Meatless

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Meatless Days
Sara Suleri
Post-Colonial Literature in English

Introduction:
Postcolonial literature refers to writing from regions of the world that were once colonies of
European powers. The term refers to a very broad swath of writing in many languages, but the
emphasis in this class (in an English department) is on writing in English. The writers in this
course come from quite different backgrounds, including Africa, South Asia, and the Caribbean,
but they struggle with some similar issues, chief among them being the legacy of colonialism –
of European dominance.
Postcolonial literature is of particular importance partly because much of it is stylistically
original and different from earlier European literature, (one thinks of the number of
postcolonial writers who have received prestigious literary prizes in recent years). But
postcolonial writing is also important because the texts – as literature – have the potential
provide perspectives on the world that are unavailable from textbooks and the news media. The
best postcolonial literature aims to tell good, entertaining stories while seriously attempting to
represent some of the most troubling conflicts and injustices imaginable.
Postcolonial writers attempt to develop their own literary voices in regions of the world
that may have been described in the colonial era as “primitive” or “savage” – where literature
and culture were considered absent or somehow illegitimate. The larger project of moving past
this colonial legacy, what we might call the “decolonization” of writing, brings up a wide array of
themes, each of which we will address in turn. To begin with, there are issues that affect writing
itself, such as choice of language. Many postcolonial writers choose to write in the languages of
the former colonial power (i.e., English, French, Spanish, Portuguese), though this can be a
source of serious disagreement. Moreover, much postcolonial writing is highly sensitive
to how language is used, and by whom. There is a serious consideration of the role of dialects,
patois – the intentional, potentially liberatory use of what one African writer calls “rotten
English.”
Relatedly, postcolonial writers are compelled to find suitable and original shapes in
which to represent their particular cultural experiences and historical perspectives. The novel-
form is a European construct – is it malleable enough to tell the story of villagers in Zimbabwe,
Punjab, or Trinidad? One answer to this problem, a mode of writing known as magical realism,
blends traditional storytelling practices (some of which may be oral) with western modes of
narration. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children is one of the best examples of the deployment
of the magical realist style. We will discuss each of these issues of form as we progress; we will
also refer to some critical and theoretical texts that map out these and other formal concerns.
In this course literature, politics, and social theory will be inextricable for the simple
reason that the texts themselves are intensely concerned with social and political problems. The
postcolonial experience has been extremely violent and complex, with new forms of oppression
and violence often replacing the old structures. The past 50 odd years have seen innumerable
conflicts around the definition of the nation in the postcolonial world. Other conflicts have
circulated around issues such as ethnicity, race, religion, and cultural difference. And nearly
Facebook Page MA English University of Sargodha Pakistan

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everywhere are negotiations of gender and sexuality, which are in the foreground in virtually
everything we will read. Responding to these problems requires a good deal of particular
historical and cultural knowledge relevant to given issues or struggles, and I will encourage
members of the class to pursue and develop knowledge related to given texts (for example, Sara
Suleri’s Meatless Days might provoke research on the history of Pakistan).
Finally, we will talk quite often about diasporization and displacement. Because they
often express ideas that are controversial in their home countries, many postcolonial writers
find themselves in exile, sometimes in the capitals of the former Imperial regime (a surprising
number of the writers in this course currently live in London). Others are members of
immigrant populations who have moved from postcolonial locales to European and American
metropolitan centers, in search of economic opportunity. Yet others (especially Caribbean
writers like Naipaul and Phillips) are descendents of people who were displaced against their
will – slaves and indentured laborers. As a result of all of these factors, displacement and exile
are central themes in postcolonial writing.
Novels Based on Partition

A number of novels in the Indian sub-continent have been written on the theme of the Partition
of India. This unforgettable historical moment has been captured as horrifying by the novelists
like Khushwant Singh in Train to Pakistan (1956), A Bend in the Ganges (1964) by Manohar
Malgaonkar, Attia Hosain's Sunlight on a Broken Column(1961) , Rajan's The Dark
Dancer, Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man, Chaman Nahal'sAzadi and Bhisham
Sahni's Tamas. These novels examine the inexorable logic of Partition as an offshoot of
fundamentalism and fanaticism sparked by hardening communal attitudes. These novels belong
to t;he genre of the partition novel. These novels effectively and realistically depict the
"vulnerability of human understanding and life, caused by the throes of Partition which
relentlessly divided friends," as Novy Kapadia observes. She opines that throughout history,
fanatics as well as ideologies, pushed to the emotional brink of daring their lives, have taken the
plunge, which has triggered off a chain reaction of rigid mental fixations and attitudes. Bapsi
Sidhwa's novels are narratives of political and moral upheaval resulting in a mass trauma which
continues to haunt the minds of generations. Generally, in the novels of Sidhwa, there are
people from all walks of life and from all communities. They are Hindus, Muslims, Christians,
Sikhs and Parsis. The event of Partition has been depicted through the painful experiences of
these ethnic groups. Novy Kapadia explicitly explains the situation as: "With a morbid sense of
humour, Bapsi Sidhwa reveals how the violence of Partition has serrated the roots of people of
different communities, irrespective of ideology, friendship and rational ideas. In such a
depiction, Bapsi Sidhwa resembles the horror portrayed by William Golding in The Lord of the
Flies(1954). Golding indicated that there is a thin line between good and evil in human beings
and it is only the structures of civilizations which prevent the lurking evil from being rampant.
At the end of the novel The Lord of the Flies boys of Jack's tribe like barbarians got a sadistic
delight in hunting Ralph. The situation is saved as a naval officer reaches the island to stop
brutality ... Lenny's destruction of the doll also has allegorical significance. It shows how even a
young girl is powerless to stem the tide of surging violence within, thereby implying that grown
up fanatics enmeshed in communal frenzy are similarly trapped into brutal violence.' It becomes
obvious that there is no solution to communal holocausts except struggle and resistance to
communalism in a collective effort. There are no winners in these riots and the communal
holocaust devours everything that supports life-sustaining principles. It presents a scene of Holi,
not of colours but of blood in the living inferno. The Partition of India proved to be the greatest

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communal divide in the Indian sub-continent. In fact, the novel Ice-Candy-Man is a Pakistani
version of the Partition just like Khushwant Singh's Train to Pakistan.
In the fictional world of Ice-Candy-Man,the readers are introduced to a plethora of
characters from different communities and different walks of life. "Sidhwa's novel written at a
period of history when communal and ethnic violence threaten disintegration of the sub-
continent, is an apt warning of the dangers of communal frenzy. Bapsi Sidhwa shows thatduring
communal strife, sanity and human feelings are forgotten." In fact, riots anywhere in the world
follow the common pattern where distrust and rumour reign everywhere which leads to bloodshed
and terror. Novy Kapadia rightly observes:
With a sprinkling of humour, parody and allegory Bapsi Sidhwa conveys a sinister warning
of the dangers of compromising with religious obscurantism and fundamentalism of all
categories. Otherwise a certain historical inevitability marks this historical process. Though her
novel is about the traumas of Partition, Bapsi Sidhwa like Amitav Ghosh reveals that communal
riots are contemporaneous and that 'those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat
it.'
Similar messages have been forwarded by novelists like Bhisham Sahni, Khushwant Singh,
Manohar Malgaonkar, Amitav Ghosh, Rajan in their novels based on the theme of Partition. While
depicting the heart-rending saga of Partition, these novelists have also tried to adhere to its
historical background. In The Shadow lines, Amitav Ghosh depicts Hindu-Muslim riots in Bengal
in 1964 which soon spread to erstwhile East Pakistan. Amitav Ghosh shows "how different
cultures and communities are becoming antagonistic to a point of no return. Hence in The
Shadow Lines he effectively uses political allegory to stress the need for a syncretic civilization to
avoid a communal holocaust."
Attia Hosain's novel Sunlight on a Broken Column (1961) is another novel about the
communal divide and riots. Attia Hosain depicts the trauma of the Partition and communal riots
through her narrator-heroine Laila.The action of the novel is revealed through the memories of
her Taluqdar family disintegrating. Laila does not glorify her Muslim past or traditional customs.
Attia shows her heroine Laila making a departure from tradition and customs. She rejects
dogmatism and epicureanism. The opening pages of the novel show Lailain an environment which
is conservative. Laila's cousin married in Pakistan returns to Hasanpur. They are engaged in a hot
discussion on Muslim culture and traditions. It turns out to be a serious difference of opinion.
Laila later recalls this experience with a sigh: "In the end, inevitably we querrelled, and though
we made up before we parted I realized that the ties which had kept families together for centuries
had been loosened beyond repair." After the violence of the Partition, Laila moves around her
plundered home. Later, she vividly recalls those shocking sights with a pang in her heart. She
walks and strolls through the rooms of her ancestral home 'Ashiana', but she does not want to
return. She has been fed up with the feudal order and now she wants to be Ameer's wife. She
experiences the expansion of her limited self after discovering her new identity. Novy Kapadia
compares the experience of trauma of Partition of Laila with Lenny (Ice-Candy-Man): "She comes
to detest dogmatism, either in the name of religion or radicalism. Her views and perspective of
life developed after intense personal struggle enable Laila to tackle the loss of her husband Ameer
and the trauma of Partition. So both narrator-heroines, Lenny and Laila react against communal
responses and the horrors of violence. The mature Laila rationalizes against communal tension
whereas the young Lenny instinctively reacts against the horrors of communal violence."
All the novelists writing about, communal violence agree that it is no easy job to find out a
solution to the problem of "communal holocaust except intense struggle againt dogmatism". In
Ice-Candy-Man, Sidhwa shows how friends and neighbours turn out to be enemies overnight. A
Muslim village Pir Pindo is attacked by Sikhs and Muslim men and women are killed. Sikh families

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in Lahore are attacked in Lahore and the chain reaction continues. People like Hari and Moti
become converts to save their lives. Ayah's lover Masseur is killed. Bapsi Sidhwa shows that the
communal frenzy has a distorting effect on the masses and leads to feelings of distrust and frenzy.
In such an atmosphere of communal frenzy and hatred, simple people like Ice-Candy man lose
their temper when he sees the mutilated bodies of Muslims. Revenge becomes the only motivation
in his life. Friendships and personal relations are forgotten. The atmosphere becomes malicious
and Ice-Candy man joins the frenzied mob which abdicates Ayah and keeps her in the brothels of
Hira Mandi. Later in the novel, Ice-Candy man tries to mend his ways and forcibly marries Ayah
and changes her name as Mumtaz. But she finds this disgusting and with the help of Lenny's
Godmother she reaches a relief camp in Amritsar. Ice-Candy-Man tries to get her but in vain. The
novel conveys a serious warning of the dangers of communalism and religious obscurantism.
Issues of Gender in Literature and Theory
Early South Asian literature has been dominated largely by male writers people like R.K.
Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Nirad Chaudhuri and, more recently, V.S. Naipaul and Salman
Rushdie. Early women writers include Anita Desai, Nayantara Sahgal, Attia Hosain, and the
emigré, Ruth Prawar Jhabvala. Since the 1980s a number of new writers have come up, who are
often included, for example, in publications like the New Yorker special issue or in Rushdie's
recent anthology.More recent women writers from South Asia have been put into two kinds of
"camps," if one can call it that: one, "indigenous" writers from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and
two, South Asian-American writers, immigrant writers, of whom Bharati Mukherjee and Chitra
Divakaruni, who has published a collection of stories called Arranged Marriage, are the best
known. Of course, currently the best-known Indian woman writer is Arundhati Roy, whose
book The God of Small Thingsreceived the Booker Prize in 1997.This and also Sara
Suleri's Meatless Days, pose extremely important questions. Both are also good teaching texts,
linguistically brilliant and very innovative, with wonderful prose, and I will discuss both of them
a little later. There are many, many others. There are also, of course, many second- and third-
generation South Asian women writers from Britain such as Meera Syal. So what we have is not
only a national phenomenon, but also a diasporic phenomenon. What comes out of all this, then,
is a combination of concerns that have to do with postcolonialism and the history of
colonization, but also its consequences, migration and diaspora.
One of the questions is: how is it that women writers, or even male writers approach feminism
or express an ambivalent kind of feminism? We can talk about gender with regard to male
writers, too, most certainly, but with women writers, a whole different set of concerns emerges.
With regard to feminism and nationalism, one of the classic problems is that for women writers,
and for feminists as well, if you criticize traditional forms of cultural practice, including
patriarchal societies, or religious and ethnic groupings, you are often attacked for not fitting into
the colonial nationalist project. This is something Arundhati Roy takes up in her book. But the
whole question of setting up a gender critique of patriarchal systems is something that becomes
very problematic for women writers, particularly when they are seen as allying themselves with
so-called white feminism. This has certainly been the problem for African women writers too.
Recently, in the work of postcolonial critics like Lata Mani and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, a new
or at least a slightly different issue that comes up is the question of colonial legacies for women
in postcolonial national discourse. Take the example of sati: how is to be understood in a

