Noreen Masud: “Whether or not language contains me, I still exist”
The author on the fundamental impossibility of words, colonial trauma and being outside
Hi, welcome back to Mixed Messages! This week I’m speaking to author Noreen Masud, who is of mixed British and Pakistani heritage. Noreen’s memoir, A Flat Place, explores her love of flat landscapes, wide open plains that mirror her own inner flat place. After experiencing childhood trauma, these environments provide an uneasy solace for Noreen, representing both an inheritance and a dispossession. Shortlisted for the first Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction and the Jhalak Prize, it’s a book unlike any other. Read her story below.
How do you define your background?
I'm British and Pakistani. My dad is Pakistani, and our ancestral base is in Shopian in Kashmir. On my mother's side I'm sort of Scottish, but my grandmother was English, which is why I have this ridiculous RP accent. My mother got her mother's accent, even though she grew up in Scotland, and I got her accent, even though I grew up in Pakistan.
Words are tools of communication. I try not to grieve or get caught up in the fact that our bread and butter words can never convey the whole of our experience – that's a fundamental impossibility. So I say mixed-race British Pakistani, and I know and my friends know that there's more to the story than that.
You’ve had a unique upbringing – even though you grew up in Pakistan, you were kept quite separate from Pakistani culture. Do you feel connected to your cultural heritage?
My father was a real Anglophile, as well as paranoid and controlling. We weren't allowed outside the house very much aside from for school.
Pakistan is one of the few countries in the world I think that’s founded on the basis of religious affiliation, so what it means to feel or be Pakistani is really complicated. Are all Muslims Pakistani? Is it just those who follow a certain branch of Islam? There’s so much intolerance and state-sponsored hatred, I think it comes from this post-colonial anxiety about who belongs in Pakistan, so I don’t know if anyone feels that they do.
Growing up, there was a lot of confusion about how I understood myself. As a very young child, I thought whiteness was the same as Christianity and Brownness was Islam.
When you see South Asian culture today, does it feel like something you can be a part of?
I have these bursts of nostalgia and pain. My father hated weddings and social performances, so we hardly ever went, but they’re so important in the culture. When I first came to the UK to a little town in Scotland, it was quite rare to encounter other Pakistanis. Sometimes when I hear Urdu, it feels like something that is mine but at the same time something I’m forever exiled from and have no right to.
The way we left Pakistan feels like a kind of rejection and exile. My Pakistani passport has now expired and I can't get it renewed without a signature, either from my father or my husband. I’m a gay woman and my father disowned me two weeks before I turned 16. I’m also down as Muslim in that passport, which means I’d need to declare my belief that Ahmadis aren’t Muslims. It’s a real state-sponsored act of hate that I wouldn’t want to participate in.
I lost my belief in any God when I was 15. At that time, apostasy was technically punishable by death. It creates a crisis of belonging to Muslims – if you don't believe in Islam, how can you be Pakistani? So there's a sense of Pakistan not wanting me. But you will always want the country that rejected you.
It’s an impossible question, but do you think you would have felt differently if both your parents were Pakistani?
Definitely. I think my mother would have felt more confident to push back against certain of my father’s edicts. I think that she would have participated in and enjoyed Pakistani culture. I think we would have been stared at a lot less, felt less like outsiders. I think I’d have learned Urdu. It was only possible to implement my father’s Anglophilic passions in the way he did because my mother was British.
Has your sense of self shifted over time?
Growing up is wonderful. What a delight to be in my 30s and start to understand where categories mean something and where they don’t, what categories are important and where they’re merely a useful shorthand and that we don’t need to be the sum of our categories. We can exceed those categories in ways that do or don't need articulation. We can have a private life, things that exist without being acknowledged by language.
The colonial logics of this world are impossible to bear. When I was growing up, the question of ‘am I British or Pakistani’ will so quickly turn into the question of ‘am I the oppressor or the oppressed?’ You oscillate between the guilt of being half part of a culture that has created colonial wrongs, but also feeling like you don’t benefit from any of that.
I know that flat places are calming for you, quieting some of your mental noise. Do you think being mixed added to that noise?
I would think so. So many of the difficulties in my early life, like questions about how we value cultures and colonial trauma, would have been easier to handle with no skin in the game.
How do you want the conversation around mixedness to develop?
It doesn't really trouble me when I find myself excluded by language. Language is my job, it’s what I teach at university, specifically poetry. I explore the ambiguity of language, where language generously accommodates and where language generously slips.
I get a pleasure from language which I wouldn't have said when I was younger. I know what language can and can't do. I know that whether or not language contains me, I still exist. What it allows me to do, in that space between myself and language’s outer edges, that is where I will make art. Art is something which contains what language cannot. At its best, it feels like a glorious secret, something that's just mine.
That shorthand that people use every day is nothing to do with us, it’s just people being lazy, which is to say people being human. A generous discourse might be one that describes rather than sums up, which describes the particularity of individual people.
What’s the best thing about being mixed for you?
You end up knowing more. It’s not true of everybody, but you have the opportunity to know more, if you want to, and be outside a little bit. Being totally inside something can be claustrophobic as well as cosy.
How would you sum up your mixed experience in one word?
Outside. I know that sounds like a boring, sad word, but sometimes it's nice to be outside. That's where the fresh air is.
Buy A Flat Place here. Next week, I’ll be speaking to Red Eye actor Jemma Moore. Subscribe to get Mixed Messages in your inbox on Monday.
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Mixed Messages is a weekly exploration of the mixed-race experience, from me, Isabella Silvers. My mom is Punjabi (by way of East Africa) and my dad is white British, but finding my place between these two cultures hasn’t always been easy. That’s why I started Mixed Messages, where each week I’ll speak to a prominent mixed voice to delve into what it really feels like to be mixed.
“Outside.. that’s where the fresh air is”. Loved this! 🤎🤎🔥🔥
I’m intrigued by the connection between the inner and outer landscape - and have just bought bookto reflect on! Thank-you! Penn x