Noreen Masud interview: ‘Our only safety, and salvation, is in other people’

The flat, empty landscapes (of Lahore, Orford Ness, Morecambe Bay, Orkney, the Moors of Newcastle and the Fens) she traversed become a metaphor for the voids left by trauma, the unspoken wounds that scar the soul. Through evocative descriptions of vast plains, she captures the stark beauty of these seemingly bleak places, revealing their hidden depths and the solace they offer. With raw honesty, Masud unearths the fragments of her past, the buried memories and unspoken truths that have shaped her life. She endeavours to put a name to the complex trauma that has haunted her since her childhood in Lahore. In this interview to The Federal, she talks about the personal agency that was denied to her, memory, melancholy, and the process of ‘putting her world into words’. Excerpts:

The roots of your complex trauma lay in your life in Pakistan and your strained relationship with your father; you write that Pakistan was a ‘smear’ on your mind which would never come off. How did your exploration of your relationship with your father contribute to your understanding of identity and personal agency?

Personal agency is an interesting question. In my family, I was not supposed to have personal agency, really. I was meant to reflect my father’s sense of himself back to him, and shore up his identity. So that was my initial source of rage: that I was denied a personal agency which I wanted so very badly.

But there is a broader question about personal agency. Historically, and culturally, none of us have much personal agency. We are all trapped inside systems which steer us, and confine our choices, far more than we would like to admit. If we admit it, we’d have to admit that we are unhappy — so most people pretend that they are totally in charge of their own lives. But there is something very true and freeing about saying that the very idea of personal agency as an absolute good, and a right, is quite a recent invention, historically. And that only the tiniest, tiniest fraction of people in this world — the richest, the most powerful — have any control over how their lives go.

The vast majority are forced to live and die under the thumb of landowners, governments, militias, weather, colonial whims, the exigencies of poverty. It seems to me that solidarity with people who suffer in this way is more important, really, than minute questions around my own personal agency. Of course, I experience limitations of my personal agency as a tragedy. But it is an absolutely everyday tragedy. It is universal. I must never forget that, even as I permit myself to feel pain about it.

Memory keeps us all tethered to our pasts. How did your experiences in both Pakistan and Britain influence your perception of memory, particularly in the context of trauma and healing?

I have a memory which seems either to be too good, or not good enough. I remember things that others don’t seem to, or don’t want to, and that discrepancy causes us pain. But there’s a lot I also don’t remember. Or I remember it in a form which could never have happened (memories, for instance, that I discuss in the book — men with the heads of monkeys, and so on). My experiences really emphasised the unreliability and selectivity of memory to me. Not as a tragedy, really, but as something I try to be matter-of-fact about: there is no such thing as a ‘perfect memory’ of something. If it was perfect, it wouldn’t be memory. We all have a different version of ‘what happened’. So the best thing we can do is to be compassionate with one another about our differing memories. After reading the book, my mother said something which meant a lot to me: ‘I don’t remember that happening, but I’m so sorry that you do and that it caused you pain.’ That was a beautiful thing to say. It was all I needed — that she acknowledged my world to be as real as any other world.

And I also think a lot about historical memory. In both Pakistan and Britain, we tiptoe around historical memory. Britain doesn’t want to remember its guilt — the barbarities it committed during its colonial regimes. Pakistan also doesn’t want to remember its guilt from the massacres in 1971, for instance. And yet both countries are obsessed with memory, with memorialisation. They retread their preferred parts of their histories obsessively, as a reaction to their deep, almost unconscious knowledge that there are other parts they can’t bear to look at. But there is no possibility of healing in a world where historical wrongs aren’t even acknowledged, let alone expiated.

Your writing often evokes a sense of melancholy, yet it is also infused with a quiet resilience. What did writing about personal pain entail?

Writing this book, I felt an immense sense of my responsibility to my wider community. Writing as a woman from a Muslim background, I was very aware of the narratives which too often recur in English-language publishing: of the global south as a site of pain, fear and abuse, and the global north as salvation from that. That is not a true story, for me. My suffering was caused by my father’s Anglophilia, his sense of superiority to the rest of Pakistani society, which was driven by the inferiority complexes which colonialism has left baked into our institutions. So I had to be exquisitely clear about the real story here: not the story that a lazy Western reader might hear if I wasn’t careful, because it’s what they’re used to (and in fact what they often want to hear).