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postcolonial context? How is it a consequence of a kind of postcolonial resurgence of

traditionalism, or what is constructed as traditionalism? In what ways are women used as icons
within this neo- nationalist, often very fundamentalist project? So the role of women in
nationalism becomes a really big question. The critic Ann McClintock, for example, in her
book Imperial Leather, talks about how nationalism itself is gendered and gendered in all kinds
of ways and also how women in different class positions, as well as racial formations, are
positioned differently, with regard to feminism and nationalism. So she, for example, in talking
about South Africa and the Afrikaans project, speaks of how white women in South Africa were
positioned very differently from black women, who also were first seen as only mothers, and
who then used that positioning of maternity as a kind of political tool. These are the sorts of
questions that come out of the larger question of feminism and its relationship to nationalism,
especially for indigenous women writers.
With regard to diasporic literature, a whole new set of questions arises. The diasporic writers
we're looking at often describe very new problems and circumstances. They often talk about how
enabling it can be for women to be in a different kind of community. For example, Bharati
Mukherjee describes women emigrating to the U.S. or Canada and being able to construct a new
self self-invention. But at the same time, that separation from community can also be very
disabling, so that's another dynamic that gets played out. There are a couple of very good recent
films that are good to talk about and to teach. One of them, which is very much concerned with
diasporic issues, isBhaji on the Beach. It's a British film about second-generation South Asian
women in Britain, and it very skillfully dramatizes these questions of identity and cultural
belonging.
A third big issue in this area is the question of transnationalism, which is becoming an
increasingly important project for many feminists. It has to do with the problem of making
cross-cultural comparisons between woman writers, from, say, South Africa or Africa or India,
or different parts of the world, without erasing the specificities of history and geographic
location. How do you do that without falling into essentialisms and, at the same time, how do
you actually make useful comparisons? I think a big issue that begins to emerge in all these
writings, especially more recently, is the question of sexuality. Sexuality, that is, not so much in
terms of thinking of gender as a category, but sexuality as questioning heteronormative
frameworks of thinking about gender, either within patriarchies or not. Another recent
film, Fire, by Deepa Mehta, deals very directly with that issue.It's about lesbian sexuality
developing in a middle-class family in Delhi. Arundhati Roy also deals with this issue, and so
does Sara Suleri and, to some extent writers like Suniti Namjoshi and Kamala Das.
Pakistani Literature in American context
Sara Suleri's Meatless Days, Arundhati Roy'sGod of Small Things, and Chitra
Divakaruni'sArranged Marriage. Meatless Days is an autobiography, and yet it's quite bizarre,
in that, as a memoir, it remains extremely impersonal; the subject of the writing is completely
absent in some sense. Yet it's very exquisitely crafted and it takes on issues such as the question
of history and revision how is it that women can rewrite history, particularly nationalist history?
InMeatless Days Suleri talks about her father, who was a journalist in Pakistan and very
involved in the creation of the nation in 1947, and about her gradually developing understanding
that history does not have to be only a father's history, but is also the history of several women,

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women in her family intertwined with the history of the nation. The problem in teaching a text
like that is, How does one position such a text in an American context? Actually, Suleri takes
that up in the memoir, in talking about being the so-called horse's mouth, or the "Otherness
Machine," as she calls it. That is, how does the subaltern speak? How is it possible to present an
autobiography without becoming the icon of the Other? I think it is a very useful text and a very
rich text to teach in all kinds of courses, because it works simultaneously as a way of questioning
history, a way of thinking about gender, and a way of thinking about autobiography what is
autobiography, how can one think about autobiography as the story of the self, as opposed to
communal histories, and so on.
Sara Suleri, Salman Rushdie, and Post-Colonialism
Suleri has explicitly stated that her novel covers a history as it is a function of post-colonialism:
"There is a post colonial inextricability between Indian history and the characters. They can't be
separated; it is a shared condition". The novel weds public and private histories to such a degree
that the two cannot be differentiated in an absolute sense. Perhaps for this reason Suleri often is
compared to Rushdie, who writes from a similar background: an Indian of her generation
displaced to London. Both writers' prose evokes the rhythm, syntax, and diction of Urdu, but
Suleri says Rushdie's writing is much more grounded in the blending of the two languages.
Suleri adds that any further fiction that she may write inevitably will be about Pakistan via the
West or vice versa. In any case, Suleri says her work sits "between genres," at once neither
fiction nor non-fiction. "There's a lot of fiction in it. Some of the characters I invented, some of
the incidents I invented. Minor things, when it was necessary," she says. Lest the reader assume
entire key passages were fabricated, Suleri admits she changed mostly temporal elements such
as chronology. For example, she is not sure that when her mother was teaching Emma that she
was involved in the theater: "I compressed time, brought it closer together" so that the scene
would work.
A Short History of Pakistani Literature in English

Introduction
There is a purist view of art according to which it would be futile to categorize literature at all.
According to this view the best art, and literature is a form of it, transcend national boundaries
both geographical and ideological.
As such it would be paradoxical to speak ok say, American and Russian literature; either it is
literature, an art form of the purest kind, or it is not. And from this point of view, with which
Henry James would have agreed but many others would not, it appears chauvinistic to set out to
study Pakistan literature in English. This is what Zulfikar Ghose, an expatriate writer of
Pakistani origin must have had in his mind when to my question who in his opinion were the
best writers from India and Pakistan he replied:
We do not know enough of their work to have an opinion we must repeat that we despise labels
categories are for clerks in bureaucracies and have nothing to do with art the worst category
invented for writers is the nationalistic one as thought some sort of literary Olympic games were

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in progress A writer is interested in the best literature wherever it comes from and a writer who
makes a special place in his reading for the works of his countryman and women has to be one
who is more interested in a who’s who type of gossip than he is in his art:
Ghose’s acerbity of tone and the assertion that literature must not be given critical attention for
non-literary reasons is of course justified this has been done too often as we shall see in the
following survey of trends in the criticism of Third World literature in English. The problem of
evolution has assumed political rather than aesthetic forms in Third World literatures to a
degree quite unprecedented in modern English literatures. The critical debate in the new
literatures in English is, in the last analysis, connected with colonialism. It was colonialism,
which created cultural arrogance among European critics and a corresponding sense of
inferiority among the colonized. Now, in a reversal of this pattern, the Europeans tend to be
patronizing and the Third World critics chauvinistic and ethnocentric. The first issue, which
rises in this connection, is whether these new literatures are indeed so different from English
literature as understood traditionally, as to call for different criteria of evaluation:
The problems referred to are aspects of a general problem of evaluation. Is this new body of
writing to be judged as an extension of literature in English, and by the international standards
associated with it, or does it, of cultural and linguistic and possibly other reasons, require some
quite different critical basis? Readers of Transition will recall that the correspondence columns
for a long time carried an argument about the ‘impudent’ assumption b non-Africans that they
could criticize African authors.
But even if the literatures are distinctive wholes, and certainly their themes and sensibility does
support this view, it does not follow that non-literary criteria should be used to evaluate them.
Modern African literature came to be given critical attention in the west in the 1950s. a number
of reviews were written by anthropologists whose interest was anthropologists rather than
artistic. One critical term that was often used was ‘simplicity’. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
(1958) was said to be simple and the emphasis was on the informative, as opposed to the artistic,
value of the novel. Keith Waterhouse, while referring to Achebe’s No Longer at Ease (1960) said
in the New Statesmen:
We want a lucid, uncluttered account of the way life is changing in these territories. We want
sound competent craftsmen to put up the framework later when the chronicles of change are
more or less complete some very fortunate writers indeed will be able to fill the framework in
wallowing in the new luxuries of characterization motivation depth psychology and all of it.
This evolutionary view of creativity is based on the assumption that the African is less
sophisticated in his response to reality than his western counterpane. Others argue that
discrepant criteria should be used for evaluating western and African literatures because the
African sensibility cannot be expressed in western literary forms. This hypothesis is based on the
assumption that there are no universals, no possibility of transcendence of ethnocentric ways of
apprehension and, by Implication, no such thing as a classic – a work of art which will appeal to
people who do not belong to the culture in which it was first produced this is an extreme
interpretation of this culture-bound hypothesis. Here is one of the most balanced statements of
this doctrine:
It is unrewarding, therefore, for the non-African reader and critic to look at any of the three
major genres in contemporary African writing the novel, poetry, and drama solely from the

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perspective of western literary criteria and terminology. This is too much like trying to force a
glove with three fingers onto a hand with five. Instead we must look at African writing not only
for whatever similarities with western literary forms may be, but also once we have fully
identified these for what is different. And therefore, African
This is only a roundabout way of saying that there can be different evaluative criteria for
different kinds of literatures written in English: an assertion which can and has led to critical
anarchy in the past and which must not be accepted without reservations. And one of these
reservations in the political one; to be precise, the nationalistic one.
Nationalism, again a consequence of colonization, has been a major force to reckon with in the
Third World. In African countries too the slogan that literature should serve the cause of
nationalism has had its heyday. In the first Congress of Negro Writers in 1956, for example, a
delegate exhorted African artists to ‘try to look at art through political’. The Second Congress in
1959 held in Rome also emphasized the political basis of art. In the last few years the artists
themselves have been less willing to tolerate these prescriptive formulas and, as a consequence,
the formulas have lost their force. African critics are however, nationalistic and even question
the right of non-Africans to criticize African literature. This is merely a political conflict, that
between the colonizer and the colonized, which has taken a literary form and is expressed in the
idiom of aesthetics rather than politics.
In the West Indies, the Guyanese magazine Kyh-over-al (1945-1961) tried to ‘stimulate a West
Indian theory and practice of literary and cultural criticism‘. Another such magazine, The
Beacon (1831-1933), from Trinidad, insisted that West Indian writing ‘should utilise West
Indian settings, speech, characters, situations and conflicts’. In other words, that it would not be
imitative as it had been in the past. This was all a part of an effort to create authentic West
Indian literature. But once such a literature was produced, the critical response to it was in
many ways similar to that towards African literature. Very often certain themes, prominent
because of historical experiences, are accepted as a criterion of value. Braithwaite, a famous
West Indian writer, makes the fragmentation of West Indian culture and identity his major
theme. And then this theme, or an extension of it, become a critical standard:
Indeed this notion of estrangement from one’s community and landscape become in
Braithwaite’s various critical articles or surveys of West Indian writing the main criterion for
judging individual Caribbean writers.
Once again one notices the tendency to judge literature in terms of ideas and themes related in
some way or the other to the experience of colonization.
And this tendency is also noticeable in the criticism of Indian literature in English by Indians. I
will pay more attention to it because the cultural situation and the political forces influencing
Indian critics are very similar to those which influence Pakistani cities. Thus, in order to
understand what literary criteria should be used to evaluate Pakistani literature in English, it
would be most relevant to understand what criteria have actually been used by Indian critics to
evaluate Indian literature.
Beginning of Indian Literature

