I have made many a faux pas when it come to hilly places. Mountainous terrains. When I was 18 I solo-travelled around New Zealand for three months, and upon my arrival in Christchurch I was admiring the mountains, only to be scolded with a “those are hills”. When I came to Bath in 2013 to be interviewed for a PhD position (spoiler alert: I got said PhD), my would-be advisor suggested I’d take the bus from the train station to campus. I’m glad I did, because although google maps told me it was a doable walk, my brain did not register Bathwick Hill might not be a flat surface. And yes, it’s right there in the name. Since living in Helsinki I have had to also change my cycling habits; it is no longer just about the shortest route from A to B, inclines also need to be taken into account. The biggest incline I encountered as a child in Amsterdam, in contrast, would have been a bridge over a canal.
A Flat Place is my first ARC as I was kindly gifted access through NetGalley. I do find it much more difficult to take pictures of e-books as physical books tend to be less reflective.
I was strongly drawn to Noreen Masud’s A Flat Place because I am from the Netherlands. There is a bit in the book where Masud talks about an island that is 8 meters above sea level, which she was concerned about. As a Dutch person, I was impressed it was a whole eight meters above sea level. Amsterdam is two meters below sea level. The Netherlands exists because of the process of drooglegging, literally the laying dry of land. I find the word reclamation, the reclaiming of land, as it is described in English a bit aggressive, particularly the ‘re’ part, as in my opinion it is just some could old fashioned claiming.
Masud takes us on a journey of flat places, predominantly situated in the UK but also to the flat fields of her youth in Pakistan. She is born to a Scottish mum and a Pakistani father and various landscapes form the backdrop of her youth. Masud comments on the fact that she barely speaks Urdu, despite having lived in Pakistan for many years. Yet her father seemed to assume Masud and her siblings would just pick up the language by osmosis. As someone who teaches Dutch-Finnish children the Dutch language, I find it interesting how fathers typically seem to think their children will magically master a language, without any work or effort (and they also seem to overestimate their children’s language skills). A Flat Place shows how language skills, and the lack thereof, influence a sense of belonging and a sense of self. While Masud might not have the words to describe her thoughts and feelings in Urdu, she eloquently and movingly describes her connection with level spaces in English.
The absence-presence of her father throughout the book speaks volumes. Masud reveals enough to show that he was not a pleasant figure. He banished Masud at age 17, which is one of the reasons she returns to Scotland with her mum. After this move he is predominantly absent in her life. Her father died of a heart-attack a month after she turned 30, yet his death alters the relationship she has with him, as the dead are somehow more difficult to ignore than the living.
“For the first months after he died I couldn’t bear the thought that he was in the earth. Not that I felt sad for him. It seemed appropriate, perhaps overdue. But in life I had been able to put him aside, in death he suddenly existed very physically in the world. The ground had swallowed him up, but he was still there, all bones and eyes and muscle, newly made into an object that wouldn’t go away.”
— A Flat Place (Masud, 2023, xxii)
In A Flat Place Masud introduces a form of PTSD that I personally never heard of: cPTSD, or complex PTSD. There is not a singular event that points to the cause of Masud’s post-traumatic stress, but an accumulation of tensions and circumstances. Masud cleverly depicts this in her book as well, as a reader I was waiting for the ‘big reveal’ of trauma, but as there is not one main event, the tension just lingers and lies just underneath the surface.
This is also beautifully exemplified by Masud’s fascination with flat places: there is not one big element that stands out, there is no mountain catching the eye, not a skyscraper that directs the point of view. Instead, as an observer you need to watch carefully, look closely around a space to discover its beauty. But just because there is not an instant ‘eyecatcher’ does not mean a landscape is less valuable, interesting or fascinating. You just need to use your eyes.
“If mountains are poetry, flatlands are prose: cookbooks or technical manuals, practical but dull. ”
— A flat place (Masud, 2023, xiii)
Flatlands have a bad reputation and Masud is here to set the record straight. I am all for it. Thinking of the landscape of my youth, Dutch meadows and fields fill me with a great sense of joy and nostalgia. But while no-one ever really has a go at a mountain for taking up too much space, people can be immensely critical of flatlands, incorrectly labelling them as ‘boring’. The thesaurus also betrays a prejudice towards flatness as suggested words are ‘featureless’, ‘monotonous’, ‘boring’, ‘dull’, ‘tedious’ and ‘’uninteresting’. I hope readers that have picked up A Flat Place will transform their thinking and embrace horizontal landscapes, smooth surfaces and level terrains. Their lives will be all the richer for it.
Noreen Masud is a Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literature at the University of Bristol, and an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker. Her research covers all kinds of bases: flatness, spivs, puppets, leftovers, earworms, footnotes, rhymes, hymns, surprises, folk songs, colours, superstitions. Find out more about Noreen Masud here.
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