What that sense of responsibility did, I think, was to help me put my pain into context. I suffered pain at my father’s hands — he, in turn, suffered pain at the broader hands of a structurally racist world. Pakistan was not a place of safety for me — but that was informed by historical forces, which in turn meant that Britain was not a place of safety for me either. So it was not possible to be glib about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in this book. My pain had to look above and below it at every turn, and understand where it stood. I tried to give the pain space to exist, but alongside my sense of its historical situatedness. I think what helped me to do this was my ethic of description: to simply describe, rather than rushing to judgment. To allow things to sit side by side, rather than wrapping them up into a single conclusion. So there is pain, plenty of it. But it’s a knowing pain. And I think you achieve that by being as honest as you possibly can be, about pain’s nastinesses and pettinesses and horrible thoughts — in the end, that turns, I think, into compassion for oneself and for others.

How did your background in poetry influence your approach to writing this memoir, and what role do you believe language plays in the healing process?

I am obsessed with language. It’s the water in which I swim. Poetry gave me a lifebelt to hold on to when I was a young teenager in Pakistan: I memorised poem after poem, and recited them in my head when the world around me was too much to bear. My memoir gropes after experiences for which we have no ready-made words or tropes — that is the exact business of poetry. So my background in poetry, as a literature academic, informed me very strongly indeed. In both my academic writing and my creative writing, I don’t want to write a sentence which isn’t enlivening and interesting — sometimes it might be ugly and awkward, because sometimes those are the forces which lie at the heart of beauty — and sometimes it might be smooth and invisible. Sentence by sentence, I want my writing to have texture, and I want to have as much control as possible over the effect of a sentence: its rhythm, its weight, its rise and fall.

With a story like this one, what is unsaid, or just dallied upon, is as important as what it’s said. Poetry, again, provides us with a set of tools for that. I don’t know about healing: this is less a story about healing than one in which one’s unhealed self comes to feel more coherent. But I have found it extremely powerful to put my world into words: to give it form, and thus a physical existence as a book. That does a lot for one’s sanity, I think.

The book explores themes of exile and belonging. How did your experiences of displacement shape your sense of home and identity, both in the physical and emotional sense?

My experiences of displacement gave me, I think, a sense that we worry too much about questions of home and identity. The book opens with a quotation from Judith Butler’s Giving an Account of Oneself: ‘To say, as some do, that the self must be narrated, that only the narrated self can be intelligible and survive, is to say that we cannot survive with an unconscious.’ Now that sentence means many things to me. One of the things it means is a reminder that we cannot know everything about ourselves. Any narration we have about ourselves will only ever be partial. We all have unconsciouses. We all have forces operating within us, and are operated upon by forces that we can never fully know or understand. This reminds me that any ‘identity’ is only an invented thing, a compromise: something which feels absolute, but which is in fact just a product of our cultural and historical moment.

So, I try not to think much about my identity, or indeed my home. My response to ideas of my identity is the same as my response to ideas of home: that our only safety, our only salvation, is in other people — no matter how difficult or how terrifying they might feel. We must find ways to be together with other people. That necessity has, in recent decades, been marginalised in favour of these sometimes rather navel-gazing questions: ‘Who am I? Where do I belong?’ The answer to both, I think, is: with other people. I am a product of other people, in a network with them. I belong with other people. And that’s very difficult for me, because other people are scary to me. So I must go on being brave, and go on trying.

A Flat Place covers a vast emotional and geographical terrain. How did you decide on the scope of the book, and were there any aspects of your experience that you felt were important to leave out or explore further in future work?

In terms of the scope of the book — the landscapes I chose, and so on — I was guided by my sense of what was available and made sense. I was pleased to be able to include landscapes from different parts of the UK — Scotland, north-east England, north-west England, east England and south England. I do omit a key detail: the reason why my father disowned me, and why my mother and sisters and I came to the UK. I talk about this more in the book, and have nothing to add, so won’t go into more detail here. And no — I don’t think there’s anything I want to discuss in further work. I feel quite at peace with what I have achieved in this book.