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Indian literature in English, like the other new literatures of the Third World, began as a
consequence of the confrontation of India with the West. However, it was not a literature of
protest but that of imitation in the beginning. Henry Derozio (1809-1831), Kashiprosad Ghose
(1809-1873), Michael Madhusudan Dutt (1827-1873) and Bankim Chandra Chatterjee (1838-
1894) were some of the pioneers of Indian creative writing in English’. Butt this writing was
more derivative rather than creative. Ghose and Dutt, one of Tom Moore, the other of the lesser,
romantic Byron, and Aurobindo Ghose (1867-1924) wrote a delicate kind of Victorian lyric in
Love Songs and Elegies (1898’. Even Sarojini Naidu, famous though she was, wrote merely
meretricious pseudo-romantic verse in the style of the nineties.
At first, barring encomiastic reviews, there was almost no Indian criticism of this literature.
Bhupa Singh, the chronicler of Anglo-Indian fiction, did, however add a brief appendix to his
book about some Indian writers of fiction. Singh’s book was published in 1934 and he has not
mentioned any writer who gained fame later. Criticism egan in earnest in the 1950s and K.R.
Srinivasa Iyenga’s book study of Indian writing in English (1959) by an Indian critic.
Narasimhaiah’s The Swan and the Eagle (1968), R.S. Singh’s Indian Novel in English (1977) and
Uma Parameswaran’s A study of Representative Indo-English Novelists (1976), to mention only
three studies, came later. There are also a large number of researches articles, some sub-
standard and others good, which are produced in Indian or by Indians writing in Western
journals. In other words a lot is being written about Indian writing in English at present.
The most important and balanced account of this criticism and its concerns has been given by
Feroza F. Jussawalla in her book entitled Family quarrels (1985). She tells us that critics have
been concerned more with the nationalistic theme and variants of it than with other factors. It
was nationalism which led to the major debate in Indian criticism it should, be produced in
English at all. The other main concern is with Indianness, the success a writer achieves in
creating literature with a genuinely Indian quality. The manipulation of long age to express
Indianness and the endorsement of nationalism implicit in such a demand are also derived from
nationalism.
The choice of the English language, has been one of the major problem of Indian criticism.
There are many levels and aspects of this problem. At the most polemical level Indian critics
object to the use of the English language because, as Feroze Jussawalla reproducing the
argument, P. Mehta puts it:
Indians write in English to impress the British, to gain a wider readership international and
national; Indians want the world to see that nationalist India is different; they distrust the
vernaculars because the are not universal language, and because of their Western education and
Western models; they write at the inspiration of Western writers.
At a more sophisticated level, Indian critics have invoked the extreme version of the Sapir-
Whorf hypotheses in their discussion of the possibility of using English to convey Indian reality.
The extreme version is an interpretation of the hypotheses put forward by the American
linguists Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and Benjamin lee Whorf (1897-1941). According to this:
There are no restrictions on the amount and type of variation to be expected between languages,
including their semantic structures, and that the determining effect of language on though is
total.

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It was claimed on the basis of this hypothesis that Indian cultural experience, and by analogy
any culture bound experience, can only be communicated in the language in which it is
experience by a person who speaks that language as a mother tongue. In the 1960 the Whorfian
issue became important when a special issue of Indian writing Today referred to it in the
editorial. The crux of the issue was whether Indianness could be expressed in a foreign English;
Mulk Raj Anand’s use of indigenous expressions; and Raja Rao’s syntactic deviations have all
been attacked or praised by the critics more of success on communicating indianness, a
nationalistic c0ncern, than for artistic validity.
The writers themselves, o at least the best ones, were more concerned about art than politics.
R.K. Narayan had the following to say about their use of English:
We are still experimentalists. I may straightaway explain what we do not attempt to do. We are
not attempting to write Anglo-saxon English. The English language, through sheer resilience
and mobility, is now undergoing a process of indianisation in the same manner as it adopted the
U.S. citizenship over a century age, with the difference that if is the major language there but
here one of the fifteen.
But language remained a major issue such as it is not in African or Caribbean literature.
Another major issue, also connected with nationalism, is that of alienation and expatriation.
Indian critics have felt that expatriate (or western) writers, Kamala Markandaya and Ruth
Prawer Jhabvala for instance, are not capable of representing Indian reality authentically. Uma
Parameswaran assert that writers who are ‘not as rooted in Hindu culture as the native-talents
or early writers lack as Indian sensibility’ and their portrayal of Indian reality is not competent.”
According to this ethnocentric criterion Jhabvalaabd Markandaya’s understanding
of India reality erroneous or at least flawed, indeed this is exactly what P. Balaswamy argues in
his criticism of Markandays’s A Handful of Rice (1966). And Jhabvala, inspite of her brilliant
portrayal of Indian life, has largely been found fault with because she is unflattering to Indian
and British alike. J.S. Lall in a review of Jhabvala’s novel Heat and dust (1975) said:
Mrs. Jhabvala’s marriage to an Indian is not an automatic key to an understanding of India. This
is only partly a book about India. It hardly matters; clearly it is written for markets that pay.
This is not true for, though marrying an Indian does no make one a novelist, talent does. And
Mrs. Jhabvala has the rare talent for portraying society realistically. Her novel The Nature of
passion (1956), for instance, is one of those rare works of fiction which contain deep insights
into the minds of Indians of different classes and backgrounds. Its theme is that the nature of
passion In India is compromise and it is truthful yet sympathetic towards Indian ways of feeling
and thinking. The critics, it appears, are ready to praise only those who are Indian nationalists,
who are close sympathetic to Indian traditions and not those who are objective, detached or
fault-finding. To quote Jussawalla:
Traditionally, once a Brahmin crossed the seas, he lost his position of status. Contemporary
criticism merely invokes a similar authoritarianism. The concerns with the effort categorize
writers as native sons and expatriates is a function of a narrow brahmanical point of view.
Probably the most chauvinistic secriterion invoked for the evaluation of literature is a writer,
attitude towards the Indian leader Gandhi. The cult of Gandhi clouded literary judgment so
much that even R.K. Narayan was criticized for his controversial treatment of Gandhi in waiting

11
for the Mahatma (1955). It is, indeed, ‘ironic that it is in the treatment of Gandhism that critics
have been most partisan in their value judgments about literature’.
The lack of criticism on Pakistani literature

The state of criticism in Third Worlds literature in English in general and that of Indian
literature in particular has been dealt with at such length to point out that the nationalistic
pitfall in particular and non-literary criteria in general must be avoided in the criticism of any
literature. They have been avoided, or are at least less in evidence, in Pakistani literature but
only because there is very little Pakistani criticism of this new literature in existence. Almost the
only area in which work does exist is in bibliography. Since 1965 the Journal of Commonwealth
Literature has been publishing a brief note followed by a bibliography of Pakistani writing in
English and other languages. This bibliographical note was written by Syed Ali Ashraf in the
beginning. Then Maya Jamil and later Alamgir Hashmi started writing it. Unfortunately the
note is hardly analytical nor is it meant to be. What is worse is that it is also incomplete since
many publications in English are obscure and it is almost impossible for anyone to keep track of
all that is being printed in the country. Book reviews are mostly indiscriminating and full of
clichés and praise. Hashmi’s own book reviews, especially those which are published in foreign
journals, are free of these faults. However, as a critic even Hashmi is impressionistic rather than
analytical and Pakistani criticism still at a very unsophisticated level.
As yet no Pakistani university offers a course in either Pakistani or even in African, west Indian
and Indian literature in English. However, recently the University ofPeshawar in its journal
entitled The journal of the English Literary Club has been publishing the works of Pakistani
writers and even critical articles and reviews of these works. Earlier, the University of Karachi
used to publish Venture which published some excellent articles on Pakistani Quarterly, the
weekend magazines of the English Dailies and institutional magazines too have been publishing
short stories and poems but very little criticism. The Nation (Lahore) has, however Published
several articles on Pakistani literature in English and the Muslim and the Frontier post publish
short stories. The Star and eveningwear from Karachi, publisher humorous pieces and Dawn
group of newspapers too publish reviews and occasional poems. Perhaps the only journal in
Pakistan which has been a serious forum for debate about literary matters and as published
some of the most talented young poets of Pakistan is The Ravi, the magazine of the prestigious
Government College Lahore It was in The Ravi that the debate whether Pakistani writers should
use English for creative work was carried on. And it was in the pages of this magazine that many
poets first achieved publication. The Government College also publisher another journal entitled
Explorations. This is the product of the Department of Ravi, University research journals hardly
contain articles on Pakistani literature in English and there is no equivalent of the prestigious
Indian academic journals such as the journal of Indian Writing in English.
Because of this lack of criticism the history of Pakistani literature in English has yet not been
written though such histories exist for other Third World literatures in English. This book is
being written to fill this gap. This book is historical as well as critical. It is this latter aspect of it
which is a source of its strength as well as weakness: strength because criticism is always

12
required to crate the criteria for evaluating creative writing; weakness because this criticism is a
product of my personal judgment which could well be prejudiced, mistaken or erroneous. The
mistake, however, will not proceed from chauvinism at least. I have, therefore, tried not to use
non-literary criteria to evaluate literature, whether a writer is, in any sense of the word,
nationalistic, Islamic or traditionalist is of no relevance to the judgment of his work. Pakistani
literature is being studied not for nationalistic reasons but simply because it too is one of the
new literatures of the Third World written in the English language. The definition of Pakistani
therefore, is loose rather than strict; cultural rather than political. I have for instance, included
several works of e expatriate writers like Zulfikar Ghose, Hanif Kureishi and Tariq Mehmood
though some of them do not even call themselves Pakistani but are of Pakistani origin and their
works are relevant to Pakistani literature.
Pakistani authors of English literature on the global scene

Pakistan came into existence in 1947 and for all technical reasons this is the year that should be
marked as the root year for the country's literary history. The genesis of a national identity in
Pakistan took some years to develop, so the reflection of this identity in the country's literature
was also not immediate.
Urdu, Pakistan's national language retained its sovereign position in society for some years. The
tremendous upheaval that was caused by the largest migration of people in modern time was
also mirrored in the literature of the new state.
The word realism could best describe this early phase in Pakistan's literary history. One of the
writers whose work best depicts this phase is Saadat Hassan Manto who is best known for his
short stories and who, because of the controversial topics that formed the main themes of his
stories, is often compared to D.H. Lawrence.
Over time Pakistani authors evolved their own distinctive style in the major languages of the
country including Punjabi, Balochi, Sindhi and Pashto. Initially, English was in no way the
language of choice for a country built on all things patriotic, but the British Raj left as its legacy
its language, now considered the lingua franca of the world. The English language's influence on
Pakistani literature cannot be ignored.
Attia Hosain published her novel Sunlight on a Broken Column in 1961 that portrayed life for a
young Muslim woman in pre-partition India. This was followed by what is considered the first
cohesive English novel written by a Pakistani author — Zulfikar Ghose's Murder of Aziz Khan
that was published in 1967.
Ghose's poetry was also present in the first two major anthologies of Pakistani literature in
English: First Voices (1965) which included the young Taufiq Rafat and Pieces Eight (1971)
which introduced Adrian Husain, Nadir Hussein, Salman Tarik Kureshi and Kaleem Omar.
Urdu writing was seeing a resurgance in Pakistan during the period, leading to a lull in creative
English literature.
The '70s saw the emergence of the young and dynamic Tariq Ali who as a student was elected
President of the Oxford Union debating club and whose voice began to be recognised more
widely when he engaged in debates with high profile figures such as Henry Kissinger and
Michael Stewart against the war in Vietnam.
With a strong socialist/leftist conviction Ali has become known for his precise perspectives on

