I brought Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place: Moving through Empty Landscapes, Naming Complex Trauma with me on this trip because a) it’s been on my desk for ages, and b) I live in a flat place (or so I thought, but not according to Masud’s use of that term), and c) I heard that it’s a book about walking. I’m happy I did. A Flat Place is a beautifully written, thoughtful articulation of living with complex post-traumatic stress disorder (cPTSD). That’s not all this book is about, but it’s the beginning of a description of the territory it explores.
For Masud, literal flat places—she lives in UK, and the flat places she visits are the fens of Cambridgeshire, Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, Newcastle Moor, and Orkney—evoke both her interior emotional landscape and a place she regularly saw but never visited in Lahore, Pakistan, where she grew up. That flat place, a large field near her childhood home, occupies a huge place in her memory. It is, she explains, paraphrasing Virginia Woolf, the base that her life stands upon, mostly because it was open and apparently unrestricted, two qualities that were absent from her life. Her father, a doctor, kept the family isolated from outsiders. He was perhaps paranoid, perhaps narcissistic—language Masud doesn’t use—and definitely angry, emotionally distant, threatening, and potentially violent. A raging man with firearms is frightening. Masud describes him as “a megalomaniac and a fantasist.” Her mother had experienced childhood trauma and may have been raped by her husband before their marriage; she could not protect her daughters from him. The rest of the household—it wasn’t a nuclear family; her grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins lived in the tiny house—were just as emotionally disturbed. Her grandmother, for instance, was emotionally scarred by the years of turmoil caused by the Partition of British India into Hindu and Muslim states in 1948 and “married off at sixteen to a man who hardly spoke.” She once told Masud that hugging a baby will turn it into a weakling. Masud describes her Pakistani grandfather as “half mad.” Her other grandfather, who was Scots, took his own life. The trauma on both sides of her family goes back generations, and for her Pakistani relatives, it’s part of the legacy of colonialism. Masud is infuriated by the blithe acceptance by white Britons of the trauma colonized and racialized people are simply supposed to accept. Nobody in her family is evil, just damaged, and even her father has his good points, but the result of the chaos and coldness, for Masud, is cPTSD.
Unlike regular PTSD, which typically results from some clearly marked horror, cPTSD is the result of many, even daily, small traumatic events, like the ones Masud experienced with her father. The trauma, following psychiatrist Judith Herman, is prolonged and repeated. But, because those events seem so minor, people with cPTSD often don’t understand how they could have had such an effect. But Masud was shaped by those daily events, the chronic lovelessness, the ongoing fear and rejection. When she was sixteen, her father told his wife and children to leave. Her older sister had committed some offence at university in Europe—a photograph was sent, and although we don’t get the details, it may have been sexually compromising in some way—and for whatever reason, he blamed them. I wonder if the sister was with another woman in the photo; Masud herself is queer, or seems to be. She saw him once more, eight years later. When he died, she felt little.
But she usually feels little. She has friends but finds intimate connections difficult. Her flat emotional life, her suicidal thoughts, suggests depression, but she has other symptoms: physical pain; stomach problems; derealization, a dissociative disorder; chronic freezing and fawning responses to stressful situations—which, for Masud and her strained nervous system, can be just about anything.
How does all of this relate to flat places? They have “always given meaning to a world that made no sense to me,” she explains. “Flat places have always given me a way to love myself.” They “quieter the thing in me that’s always crying,” she continues. The contradiction she sees in them—between everything being visible and there being nothing to see—sends a message that’s impossible to decode. “Flat landscapes ask us to tolerate not knowing things,” Masud tells us. “Not knowing what is beneath the surface, whether anything is. A flat landscape’s combination of complete exposure and complete withholding asks us to accept that there are things we’ll never understand.” By presenting us with this uncertainty, flat places “help us to reimagine what it means for something to ‘matter’”—and, for her, “they provide solace for someone who doesn’t experience conventionally heightened feeling.” They give her permission “to be numb, to be without feeling or desire.”
That’s a hard way to live, and in part Masud’s walks through flat places help her become less numb. And, in part Masud’s, they just provide her with the reassurance she describes. Even if she doesn’t feel emotions strongly, her writing is beautiful, absolutely stunning. I opened the book at random and found this paragraph about the Newcastle Moor, which I find lovely:
The cows were sometimes on one side of South Nuns Moor, sometimes on the other. People say that cows lie down when rain is coming. But the moor cows lay down, and stood up, and I found out that neither meant anything, in terms of the weather. Once I found three of them arranged in a kind of triskelion shape, tail to tail and gazing implacably out across the moor. “Hello, gorgeous!” I catcalled as I passed, and they said nothing.
The phrase “in terms of the weather” leaves open the possibility that the cows’ actions might have some other meaning, perhaps one known only to them—the “not knowing” she finds reassuring. And who hasn’t spoken to an animal or bird as they passed? I do that all the time, and while that might be unusual, I doubt that it is. Plus the word “triskelion”! The whole book is full of such writing. Masud is an award-winning scholar of twentieth-century literature, and her prose suggests that she might win other kinds of prizes, too.
A Flat Place is an original book that brings place and psychology and walking together. If you’re interested in any of those things, check it out.