This book feels haunting and like echoes and feels like the way marshland and bog winds feel. The landscapes Masud writes about feel like they are coming through the pages of the book. It reminded me of a feeling, that there is a point where pain and emptiness are so overwhelming, it feels more like wind echoing in a hollow tree, than something alive and within you. 

The writing and emotions are intense yet detached and matches the back and forth of her descriptions of alternating between flashbacks and grief and derealization. Masud’s life experience is very different from my own, but as someone also with CPTSD, the emotions, and descriptions of derealization and relations to narratives struck me to the core. Some aspects felt similar to the book “What My Bones Know” by Stephanie Foo. 

The book alternates between Masud’s exploration of moors in England and Scotland, and the history of them over centuries, and memories of her unusual childhood in Pakistan and her relationship with dysfunctional family, and her journey to England. It was originally just about the flat landscapes and reflection, but became a book of processing developmental trauma. 

I loved this book but I’m gonna need to read some fun and silly books soon. It is beautiful writing but the mood is serious and somber. 

 

“Someone donates to Winston’s Wish but looks the other way from refugees; someone fights for white women’s rights by not for those of Black women; someone donates to anti-racist groups but buys prawns farmed by modern slaves. Everyone makes deals around the humanity of other people, and how consistently they allow that humanity to be present to them. That’s how people make bearable homes in hostile worlds. My father was no exception. So my only issue a personal one. In the deal that my father happened to make with his world, it was me who didn’t count as human.” – pg 22 

On derealization: “the world becomes distant and two-dimensional: a ribbon of time, where all moments exist at once, with colours, and shapes, and mouths opening and closing harmlessly. People become blurry, and I have a strong sense that they are not actually there.” – pg 30 

 

“Staring out at the murky landscape beyond, where things moved and whispered and shifted, and one could never know for sure what was happening, or how one was implicated. Me on another island now, a wretched whelp by myself, wrapped in my own cramping body. Not knowing how to explain myself, wrapped in my own cramping body. Not knowing how to explain to myself why I still felt the chicken wire closing around me. 

The fens bound the possible and the impossible, the everyday and the fantastic, into one inscrutable plane.” Pg 39 

“I’d rather be grief-stricken than feel unreal.” – pg 58 

 

“We tell stories to make them visible. Or we tell stories so that we don’t have to look at them any longer.” – pg 78 

“The flat place is the place of grief, but also the place of the real. It’s real because of that grief: it displays itself starkly, and you are beside yourself in the face of what can’t be denied. But at least you are beside yourself. You have that consolation. You curl your fingers into a fist and pretend you are holding a hand.” – pg 91 

 

On British history: “Two things rose to the top of my mind as I researched the human zoo in Newcastle. First: People of colour have always been here, in Britain’s flat places, living and struggling. Violence and oppression form the bedrock of the landscape that I recognize and move through. Second: People have always been protesting. It’s just that no one has been listening.” -pg 133 

On loving a cat: “Cats do not understand smiles. So Morvern didn’t care whether I smiled or not. What mattered to Morvern was my presence and my hands and my voice. My face could stay dull and expressionless, unless she broke a real tender smile out of me by putting both paws on my peg and leaning up to see what I was doing. That was a gift which gave itself to her, effortlessly. If I was feeling especially numb and distant, words choked up in my throat or my head caught in the tide, all I needed to do was chirrup back to her chirrup, with a kind of brief hum in my throat. During lockdown we talked like this for hours, chirping back and forth….Mostly what Morvern did was to come and find me, wherever I was sitting in the flat, and to curl her tail around her feet and hunch into a ball, near me but facing away. I did some research. This meant, the internet said, that she was keeping watch for predators for both of us. This mean that she loved me. I loved her too. Unsmilingly, facing away, drifting in neutral. I loved her so much.” -pgs 138-140 

 

On British colonialism trauma: “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….This violent, hateful world is as real in Britain as it is in Pakistan. It happens in Britain, right now, as well as in the places Britian left in pieces when it had finished playing out its imperial fantasies. But Britain still won’t let itself know that.” – pg 204 

 

“And I don’t want to stop feeling the way I do. I don’t want to give up knowing, in this very visceral way, what I know about people and what they can do to you. About countries and what they can do to you. I don’t want to every be wholly relaxed, wholly at home, in a world of flowing fresh water built on the parched pain of others. The world itches, and so it should. When there is a truth which affirms itself insistently in a way that has no end and no resolution, when it receives no responsiveness or recognition, and has nowhere to site itself but in itself, entrenched in its own starkness- that’s the flat place. 

Cassandra, screaming, was in the flat place. Or rather, she entered it when the screaming, finally, stopped.” – page 207