13
politics in Pakistan and an unwavering strong stance against imperialism. Ali's first
book, Pakistan: Military Rule or People's Power, was written in 1970. He has written a series of
historical novels about Islam: Shadows of the Pomegranate Tree (1992), The Book of Saladin
(1998), The Stone Woman (2000) and A Sultan in Palermo (2005). His latest works
include Conversations with Edward Said (2005); Rough Music: Blair, Bombs, Baghdad, London,
Terror (2005) and Speaking of Empire and Resistance (2005).
Books to celluloid
The accomplished Bapsi Sidhwa published her first novel, The Crow Eaters in 1978. This
wonderful novel describes the life of the Parsi community and has a staid realistic tone to it. Her
other novels have taken up different themes altogether: there is The Bride (1983) which explores
the conflict between the male-dominant values of agrarian and urban societies while An
American Brat tells the story of 16-year-old Feroza who travels to the United States from Lahore
and illuminates the difficulties that arise when the search for self-definition and one's cultural
upbringing are not aligned.
Bapsi Sidhwa's ground-breaking novel remains Ice-Candy-Man (1988, later titled Cracking
India) which highlights the terrible cataclysmic events of Partition as seen through the eyes of a
young observer. The story was beautifully told and was later captured on celluloid by famous
director Deepa Mehta in her movie Earth.
It was also in this decade that British-born Pakistani playwright Hanif Kureishi won the George
Devine Award for Outskirts (1981). Kureshi visited Pakistan in 1984 and wrote of his struggle in
self-identification in the shape of a memoir The Rainbow Sign (1986) — an attempt to reconcile
the two worlds he lived in.
His most famous work is My Beautiful Laundrette, a screenplay about a Pakistani-British boy
growing up in 1980s London for a film that won the New York Film Critics Best Screenplay
Award and an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. One of Kureshi's books The
Buddha of Suburbia (1990) won the Whitbread Award for best first novel, and was also made
into a BBC television series with a soundtrack by David Bowie.
In 2000-2001 a novel he wrote (Intimacy) was loosely adapted to movie format by Patrice
Chéreau - which won awards at the Berlin Film Festival including a Golden Bear for Best Film
and was also translated into Persian by Niki Karimi in 2005. The movie adaptation of Kureshi's
drama The Mother won a joint First Prize in the Directors Fortnight section at the Cannes Film
Festival.
The '90s heralded a glowing new chapter in Pakistan's history of English literature and it started
with Sara Suleri. One of the most gifted writers of this period, Sara is the daughter of renowned
journalist Z.A. Suleri, Sara, who has been professor of English at Yale University since 1983,
wrote her first book in the shape of a memoir.
The book titled Meatless Days (1989), is a haunting one that stitches together intensely private
biographical moments with national history.
She followed this with a non-fictional work, The Rhetoric of English India (1992) and a final
farewell to her father, Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter's Elegy (2003).
Collective writings
Another name that is now well known in Pakistani literary circles is that of Aamer Hussein — a
short story writer and critic. Hussein's early work appeared primarily in journals and
anthologies in the late '80s and early '90s. His first collection of stories, Mirror to the Sun, was
published in 1993. Since then, he has published four other collections - This Other Salt (1999),

14
Turquoise (2002), Cactus Town (2003), and Insomnia (2007). He has also edited a volume of
stories by Pakistani women titled Kahani (2005).
One writer who tends to portray the lives of social outcasts, loners, losers, the deprived and the
dispossessed is Adam Zameenzad. The writer was born in Pakistan and spent his early
childhood in Nairobi. Adam attended university in Lahore and became a lecturer there. He has
had five novels published: The Thirteenth House (winner of the David Higham Prize); My
Friend Matt and Hena the Whore; Love, Bones and Water; Cyrus Cyrus and Gorgeous White
Female. His latest work Pepsi and Maria, a novel about the lives of street children, was
published in 2004.
Nadeem Aslam started writing while quite young. Born in Gujranwala, Pakistan, Aslam was 13
when his short story got published in Urdu in a Pakistani newspaper. He moved to the UK with
his family a year later. His debut novel Season of the Rainbirds was published in 1993 and won
two awards and his second novel Maps For Lost Lovers was published in 2004.
Animal Medicine was the name Bina Shah gave her first collection of short stories. It was
published in 2000 and followed by a novel, Where They Dream in Blue (2001) and The 786
Cybercafé (2004). In 2005 her essay titled A Love Affair with Lahore was published in an
anthology called City of Sin and Splendour — Writings on Lahore that was edited by Sidhwa.
Bina published her second collection of short stories — Blessings — this year.
International acclaim
Another name that often crops up in Pakistani literary circles is Kamila Shamsie. The writer
grew up in Karachi, a city that was the focus of her first novel In The City By The Sea (1998) and
which was short listed for the John Llewelyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday award in the UK and earned
the author the Prime Minister's Award for Literature in Pakistan in 1999. Her second novel Salt
and Saffron, was also well received and in 2000 she was selected as one of Oranges 21 Writers of
the 21st Century. Her third novel, Kartography and her most recent work, Broken Verses have
won the Patras Bukhari Award from the Academy of Letters in Pakistan.
Mohsin Hamid, author of the famous novel Moth Smoke was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway
Award. Indian actor and director Rahul Bose has plans to adapt the book for his film. Hamid's
second novel (published this year) The Reluctant Fundamentalist was on the New York Times
bestseller list and explores the effects of 9/11 on a Pakistani man in New York.
In the same vein there is a whole list of new writers who have recently been published including
Saad Ashraf, Sorayya Khan and Feryal Ali Gauhar, Uzma Aslam Khan, Sehba Sarwar, Suhyal
Saadi and many others. There are many more writers worth a mention, but who could not be
accomodated due to the usual excuse... No space! But let it be known that the new world order
has also heralded a time when English literature in Pakistan has finally come into its own.
Sara Suleri – life, works and critical reception

Sara Suleri Goodyear is Professor of English at Yale University, the founding editor of The Yale
Journal of Criticism and on the editorial board of The Yale Review and Transition. As an
academic, her fields of interest are listed as "Romantic and Victorian poetry…Edmund Burke…"
and her concerns "postcolonial literatures and theory, contemporary cultural criticism, literature
and law, Urdu poetry."

15
Ms Suleri was born in Pakistan, grew up in Lahore, graduated from KinnairdCollege, did
her Masters in English fromPunjab University and a doctorate fromIndiana University. She
encapsulated memories of her Lahore childhood in her creative memoir Meatless Days (1989), at
the heart of which were the tragic accidents that killed her mother and sister. Furthermore, as the
daughter of the eminent journalist Z.A. Suleri, she observed political events and political opinions
being forged from close quarters and wove the story of Pakistan into her narrative. The book was
remarkable for the quality of Suleri's prose and her use of metaphor to define chapters, and not
only marked an important milestone in Pakistani English literature, but is now one of the classical
texts of South Asian English literature. She went on to write a critical work The Rhetoric of English
India (1992), a rather complicated work, which explores the way English writing was used to
perceive and define the subcontinent, from the rhetoric of Edmund Burke to the fiction of Salman
Rushdie. The book also includes discussions on Fanny Parkes, Kipling, E.M. Forster and Naipaul.
She lives between Maine and New Haven and has recently published another accomplished
memoir Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter's Elegy about her journalist father. In this brief fax
interview with Newsline, she answers a few questions about her books. My novel is that "the novel
is not about getting inside but is about showing what happened, without explanation, with "no
introductions"
Sara Suleri’s Boys Will Be Boys
Sara Suleri Goodyear's memoir "Boys will be Boys - a daughter's elegy" is a slim volume, a
nostalgic tribute to her late father, Zia Ahmed Suleri. Or, as she refers to him, 'Pip' - her
compression of 'patriotic and preposterous'. My copy is bound in a bea utifully understated
saffron jacket with a textile design motif that puts me in mind of a a dupatta flung casually over
a slim shoulder. In a small insert, as if being viewed from a discreet jharokha, appears a
photograph of a Punjabi gentleman of leonine appearance, leaning back and smoking a cigar in
an attitude of rapt attention, as if listening closely to someone off-camera.
The book has a rambling structure, reminiscences tumbling helter-skelter from a stuffed
almirah as the author picks and chooses from a lifetime of bittersweet memories. Each chapter
is preceded by a line or two of Urdu poetry - sometimes Iqbal, sometimes Momin (although Ms.
Suleri has an obvious preference for Ghalib) - that sets the tone for that particular essay. The
book follows no chronological or even thematic pattern that I can discern. It reminds me of the
structure of a ghazal, where every sher - Suleri finds the English term 'couplet' unsatisfactory - is
complete in itself with little obvious connection to the others, except in a general thematic way.
It is not unusual to find the narrative jumping forward or backward in time by several years in
the space of a few lines.
Suleri addresses herself to her late father in the voice of an indulgent parent to a
wayward child, sometimes admiring, sometimes exasperated, occasionally complaining.
Her admiration for his intellect and the force of his personality is unmistakable. The
occasional complaint is muted in the graceful style of desi womanhood.
To say that the author has an eye and more importantly an ear, for the comic would be to
stress the obvious. Whether she is chuckling over her sister bringing one chicken to a
picnic of four under the mistaken assumption that a chicken has four legs or at the
bizarre translations at a literary meet in Moscow, she comes across as a woman who is
quick to spot the incongruous or the inexcusably pompous. In her transliterations of
Punjabi-mediated English sounds ('Scorch' for scotch, 'no dort' for 'no doubt', 'Freak Pee'

16
for sweet peas) there is little malice, merely a delight at the diversities of human speech.
And yet, in describing her own interactions with others I thought I noticed some of those
same eccentricities. For instance, she describes what strikes me as her squeamishness
when asked by her student if she may embrace her as 'friendly sagacity'. I detect a certain
desi penchant for ponderous phrases where simpler words would suffice. Having said
that, I enjoyed the book in large part for its awareness and deft use of the English
language.
Squeamishness over physical intimacy aside, Suleri shares little of the subcontinental
distaste for the physical details of the human body. She positively gloats over the desi
"Yumpax" - substitute for a certain Western feminine hygiene product - and goes into
considerable detail concerning its usage and shortcomings. Here's another characteristic
passage that combines the memory of adolescent discomfort with a distanced
amusement. Ruing her choice of a newly acquired pair of panties on a walking trip, she
says:
I realized I should not have put on the brand-new knickers that I sported. On a bed they
looked quite sportive - floral, gay - but on the bottom they were an entirely different
matter. They crept. They sought out indentations of the body that makes walking quite
an attitude of rumination [An attitude of 'rumination'. I love it!!] I would lag behind our
jolly troupe, merely to pull the knickers from where they did not belong, and my feet hurt
badly too...
The episode ends with an 'elderly hills man' taking pity on the poor girl. Gently, he says
'soti leke chal, mere lal.' The faintly sarcastic writing voice changes at this point to that of
a little girl moved to tears at the compassion of an elder even as he expresses himself in
an earthy vernacular.
Suleri's talent for spotting the pretentious and comic serves her well when she describes
her relationship with her 'stepsister'. This stepsister is described as having an ambiguous
status in the family - a sort of a female junior Svengali who worked her way into the
author's father's heart and later into his coffers. Suleri's interactions with her are
hilarious. The stepsister gives as good as she gets - more so if anything.
I derived considerable personal enjoyment deciphering the frequently interspersed Urdu
writing - partly from my now rusty familiarity with the Urdu script but also aided in large
part by the accompanying translations.For instance, I spent a considerable amount of
time puzzling over this translation of a quatrain:
Darling, darling, do not lie
Sooner or later we all die
We don't go there in coat and pant
We don't go there on elephant!
For the cryptologically minded, the preceding Urdu lines display - even to those who
cannot read the script - an 'abbb' rhyming pattern. You know my methods Watson, apply
them ! The alert reader will notice how the author occasionally skips glibly over certain
details. It is as if we are being invited to read between the lines. This is in areas where,
presumably, subcontinental ideas of morality and indecorum conflict with the au thor's

