In the fens the pylons held up the empty sky, stopping it from collapsing on the land. They kept the flat from the flat, making a wide and soaring space through which I could walk. [loc. 1053]
An exploration, in beautiful lucid prose, of the author's complex PTSD (cPTSD): her difficult childhood in Pakistan; being disowned (along with two of her sisters, and her Scottish mother) by her Pakistani father; the intersectionality of racism, mental illness and misogyny. The word 'enjoyment' is not really appropriate, but I did find Masud's accounts of her visits to flat places (Orkney, Morecambe Sands, Orford Ness, the Fens) refreshing and evocative. I particularly liked her description of Orford Ness as 'a landscape absorbed, purely, in being itself.' And I have been thinking, and writing, about the question she raises: 'how do we make stories about flat landscapes? Is there anything at all to say about a space in which nothing important seems to happen?'
Her childhood in Pakistan -- staying indoors, doing nothing, seeing nobody apart from her extended family -- resonated with me: so did her introversion. Describing the 2020 lockdowns, she writes 'I realized that human contact really did make other people feel better. It wasn’t like a beam of blistering heat, only tolerable for short stretches'. And the undercurrent of cPTSD (rooted, here, in repeated trauma and unreliable parental figures) winds through the whole of the book, changing and becoming more manageable through therapy and through conversations with her mother.
Masud's excursions to the flat places -- evoking, for her, the flat fields she used to pass in Lahore, which seemed to offer freedom -- are fascinating: but it's the psychological aspects of A Flat Place that will stay with me for longer.
So: the flat place is not Pakistan. Pakistan is not the place of trauma, of lack, of pain. The flat place is what happens when one’s reality is at odds with that of everyone else. When one’s truth comes starkly into contact with a world which denies it. Which cannot see it. [loc. 3201]
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