May? Would there have been a different intensity to my gasp every time I see Delhi Avenue Trees if I did not have an address here (however temporary it might be) or if my colony did not have a park nearby with two old banyan trees and their roots dangling in mid-air?

The entire world economy and our existence rests on caring for earth and yet we are not willing to pay attention to that big little dot. In an essay in the New Yorker, “Life on a Shrinking Planet”, Bill McKibben writes that since 1970, we have already killed sixty per cent of the world’s wildlife by destroying their habitats and increasing temperatures. We need to work out a way to think about the climate crisis as more than just a policy problem or glossy reportages or species decline. Masud with her lyrical prowess manages to go over the gloss and lay out the terrain bare for us about what climate crisis is doing in our everyday life. In that way, this is a deeply moving, beautiful and reflective prose. I highly recommend that everyone should read it.

Seeking the home ground

On a research visit to the National Gallery in London, while walking towards Trafalgar Square, I smelt the mound of landfill in Ghazipur. I could not understand what was happening. Soon I was propagating the Signature Bridge which spans the Yamuna River and connects Wazirabad to East Delhi. I did not want to let go of that odour. Somehow the two place’s odour was wafting and intermixing but only one of the landfill mounds was being propagated as I continued to walk towards the National Gallery. After returning to India, I have tried multiple times to remember that smell, propagate that image of the landfill in many attempts. But nothing. Time and again Masud also seeks Lahore – through Google Maps, inquires with friends, and conversations with her sisters and mother. Mihir Vatsa in his memoir Tales of Hazaribagh searches the Chota Nagpur plateau on Google Earth. He pursues the place of Hazaribagh actively through conversations, anecdotes, histories amidst digital aids. As much as there is helplessness and immense grief for not being able to ever witness geography or feel it again, it leaves an absence or a gap. The time taken with the reading of this memoir did not help fill anything. But it helped in observing other things too. Like the landfill.

A Flat Place is also attentive to the casual denial of environmental racism as many Western countries focus on sustainability even when their trash including plastic, e-waste, and toxic materials are being regularly shipped to South Asian countries for recycling and creating subsistence economies. I believe that Masud in writing accounts of her engagement with flat landscapes while walking through it is not only talking about the erasure of environmental memory. She is also sharing that it isn't about movement but also how your past affects the seeing of landscapes, thereby being attentive to how lands show you memories of colonial trauma.

A Flat Place tries to understand personal and political relationships with a formidable effect through environment and landscape even as many of us might believe that we can’t go back to where we came from. So, for anyone who has ever wondered “what base does their life stand upon,” you will find someone waiting with tea, warm food, a plant and a hot water bottle in these pages.

A Flat Place: A Memoir, Noreen Masud, Hamish Hamilton.