17
own. At the risk of adding more mystery to the above puzzle, I will leave it upto you, dear
reader, to figure out where such sleight of hand is practiced.
Sara Suleri’s A Daughter Remembers

Sara Suleri's timeless creative memoir Meatless Days was a wonderful collage of memories, a
reclamation of her Welsh-born mother and her sister, Ifat, both killed in hit-and-run accidents.
Her new book, Boys will Be Boys: A Daughter's Elegy, revolves around her late father Z.A. Suleri
- 'Pip', as she calls him, the nickname given to him by his children, short for Patriotic and
Preposterous. The title of the book is taken from his oft-repeated announcement that one day he
would write an autobiography and call it Boys Will Be Boys.
Sara Suleri Goodyear brings her family vividly to life once more, beginning with the bond
she shared with her sisters, into which she introduces an image, her father trudging up "the
bitter stairs" with her, at the death of her eldest sister, Nuzhat Akhund, saying, "She should have
made this trip for me." The author has the rare ability to knit together moments of such absolute
sadness, with vivid, light-hearted memories of those she has loved and lost.
Her elegant, tightly woven prose, moves seamlessly from one country to another,
scattering references to a holiday in Nathiagali, or a stay in London, in between recollections of
Karachi, Lahore, Brooklyn and New Haven, and knitting them together into rich, enjoyable
narrative. Describing Lahore and Kim's gun she comments that in Vermont, she was invited to
give a talk at Kipling House. Recalling Kipling's famous words, "OH East is East and West is
West and never the twain shall meet," she finds it strangely ironic that she and her American
husband, Austin Goodyear are given Kipling’s bedroom to stay overnight. She adds: "I think you
would have enjoyed the evening in Vermont, Pip, because you liked to hear me speak of Lahore,
and you were also fond of Kipling."
Sara Suleri Goodyear addresses her father in this way often, welding her memories of him
with the present. She wonders what he would think, if he had lived to see events unfold,
including the dismissal, incarceration and exile of Nawaz Sharif, described by her as "Bobby
Shafto, fat and fair with his Model Town estate and innumerable mills of corruption…"
The title of each chapter is taken from an Urdu verse, song or saying, under which is
printed the English translation and defines the theme. She writes:
"Language! What a nuisance it is! I knew how pained Pip would be - almost as pained as
was I - when I went through like a blunderbuss through the delicacies of Urdu, which remained
surely his most favoured language. He was glad, I think, that I developed at least a nodding
acquaintance with its poetry…"
Further on, she adds:
"In a way, my mother lived most of her life in translation. She never spoke Welsh, which
her parents did; her French was merely academic; Urdu was one of those illusions which cast its
shadow over her, but never long enough for her to possess it. As for Punjabi, it always struck us
as a singularly male language."

18
In a chapter which takes its name from Ghalib, 'Love Demands Patience,' she describes
her mother's first meeting with Z.A. Suleri at his lecture on the independence of India in London
where "doubtless he was eloquent" and his future wife said, "Now I could marry that man."
She goes on to describe her mother in Lahore and touches upon the same ambience as
Meatless Days, but from another perspective, introducing different incidents and details. She
writes: "I am not even sure how Mamma would have responded to Meatless Days, although of
course she couldn't, since it is largely an elegy for her. But I cannot describe my trepidation
when I sent the book to Pip. "
The full-blooded personality of her indefatigable father, with his "lion's head" and
"memorable gaze", dominates the book, as do his comments, conversations and quirks, his love
for newsprint, words and grand ideas, his passionate commitment to Pakistan and Quaid-e-
Azam.
She says: "For a man, Pip, you certainly gave continuous birth. I refer less to your
offspring than to your newspapers, your projects. You always seemed to have something afoot, a
bird in the bush and several more in hand".
Into this multi-hued tapestry, Sara Suleri weaves in the many vicissitudes of her father's
journalistic career. This ranges from his editorship of The Pakistan Times, his spell in jail, his
visits to New York for the UN General Assembly - and his enthusiasm for Zia-ul-Haq which she
could not share. She blames "Zulu Haq" for much and describes him aptly as a "maniacal
general". But then, this is not a book about father-worship, but love and loss, life and death. She
enshrines memories of good friends such as Eqbal Ahmed and poet Agha Shahid Ali, who also
died shortly after her father and enlivens her pages with a quiet humour and wit and small
cameo portraits of friends that her many Pakistani readers will know.
Boys Will Be Boys is written in an easier more informal style than Meatless Days, but Sara
Suleri remains a skilled miniaturist. She can compress entire worlds into a few brief sentences,
filling in the tiny details, but never losing sight of the balance and structure of the whole. This is
a thoroughly satisfying read.
Critical reception
Suleri says that any further fiction that she may write inevitably will be about Pakistan via the
West or vice versa. In any case, Suleri says her work sits "between genres," at once neither
fiction nor non-fiction. "There's a lot of fiction in it. Some of the characters I invented, some of
the incidents I invented. Minor things, when it was necessary," she says. Lest the reader assume
entire key passages were fabricated, Suleri admits she changed mostly temporal elements such
as chronology. For example, she is not sure that when her mother was teaching Emma that she
was involved in the theater: "I compressed time, brought it closer together" so that the scene
would work, she says.
Sara’s narrative voice and fictional technique

Introduction
Owing to the grandiloquent, highly analytical style of Sara Suleri's Meatless Days, an

19
appropriation of voice inevitably stands out; in such instances, it is almost as if the writer
condescends, leaving behind her typical syntax and diction to speak at a lower level of the
English tongue. Of course, her reason for so doing might involve the language itself, as in the
following passage from the "Papa and Pakistan" chapter:
There were always a few words that his flamboyant English insisted he mispronounce: words, I
often imagined, over which his heart took hidden pleasure when he had got them by the gullet
and held them there until they empurpled to the color of his own indignant nature. "Another"
was one of them-- I cannot count how many times each day we would hear him say, "Anther?"
"Anther?" It did not matter whether it was another meal or another government or another baby
at issue: all we heard was a voice bristling over with amazement at the thought that anther could
exist. ... Something like "beginning" had to become "bigning," a hasty abbreviation that was
secretly aware of the comic quality of slapdash, the shorthand through which slapdash begins.
He was a journalist, after all.
Later, at the end of this paragraph-- and before delving into her father's background and
upbringing-- Suleri will state, "For in the bigning, there was Pip"-- "Pip" being a childish
appellation for her father. What I am wondering is, of course, why Suleri would do this-- why
here, in that final, transitory sentence, she would appropriate the voice (or, more accurately, the
mispronunciation) of her father. At the outset of the paragraph I've reprinted above, the author
quickly and quite cryptically characterizes her father as "indignant" in nature; moreover, her
description of his articulation-- the way in which he spoke, or attempted to speak, English -- is
rife with violent imagery. The image, to be specific, is of her father choking a word until it
conforms to how he wants it to sound, as if he knows how it ought to sound but actively seeks to
turn it, by way of articulation, into something meaner, more "indignant."
Suleri's Pay-Off and Set-Up Anecdotes

In Meatless Days, Sara Suleri jumps right into her anecdotes, often delivering the pay-off
without a set-up. "Dadi behaved miserably at my mother's funeral" , she writes, immediately
following a story in which her mother appears quite alive. The information jars the reader,
perhaps reconstructing the suddenness of Suleri's mother's death. But, more importantly,
Suleri's anecdotal structure gives her stories a particular energy: we know what happens, but we
don't when it will. In a way, it resembles Alfred Hitchcock's "Bomb Theory": two men sit across
from each other on a train and only the audience knows that there is a bomb under the table that
separates them. Only with Suleri, we already now that the bomb goes off. Other examples: I had
strongly hoped that they would say sweetbreads instead of testicles, but I was wrong.
And so we were not really that surprised, then, to find ourselves living through the summer of
the trials by fire. It climaxed when Dadi went up in a little ball of flames, but somehow
sequentially related were my mother's trip to England to tend her dying mother, and the night I
beat up Tillat, and the evening I nearly castrated my little brother, runt of the litter, serious-eyed
Irfan.
What Suleri Knows of Storytelling

Sara Suleri's style of storytelling is nothing new to us. Like Wolfe and Chatwin, Suleri moves
from scene to scene without haste, leaving dense paragraphs and seemingly unfinished ideas in
her trail. Clever transitions, oftentimes employing minor details to turn the reader's eye, keep
the prose moving at a quick pace, and it is up to the reader to slow down, reread, and put all the
pieces together. Yet, according to the following passage, Suleri herself seems to struggle with
this approach:

20
Tom and Tillat tried to behave like friends; they cooked together in a way I liked -- but with me
the man was so large that he could conceive of himself only in bits, always conscious of how
segments of his body could go wandering off, tarsals and metatarsals heedlessly autonomous.
Such dissipation made him single-minded. He never worried about the top of his head, because
he had put it behind him. His mother chose his glasses for him. His desires made him merely
material: he looked at himself just as a woman looks when her infant takes its first tremulous
step into the upright world, melting her into a modesty of consternation and pride. And his left
hand could never see what his right hand was doing, for they were too far apart, occupying as
they did remote hemispheres of control. Perhaps I should have been able to bring those bits
together, but such a narrative was not available to me, not after what I knew of storytelling. . . .
This passage raises a number of important questions:
• How is it possible that Suleri is unable to "bring those bits together" if, as we've
mentioned, her own writing seems to work this way? What exactly does Suleri know of
storytelling?
• What differences between men and women is Suleri highlighting with this description of
Tom? Are there any implications for the different responses men and women might have to
Suleri's work?
• Do you find Suleri ultimately effective in completing her ideas or, like Tom's two hands,
is it all just too far apart?
In Meatless Days, Sara Suleri recounts story after story about her family members and
growing up in Pakistan. The book is composed of strung-together narratives between which
Suleri inserts her own musings and interpretations of the larger implications of her personal
stories. Figuring largely in the book are well-developed characters, whose idiosyncratic
personalities can be gleaned from Suleri's carefully chosen anecdotes. Two of these characters
are her grandmother Dadi and her elder sister Ifat, to whom Suleri frequently refers both as
living characters within stories and as dead people, eulogized through the stories.
And somehow it seems apt and heartening that Dadi, being what she was, never suffered the
pomposities that enter the most well-meaning of farewells and seeped instead into the nooks
and crannies of our forgetfulness. She fell between two stools of grief, which is appropriate,
since she was greatest when her life was at its most unreal. Anyway, she was always outside our
ken, an anecdotal thing, neither more nor less.
Conclusion
Later, Suleri writes about her sister: It reminds me that I am glad to have washed my hands of
my sister Ifat's death and can think of her now as a house I once rented but which is presently
inhabited by people I do not know. I miss her body, of course, and how tall she was, with the
skull of a leopard and the manner of a hawk. But that's aesthetic, and aside from it, Ifat is just a
repository of anecdotes for me, something I carry around without noticing, like lymph.
Sara Suleri as a stylistician

