If you look up Noreen Masud’s memoir A Flat Place you’ll be met with pages and pages of reviews, recommendations and awards it’s been shortlisted for - and it’s nothing if not entirely deserving of these - but I knew Noreen before I knew her award-winning memoir. I knew her as a lecturer and tutor (my favourite one, to be clear). Her course on trauma and literature was eye-opening for me; her seminars were unmissable, some of the most engaging and open discussions I’ve had since I’ve been at university, attested by the attendance which barely dwindled over the term despite the 9am Monday slot we’d been cursed with.
A Flat Place follows Noreen through various flat landscapes, beginning in Lahore, Pakistan, where she spent her childhood, and continuing in the UK. Memories of Noreen’s life are woven into her pilgrimages, grappling with identity – not just her own, but often the identity of a place, the impact of colonial legacies.
I sit down with Noreen in her office on campus, and she immediately puts me at ease (I think it’s usually the interviewer that’s meant to do that, but I imagine my nerves were palpable, so I was grateful). We start talking about the book, and she tells me that when she started writing it, it was meant to be solely about flat landscapes, without mention of her own life. When she sent it to her agent, his response was (in Noreen’s summary) ‘It’s very nicely written, but it’s weird.’ It was at this point that she explained her diagnosis of complex PTSD to him, how it informs her view of the world, and he told her she should really include it in her book. ‘The image of the flat landscape’ she says, ‘became an increasingly compelling way for me to understand what has happened to me in my life.’ This was the birth of her memoir.
‘I think that was the first time I wrote about my life and someone didn’t try and minimise it or dismiss it. I was believed, and that was really powerful'
With this in mind, I ask her if the writing process was therapeutic for her. ‘I didn’t write it to be therapeutic’ she tells me straight away, yet ‘I think that was the first time I wrote about my life and someone didn’t try and minimise it or dismiss it. I was believed, and that was really powerful’, ‘now it’s just a bit of paper (she flaps the book around in the air) I’m no longer tormented by it.’
Did she feel any pressure, then, to round things off for the sake of the book? She responds by telling me about her strong resistance to the idea of ‘healing narratives’ speaking slowly and deliberately, and never stumbling on her words. ‘Capitalism says you’ve got to heal so that you can go back to being ‘productive’’, she gestures air quotes, expressing her opposition to this, her desire to resist those demands.
'So much of our media is [...] owned and controlled by people who have an active interest in perpetuating and increasing inequality in our society’
But how can she do this? How can a contemporary writer focus on ‘solidarity’ rather than being ‘useful according to capitalism’s terms’? Noreen has been nominated for several awards and asked to speak on panels, and I’m interested to know what that world looks like, particularly for an activist. She has a lot to say. The root of the problem for Noreen is that ‘so much of our media is owned by billionaires. It’s owned and controlled by people who have an active interest in perpetuating and increasing inequality in our society’, ‘where are book reviews published? In our billionaire-owned media.’ Noreen’s unwillingness to keep quiet on political issues has absolutely led to having ‘opportunities taken away from (her)’, she tells me emphatically.
She does not say this with any ‘poor me’ objectives, it seems – in fact, she declares herself ‘one of the luckiest people alive’ as she talks about the recognition she’s received in recent years. It’s a societal matter - ‘we value narratives by people we value’, and, Noreen acknowledges, she has moved from ignored, uncared for, to valued, by those around her and by the literary world.
Noreen’s father was a dominant figure in her childhood, whose abuse is recalled throughout the book. She alludes to her happiness at his death, yet she also writes that he was ‘not a bad man.’ I ask her if it was hard, in the face of his influence, to write these words, to attach this to his legacy, and her reply takes the conversation on an unexpected turn. She mentions the slew of popular books ‘about bad Muslim men’ circulating when she was younger, and the normalisation of Islamophobia in recent years. ‘I was absolutely terrified,’ she says, ‘of reinforcing those ideas’; ‘I did not want what had happened to me to be misappropriated, misread to fuel Islamophobia’. She makes her point very clear, saying with conviction, ‘my father behaved the way he did not because he was a Muslim, but because he was an Anglophile, because he was left with this great sense of postcolonial inadequacy.’
'I did not want what had happened to me to be misappropriated, misread to fuel Islamophobia'
Her point couldn’t be more relevant in the face of Elon Musk’s recent fascination with the Rochdale grooming cases, inspired by and inspiring yet more Islamophobia in the press and online. ‘Muslim men are a socially palatable monster’, Noreen says on this point. She becomes visibly upset now, as she begins talking about recent events in Gaza: ‘it makes me sad and angry when people say “so many of the people killed in Palestine are women and children”’, ‘but what a tragedy it also is to lose beautiful, caring, loving Palestinian men. Their lives matter too.’
We move away from the topic, and onto another important figure in Noreen’s life, her mother. She was largely a passive figure in Noreen’s childhood, something she grapples with in the book. The relationship between the two is by no means simple. But as they journey through Orkney together, her mother begins to open up, and their relationship seems to strengthen. I ask Noreen about her relationship with her mother since the book’s publishing. It was a huge step for her, she says, she can now look at her mother and say, ‘I don’t understand you, but I love you.’ This motto has had a far-reaching effect in Noreen’s life. This is what’s important, she asserts – to be able to stand with someone even if you can’t relate to them. It is a message of hope that Noreen conveys, both in her book and in our conversation, of solidarity through struggle. Our lives are dominated by extremity – of emotions, of opinions and voices, of events – so I would encourage every student to read A Flat Place, and to consider flatness for a while.