Introduction
Because the foremost characteristic of Sara Suleri's Meatless Days is its precision of language-
- the writer clearly has a tremendous vocabulary, and never hesitates to employ even an esoteric
word, so long as it best suits her meaning-- certain choices tend to stand out as strange or even
counterintuitive, given their context. Probably the best example in the first chapter appears at

21
the end of the discussion on Dadi and God:
God she loved, and she understood him better than anyone. Her favorite days were those when
she could circumnavigate both the gardener and my father, all in the solemn service of her God.
With a pilfered knife, she'd wheedle her way to the nearest sapling in the garden, some sprightly
poplar or a newly planted eucalyptus. She'd squat, she'd hack it down, and then she'd peel its
bark away until she had a walking stick, all white and virgin and her own. It drove my father into
tears of rage. He must have bought her a dozen walking sticks, one for each of our trips to the
mountains, but it was like assembling a row of briar pipes for one who will not smoke: Dadi had
different aims. Armed with implements of her own creation, she would creep down the driveway
unperceived to stop the cars and people on the street and give them all the gossip that she had
on God.
The word that caught my eye, the one I am talking about here, is that gossip in the final
sentence. Typically, of course, one does not refer to religious speech, to preaching or
proselytizing, as gossip-- unless one hopes to convey a subtle scorn for his or her subject. So,
having been bombarded throughout the paragraph with Suleri's rather tame, impassive
vocabulary (pilfered rather than stolen, circumnavigate rather than sneak by), the reader cannot
help but be diverted by the relatively suggestive term in the final clause.
Names and language

Throughout her book Meatless Days, Sara Suleri examines language, in many cases
specifically discussing names -- the naming of both places and people. At one point near the end
of the book she comments on the cultural and social importance of Pakistani names:
"Oh!" said Ifat and listened, white as ice. She listened to her father-in-law, the brigadier, a polo-
playing man, tell her that he wanted his four sons to be gentlemen, he did not want them to be
cads. She listened to all of this, and then she taught herself the most significant task of them all.
She learned the names of Pakistan.
For never has there been, in modern times, such a Homeric world, where so much value is
pinned onto the utterance of name! Entire conversations, entire lives, are devoted to the act of
naming people, and in Pakistan the affluent would be totally devoid of talk if they were unable to
take names in vain. Caste and all its sub classifications are recreated every day in the structure of
a conversation that knows which names to name: "Do you know Puppoo and Lola?" "You mean
Bunty's cousins?" "No, Bunty's cousins are Lali and Cheeno, I'm talking about the Shah Nazir
family -- you know, Dippoo's closest friends." "Oh, of course, I used to meet them all the time at
Daisy Aunty's place!" For everyone has a family name and then a diminutive name, so that to
learn an ordinary name is not enough -- you must also know that Zahid is Podger, and Seema is
Nikki, and Rehana is Chunni, and on and on. To each name attached a tale, and the tales give
shape to the day . . . We had felt too supercilious, in our youth, to bother with this lingo, so it was
somewhat of a surprise to hear such names to hear such names on Ifat's lips. An energetic lady,
Aunty Nuri, undertook to mediate between the brigadier and Pip until -- under her auspices -- a
reconciliation of the clans was tautly staged. "I can't stand it," Shahid told me afterward, "when
Ifat talks Punjabi or does this Nikki Pikki stuff!" "Well, it must have been hard work," I mused.
In any case, I was distracted. For when we met again, how strange I felt to notice that Ifat's
beautiful body, which I had missed so much, was now convex with child.
Naming has been an important theme throughout the book, yet this explanation is given near
the end. In her writing, Suleri alternates between different names for characters, such as Papa
and Pip, without explaining her choices. Suleri often uses the technique of ending a paragraph
with what seems like an introductory sentence for the following paragraph.

22
The Metatextual and the Hermeneutic in Meatless Days

Two things, in particular, struck me about Sara Suleri's Meatless Days. The first is the author's
attempt to purposely confuse her readers, to perplex them into a state of suspense. Often, I
found myself rereading a sentence or paragraph over and over again, hoping to find the
symbolic key to its hidden meaning. But, as I read on, I realized that Suleri had left me with
something tantalizingly nonsensical, a riddle she refused to answer until later in her story. The
following passage, epigrammatic of the novel as a whole, coaxes the reader into a state of mild,
perhaps pleasant, confusion:
It is hard to believe today that I thought the dream too harsh a thing. As parable,
thekapura does not dare to look much further. It wishes to take the taste of my imagination only
quite so far and, like my mother, makes me trebly entranced; had I really been perplexed at such
a simple thing? Or perhaps my mind had designed me to feel rudely tender. I had eaten, that
was all, and woken to a world of meatless days.
Suleri's use of the hermeneutic code is both frustrating and engaging. I was also struck by the
many moments in the text where Suleri seems to describe her own project. The following are
examples of this metatextuality:
When we lived in Pakistan, that little swerve from severity into celebration happened often.
When I teach topics in third world literature, much time is lost in trying to explain that the third
world is locatable only as a discourse of convenience. Trying to find it is like pretending that
history or home is real and not located precisely where you're sitting.
I can understand it, the fear that food will not stay discrete but will instead defy our categories of
expectation in what can only be described as a manner of extreme belligerence. I like order to a
plate, and know the great sense of failure that attends a moment when what is potato to the fork
is turnip to the mouth. It' shard, when such things happen.
Marmalade Squirrels: A Love of Language

For Sara Suleri language is life. She relates to the people and history through food metaphors.
She structures her days and life as if they are sentences and stories. For Sara a name contains
"jewels and tiny serpents" and a sentence can seem like a surviving part of a dead sister. Many
writers we have read enjoyed language and played with it as John McPhee did in his many lists
of names and places, and as Lawrence did with his unique descriptions of nature. Not one of
them embraces language as passionately as Sara Suleri does in Meatless Days. Sara depicts
her love of language at infancy in the passage that follows.
It made me the quaintest baby that she had -- as an infant I was absorbed with grammar before I
had fully learned the names of things, which caused a single slippage in my nouns: I would call a
marmalade a squirrel, and I'd call a squirrel a marmalade. Today I can understand the impulse
and would very much like to call sugar an opossum; an antelope, tea. To be engulfed by
grammar after all is a tricky prospect, and a voice deserves to declare its own control in any way
it can, asserting that in the end it is an inventive thing.
Conclusion
Perhaps Sara's quest for independence within voice and language explains her horror when she
discovers her own inventive speech stolen by her eccentric friend Fancy Musgrave.
She had pilfered my voice! In my absence, ventriloquized me to a T! I was the man making
foolish faces, while she was the chatterbox on my knee! I was astonished, feeling like an organ-
grinder who had woken up to discover that the monkey had run off with his machine.

23
And then there are the concluding words on language: Speaking two languages may seem a
relative affluence, but more often it entails the problems of maintaining a second establishment
even though your body can be in only one place at a time...Living in language is tantamount to
living with other people. Both are postures in equilibrium that attend upon gravity's capacity for
floatation, which is a somber way of looking out for the moment when significance can empty
into habit.
Introduction and Short Summary of Meatless Days

Meatless Days is a book that encompasses person memoir, the history of the development of
Pakistan, and fermale position within Pakistani culture. Suleri jumps from the present to the
past, from the United States to Pakistan, and from the privileged world of Yale in New Haven to
the traditional realm of cultural traditions. Both the clash of modern and traditional cultures as
well as the exile versus the homeland is addressed in her beautiful prose.
The female Pakistani author, Sara Suleri addresses the ontological landscape of her narrative as
the role of both a Pakistani female and an exile. Through Pakistani’s role as the "alien double" in
relation to the West, Suleri sees herself as the American Pakistani also as the alien double of her
own culture. Through her misunderstanding of some of her own cultural traditions, she sees
herself as existing in between two cultures and two ideologies, neither one nor the other. Sara,
through her stories of her father’s work for Pakistan and his political machinations, Suleri
presents history within a human frame. She also illustrates her own imagining of
what Pakistan is an means to the exile. Her "country" becomes a homeland that encompasses
both the remote and archaic world of traditions with the contemporary, modern society of both
the East and the West. Through religion and the cultural development of the Twentieth Century,
Pakistan is presented as both jarring and formless within Suleri’s prose. The book is an
intriguing look at life in Pakistan and in the American-Pakistani community that Suleri has
known. A fascinating and haunting book.
In Meatless Days, post-colonialism is used, like the English language itself, self-consciously.
Post-colonialism and English have become not just historical links to the canon, but tools used
by the authors to communicate their unique, non-Western visions of life. Discussion of post-
colonialism in these novels illustrates the confrontations of two worlds, Western and colonized,
but this is conflict is not bemoaned or decried. In fact, post-colonial rhetoric, metaphors, and
imagery have been appropriated in both, as has the very use of English. Meatless Daysdelivers
a forceful image of a unique culture that has collided with Western tradition in no uncertain
way. Works such as these can illustrate the effect the fermenting residue of colonial power will
ultimately have on nations confronting the dual identities of indigenous and imposed culture.
An apt analogy lies in the derivative of cricket played by the native populations of some
Indonesian islands. Discouraged by British missionaries and early colonial outposts from
pursuing their traditional form of mostly theatrical warfare and their pagan rituals, they coopted
cricket, which the colonials were eager to disseminate. Transforming it, they play it as a multi-
day ceremonial celebration in full traditional garb and with much of the showy feints and
retreats characteristic of their original inter-tribal conflicts.

24
Although Meatless Days is non-hronological, a significant amount of the text address the
partition of the Indian subcontinent and the resulting confusion: "When in 1947 Mountbatten's
scissors clipped at the map of India and handed over what Jinnah fastidiously called a moth-
eaten Pakistan...those very people must have worked with speedy fidelity all through the crazy
winter of 1946, realigning their spatial perspective with something of the maniacal neatness of a
Mughal miniaturist" . The religious/ethnic conflict on the subcontinent has become a prototype
irredentist dispute of the kind now manifesting itself in many ex-colonies: Ireland, the Middle
East, India and Pakistan, etc. Neither of these novels is about post-colonialism. Theses authors
do not stake claim to canonization by appealing to current historical and political sensibilities,
but by presenting a unique synthesis of their literary predecessors and native cultures.
Meatless Days, colored by the effects of colonialism, provides a unique vision that is not
explicitly post-colonial in nature. Meatless Days treats multiple themes (gender and sibling
relations, political strife, religion, expatriatism, etc.), but above all it is a personal novel, a
celebration and remembrance of her English mother. In communicating her personal vision,
Suleri necessarily writes about colonialism, for she is a Pakistani. However, as a celebration of
her mother, post-colonialism is conceptualized as a communicating tool and metaphor. She
asks, "How can I bring them together in a room, that most reticent woman and that most
demanding man?... Papa's powerful discourse would surround her night and day".
Meatless Days succeed as vessels for communicating a unique vision. It is evident that Suleri
has become adept at utilizing her cultures' encounters with the West to their own ends. This
cooptation of things Western, including English itself, provides an ironically effective method of
forcing Westerners to reevaluate their beliefs in regard to the canon among other things. These
are precisely the contemporary writers who can force open the canon. In an era where post-
colonialism, the third world, and ethnicity are central concerns, the sensibilities that shape the
canon may be ready to accept Meatless Days. Certainly her vision, quality, resourcefulness,
and groundbreaking topicality recommend them.
Main Characters in Meatless Days by Sara Suleri

The Character of Dadi
In her autobiography, Meatless Days, Sara Suleri brings the reader right into her family's life
in Pakistan from two intertwined perspectives. At times she has the eye of a child growing up in
Pakistan, at other times she speaks from the more distanced eye of an adult living in the United
States. She begins with her adult view which helps ease the reader into her story because it is a
perspective closer to our own. Later she moves into descriptions of life in Pakistan with her
siblings and grandmother told from a child's point of view.
It is interesting to note how Suleri develops the character of her grandmother from an adult
perspective and what her childhood memories add to the picture of Dadi the reader gets.
Suleri uses short sentences when first introducing Dadi to get across information about Dadi's
history; where she was born, when she married, when and why she moved to Pakistan. Much is
left to the reader's imagination early on, and specifics get filled in as the story progresses. The
fist physical description we get of Dadi is much more lyrical than our initial introduction.
By the time I knew her, Dadi with her flair for drama had allowed life to sit so heavily upon her
back that her spine wilted and froze into a perfect curve, and so it was in the posture of a shrimp
that she went scuttling through the day.
The description is seemingly from her perspective as a child when she thought of her

25
grandmother as scuttling like a shrimp, but she is reflecting as an adult on how her grandmother
had allowed life to sit heavily upon her spine.
As the narrative progresses Suleri shares some of her grandmother's little idiosyncrasies such as
the walking sticks she would cut down from the garden even though Suleri's father would buy
her dozens. We become familiar with Dadi's traditional values through Suleri's description of
her grandmother sitting in the courtyard in the late afternoon winter sun.
With her would go her Quran, a metal basin in which she could wash her hands, and her
ridiculously heavy spouted waterpot, that was made of brass. None of us, according to Dadi,
were quite pure enough to transport these particular items, but the rest of her paraphernalia we
were allowed to carry out. These were baskets of her writing and sewing materials and her bottle
of pungent and Dadi-like bitter oils, with which she'd coat the papery skin that held her brittle
bones.
Not only does Suleri convey Dadi's values and personal character but the reader also gains a
sense of Dadi through Suleri's extremely effective physical descriptions of her grandmother
which often seem influenced from her childhood mind.
The Character of Mustakori

The character of Mustakori further deploys the interpretative figure of migrancy in Suleri's
memoirs. Yoking identity and performance, Suleri's childhood friend entertains multiple names,
cultures and identities that map Mustakori's displacement by her very route from East Africa to
Ireland to Lahore. Upon arrival Mustakori immediately intuits Pakistan's "deep historical
dislike" for her most recent scripted role as a "brown European" and immediately she seeks
recourse through performance, and she proves successful in this endeavor. Not coincidentally,
shortly after her enrollment at the Kinnaird School for Girls, Mustakori receives the title of
actress accompanied by an invitation to continue her perpetual performance -- but on stages.
Suleri offers a nuanced understanding of Mustakori's theatrics, "her deep allegiance to the
principle of radical separation: mind and body, existence and performance, would never be
allowed to occupy the same space of time" . Like Surraya, Mustakori accesses her creative
powers in self-formation by acknowledging and then mimicking the very mode of identity
formation society expects from her. That is, Mustakori and Surraya both insist upon radically
separating mind and body, preferring instead a contingent selfhood.
A possible misreading of Suleri's gutted category of women and the meatless disembodiment
achieved -- somewhat differently -- by Surraya and Mustakori can lead to the false conclusion
that through performance one can enjoy a newfound liberation -- choosing roles and identities
like outfits with ease and option. Rather, as the character of Mustakori exemplifies, performance
does not connote freedom, and in her continual audition Mustakori appears always painfully
aware of her incomplete subjectivity. The anxious energy that keeps Mustakori in search of some
totality proves draining. So unsure of her discourse, Mustakori takes on characters without a
moment's warning. Here Suleri recites Fancy's, (another name for Mustakori) blatant robbery of
her proper lines:
As she talked on the voice grew more and more familiar, giving me the strangest sense of deja
vu, but it was only when Fancy darted a guilty glance in my direction that I finally realized what
she had done. She had pilfered my voice! In my absence, ventriloquized me to a T! I was the man
making foolish faces, while she was the chatterbox on my knee! . . . "Mustakori," I said very
firmly, "give it back to me." For a second, she looked as though she considered feigning
ignorance. But then, "I'm glad I had you for a while," she said most cheekily.
Throughout her anti-essentialist narrative, Suleri diligently divorces mind from body, locating
nothing but speech as the mediation for subjectivity. Therefore, by relating Mustakori's playful

26
treachery, "I'm glad I had you for a while," she highlights the intimacy between speech and
subjectivity. Following this logic of distinction, Suleri's father refuses investigators' pleas to
perform an autopsy on the murdered body of Ifat. Commending her father's decision Suleri
attests, "Ifat's gold was in her speech, in language that reflected like a radiance from her: they
would find nothing in her interior . Like the identity of women in the third world, nothing
interiorizes the body by virtue of biology, but rather by virtue of speech and thought.
Critical appreciation – Meatless Days

Introduction
The book starts out with an intriguing first sentence, Leaving Pakistan was, of course,
tantamount to giving up the company of women.
Somewhere along the way Suleri manages to show the different ways in which things are
discerned in different cultures, in the unique way in which only those who straddle such
differences can. This includes looking at how the sexes are differently perceived, what it means
to be a woman in an eastern household- in a refreshingly non-judgemental manner.
This is the memoir of a woman of mixed heritage, from Pakistan and currently residing in the
states. It takes place in both past and present and comprises a series of anecdotes about living in
a household of mixed heritage, in Islamic Pakistan. We are introduced to the lives of the author,
her parents, her heritage of being mixed and perhaps most importantly of all, her siblings. The
sensation of impending loss and then loss realized which is oft-quoted in reviews about this
book, is resoundingly present. It layers each paragraph as the pages turn. It takes awhile before
the reason behind this sinks in, though. I think it has something to do with the function of
memory.
The house described seems to be a complicated kind of oasis, thanks to the turbulence of the
world outside, fraught with danger that may seem alien to most, but which is a palpable force
hemming the narrative in, even behind the most interesting passages about Pakistani life and
culture (more so, perhaps, because her father was a journalist and quite a character). But then
again, most books read are filled with an alien culture, of sorts. There is also that sense of
alienation from the past- trying to fit it within context of present and personal history. I feel this
to be an important part and parcel of the “post-colonial” experience, which, on a more intimate
scale, has something to do with memory- and alienation from it on both personal and collective
levels.
It also has something to do with how human nature adapts to different life conditions- as well as
the peculiar characteristics of any given culture in how it adapts. This is brought home by the
title which comes from an interesting practice in Pakistan- two days of each week, meat is not
sold in order to conserve the meat supply of the nation. Suleri pens an interesting study of how
this practice is assimilated into custom and how it affects both her household and her memory.
My favourite aspect of this memoir remains the character studies though, because the strains of
feeling and apprehending of the life-force behind each one makes this, in my opinion- the
memorable work that it is. Not always an easy read, as Suleri has her own unique brand of
narration and world of idioms- but ultimately, a rewarding experience.
Weaving a History
In Meatless Days Sara Suleri brings us into her childhood home in Pakistan. We learn the
names of all of the favorite foods and the habits both strange and endearing of family members

27
yet, we only receive this information in quick glimpses. Suleri uses herself, each of her family
members, and the telling events of her childhood as small threads which she winds together
throughout the story to create a solid tapestry of her young years in Pakistan. Just as when one
is weaving a real tapestry, each thread comes into the story, leaves for a time, and then returns
and the picture grows ever clearer. Her fleeting anecdotes successfully recreate the
wonderments and mysteries of her childhood as well as her angst over the increasing instability
of the Pakistani government. As she demonstrates with her poignnant writing, Suleri is tied to
her past and to Pakistani culture and to the landscape that colored her childhood. Many
memories of events in her home are inextricably linked to historical affairs in Pakistan.
This connection between public and private appears when she writes about her father and
grandmother's relationship while her grandmother is recovering from serious burns.
After her immolation, Dadi's diet underwent some curious changes. At first her consciousness
teetered too much for her to pray, but then as she grew stronger it took us a while to notice what
was missing: she had forgotten prayer. It left her as firmly as tobacco can leave the lives of only
the most passionate smokers, and I don't know if she ever prayed again. At about this time,
however, with the heavy-handed inevitability that characterized his relation to his mother, my
father took to prayer.
Suleri goes on to say of this strange turn in her father:
In an unspoken way, though, I think we dimly knew we were about to witness Islam's departure
from the land of Pakistan. The men would take it to the streets and make it vociferate, but the
great romance between religion and the populace, the embrace that engendered Pakistan, was
done. So Papa prayed, with the desperate ardor of a lover trying to converse life back into a
finished love.
Instead of marveling at the love for his estranged mother and religion that her father found
upon his mother's injury, Suleri recounts that that historic moment in her home alerted her and
her sisters to the shifting nature of religion in Pakistan.
A similar meshing of home and country appears when Suleri writes about the death of her
grandmother:
I saw my mother's grave and then came back to America, hardly noticing when, six months later,
my father called from London and mentioned Dadi was now dead. It happened in the same week
that Bhutto finally was hanged, and our imaginations were consumed by that public and
historical dying. Pakistan made rapid provisions not to talk about the thing that had been done,
and somehow, accidentally, Dadi must have been mislaid into that larger decision, because she
too ceased being a mentioned thing. My father tried to get back in time for the funeral, but he
was so busy talking Bhutto-talk in England that he missed his flight and thus did not return.
Although she writes pages and pages about her grandmother, most of what is mentioned of her
death is that it happened in the same week that Bhutto was killed. In her mind the change in her
family and the change in Pakistan can hardly be separated.
Suleri gives us many brief glimpses into certain events from her life and in her country. Is her
"weaving" patter effective or does it create holes in her story? How does the reader feel upon
waiting to read Suleri's reaction to her father's praying or her grandmother's death and instead
receiving an update on Pakistan?
Except for a handful of mentions of being embarrassed as a child or ashamed Suleri seldom
writes about her personal emotions in situations. Why does she do this? What impression of
Suleri does the reader perceive?

28
It could easily be argued that Dadi is a heroine of sorts in "Excellent Things in Women." Suleri
quotes her grandmother's wise remarks and admires from a distance her strength. Yet, toward
the end of the chapter Dadi is shunned from the family's daily life and dies alone. Suleri admires
her grandmother but does not further explain the distancing of Dadi from the family. Why does
she do this? It is clear that Dadi is meant to be viewed as one of the "excellent women," yet many
of her hardships and abandonment are written about. What is Suleri attempting to tell us?
A Personal Pakistan
Sara Suleri, writes in her first chapter, "Excellent Things in Women" about the important
characteristics of her female relatives. She has a keen eye for the behavior and essence of her
grandmother and siblings. Suleri combines personal anecdotes, descriptions of her life in
Pakistan, like the smell of "cumin and camphor," and historical narratives. This writing style
encompasses many genres, although we are reading it in a course on non-fiction class. For Suleri
personal events are tied to historical ones and vice versa.
By this time Bhutto was in prison and awaiting trial, and General Zulu was presiding over the
Islamization of Pakistan. But we had no time to notice. My mother was buried at the nerve
center of Lahore, an unruly and steady place, and my father immediately made arrangements to
buy the plot of land next to her grave: "We're ready when you are," Shahid sang. Her tombstone
bore some pretty Urdu poetry and a completely fictitious place of birth, because some details my
father tended to forget. "Honestly," it would have moved his wife to say."
The Joys of Motherhood

She's wearing the looks of a young mother who's never been a mother before. Her face has shed
a succession of masks (menopausal wife, ex-age-care officer, history teacher's life-long, long
suffering mate); she's all innocence and maidenhood. A Madonna--and child. (Swift).
They were all wearing the flushed expression of dilated joy that is the mother's true prerogative.
(Rushdie).
Then, as I watched that face light up, a smile quickening its voice even when she was not
smiling, there was a curious recognition in her familiarity of face. "Oh," I realized, "so it's not
just Emma. Mamma's daughters also bring her joy." (Suleri).
Along with the burdens of motherhood, Rushdie, Suleri and Swift all beautifully describe the
miracle of motherhood and the blissfulness a child brings to its mother. Ironically, neither of the
three are mothers themselves. Although the authors are unaware of a mother's actual emotions,
their experiences as children of their mothers and encounters with other mothers make for a
remarkably similar compilation of maternal issues. The reoccurrence of female gendered
landscapes in all three novels establishes a common literary theme. Rushdie, Suleri, and Swift
deal with a difficult issue faced by all postcolonial authors. That is, the issue of whether an
author can write about a country, a society, or a group without participating in it themselves. In
the three texts, the verisimilitude of the portraits of motherhood suggests that these authors
write with a verified authority on issues of mothers found in and out of postcolonial settings.
An Empty Vessel"
Both acts of reclamation, Mary's struggling abortion on the table at the Witch doctor's home
echoes of Waterland's fens and incessant dredging. While men dredge land out of the rivers,
daily reclaiming land from the bottom of the rivers, the process infinitely circles. Water
continually washes away the manmade land piles and men continually dredge the washed out
land back out of the rivers. Dredging is an invention of the Industrial Revolution, its unnatural
and work intensified tendency to fight water flow in order to protect land represents the

29
extremes man goes to avoid abandoning his mother country. Similar to man's dredging of the
fens, the Witch dredges out the fetus inside Mary in order to reclaim her virgin womb. Ridding
her body of an unwanted child, Mary desperately seeks to return to the refuge of innocence and
curiosity which inevitably leads her to the Witch and her potions. The botched abortion leaves
Mary eternally infertile, her womb permanently reclaimed.
"Children, women are equipped with a miniature model of reality: an empty but fillable vessel. A
vessel in which much can be made to happen, and to issue in consequence. In which dramas can
be brewed, things can be hatched out of nothing." (Swift).
Here, history teacher Tom Crick equivocates reality with the womb, suggesting mothers can
produce almost anything out of absolutely nothing. Mothers, Crick lectures, create history--
understanding history is understanding one's identity, a phenomenon formed by one's family,
which blossoms out of a mother. As the mechanism for procreation of families, identities and
histories, motherhood is reality. According to Crick, reality is untainted history, revealing itself
from within the vessels of mothers. "And there's no saying what heady potions we won't imbibe
in order to convince ourselves that reality is not an empty vessel." (Swift). The reality of Mary's
forever empty vessel culminates in Mary's kidnapping a baby from a grocery store, an act which
she proclaims God sent her to do. Mary's concocts "potions" of religious beliefs as she reasons
with God about her barrenness; her religion solidifies upon the goals of reclaiming rights to her
womb and filling her empty vessel with the unreality of a child.
In contrast to Crick, Suleri writes that along with the realization of sexuality comes the loss "of
the differentiated identities of history and ourselves and [we] became guiltily aware that we had
known it all along, our part in the construction of unreality." (Suleri). Suleri's women, do not aid
in the making of history as Crick suggested, rather they add to the undoing of history and the
"construction of unreality". While Crick lectured on the reality implanted in each woman, Suleri
considers womanhood and sexual coming of age a disintegration of reality.
"What Mamma Knew" "When I first entered the university, the thought of being-in such a literal
way-my mother's student was strange to me, putting us both in a novel setting, over books."
(Suleri).
In Meatless Days, Suleri entitles a chapter "What Mamma Knew", a conglomeration of
teachings Suleri learned from her mother, an inevitable consequence of motherhood and
childrearing/bearing. Children often learn most from their mothers, as mothers tend to be the
persons with which children spend most of their time at a critical learning stage in their lives.
"For her preferences were there in every room, putting words into my mouth before my taste
buds had a acquired a means to cope with their suggestion." (Suleri). Our mothers teach us to
speak, they teach us their language and their preferences. Mothers also choose not to teach, a
fact which Omar learned quickly once freed from his mothers' country. "Needless to say, what
mothers had hidden from him for twelve years, schoolboys unveiled in twelve minutes."
(Rushdie). A mother's influences remain strong and timeless due to the early and concentrated
hours with which she spends with her children.
As a mothering figure, Mary tried to teach Dick Crick about sex, including him in her endless
lessons on the search for sexuality. However, Mary's teaching proved hopeless due to the
enormous size of Dick's penis and his inability to comprehend what goes into making a baby.
Meanwhile Tom Crick begins to wonder, "Supposing it's not such a simple matter of teacher and
pupil; supposing Mary's out to learn a thing or two as well." (Swift). He doubts whether Mary's
teachings come solely from maternal extinct but rather include her undeniable desire to learn
while teaching. The act of mothering can not be concretely allocated as a teaching process, just
as childhood encompasses more than an institution of learning. The educational responsibilities

30
of mother and child are interchangeable, they share a common desire to combine their
knowledge and each feeds from the other's widening array of intellect.
Tongues, Meat and Corpses: Fragmentation and Disembodiment in Suleri's Meatless

Days
In Meatless Days, Sara Suleri explores the implications of her fragmented identity: she is a
woman from the third-world, and yet, as she puts it, "There are no women in the third-world"
(20). Her motherland is Pakistan, and yet her own mother -- White, Welsh, representative of the
colonizer -- can barely speak the mother tongue. In a particularly telling passage, Suleri has a
dream about her mother's death in which the various fragments of Suleri's life interact in an
eerie but provocative way:
And then, when I was trying to move away from the raw irritability of grief, I dreamed a dream
that left me reeling. It put me in London, on the pavement of some unlovely street, an attempted
crescent of vagrant houses. A blue van drove up: I noticed it was a refrigerated car and my father
was inside it. He came to tell me that we must put my mother in her coffin, and he opened the
blue hatch of the van to make me reach inside, where it was very cold. What I found were hunks
of meat wrapped in cellophane, and each of them felt like Mamma, in some odd way. It was my
task to carry those flanks across the street and to fit them into the coffin at the other side of the
road, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Although my dream will not let me recall how many trips I
made, I know my hands felt cold. Then, when my father's back was turned, I found myself
engaged in rapid theft -- for the sake of Ifat and Shahid and Tillat and all of us, I stole away a
portion of that body. It was a piece of her foot I found, a small bone like a knuckle, which I
quickly hid inside my mouth, under my tongue. Then I and the dream dissolved, into an
extremity of tenderness.
Rape as Metaphor
According to Sara Suleri, the trope of colonialism as rape "in which colonized territory is
rendered dubiously coterminous with the stereotype of a precultural and female geography" no
longer remains "culturally liberating" in part because this metaphor obscures "the anxieties of
empire." She points out that rape as metaphor pervades the "antiimperialist rhetoric of such
Indian nationalists as Nehru, who suggested that the colonization of the subcontinent in terms
of stereotypical sexual aggression: 'They seized her body and possessed her, but it was a
possession of violence. They did not know her or try to know her. They never looked into her
eyes, for theirs were averted and hers cast down through shame and humiliation. While it
requires a Salman Rushdie to read and to disrupt the aggression of shame -- its traversals
between 'male' and 'female' discourse the stories of colonialism -- the obsolescence of the figure
of rape is too naked in its figuration to allow for a sustained reading of the valences of trauma
that the sexual symbolism of colonialism indubitably implies".
Time and Chronology in "Meatless Days"

In Sara Suleri's Meatless Days, time and chronology seem muted in contrast to the personal
and national events that the author carefully delineates. For some reason, as readers, our
internal clocks are thrown off by the aberrant role that time plays in this work. Suleri is much
more concerned with communicating the actual happenings of an event and hinting at their
significance, as opposed to their placement in a conventional chronological sequence. And when
she does place events in a chronology, she uses her own markers of time, such as the series of
cooks her family employed over the years and a friend's craze for lingerie. Consider the following
passages:

31
Am I wrong, then, to say that my parable has to do with nothing less than the imaginative
extravagance of food and all the transmogrifications of which it is capable? Food certainly gave
us a way not simply of ordering a week or a day but of living inside history, measuring
everything we remembered against a chronology of cooks. and But now I am anticipating the
overthrow of a regime that didn't occur until years alter, for the petticoat government of
Mustakori's camisoles began only in her post-Beijing American sojourn. Her conversation with
Ifat, however, had taken place in Lahore shortly after we had graduated from Kinnaird and were
left glancing about a bit in order to guess what would happen next.
Suleri's use of time

In Meatless Days, Sara Suleri moves through time and places frequently as she recounts the
tale of her family and the violent history of Pakistan's independence. It is important to note that
time has an ambiguous role in the book since it is not exactly linear and often is used in relevant
terms. Knowing this, we can deduct that the beginning of the last chapter of the book seems to
hold a special significance:
Each year, an hour gained. Because I never tampered with the clocks in Pakistan, these last ten
years feel bold to me, for they have put me in the realm of daylight saving and made me mistress
of time. That evening in October still remains an oddity to me, suggesting a moment of keen
transaction, until I am sure that I can grasp what I keep repeating. "You must put back the clock
an hour tonight."
Burying the Lede

Suleri's description of the Muslim festival Eid of Meatless Days sets up her peculiar way of
telling stories:
In Pakistan, at least, people buy sheep or goats beforehand and fatten them up for weeks
delectables. Then, on the appointed day, the animals are chopped, in place of the sons, and
neighbors graciously exchange silver trays heaped with raw and quivering meat. Following Eid
prayers the men come home, and the animal is killed.
So the animal was not killed when it was chopped? Of what, exactly does this chopping consist?
The shock of the midday act is revealed to us only in the context of a later bit of information,
slipped into Suleri's paragraph like a note under the door. The often ironic order in which she
reveals information becomes as important as the facts themselves. She becomes the witty
journalist who consciously buries the lede. Page 59 contains her hours-long rejection of Dr.
Sadik, who courts her on behalf of his son. "Within a year," she reports, "Dr. Sadik had found
another bride for his son, and he and my father resumed their fifty-year intimacy" (59-60). In
conventional story-telling, the two facts in that sentence would trade places: "Dr. Sadik and my
father resumed their friendship only after he had found another bride for his son."
Suleri points us toward her technique by describing a similar trait in her father:
There were some stories he told wonderfully, and we were trotted over them with all the
expansiveness of people who conglomerate for the exclusive joy of traversing, once again, on
familiar terrain. But establishing the sequence of those stories was a less easy thing to do, and
for some years I would chide myself for owning an absentminded brain, a faculty so distracted
that it could not even retain the structure of my father's life as part of its water table's constant.
If Gol Guppas Were Not Made in Jest, Were They Then Made in Earnest?
Sara Suleri, in her book Meatless Days uses her experiences with food to examine many other
aspects of her life. Annie Dillard, in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek uses nature in a similar way and
at times has similar reactions to Suleri. Their different viewpoints and approaches sometimes
overlap, where they use similar styles to discuss very different subject matter. The following

32
passages exemplify some similarities and differences in their two styles.

The culinary humor of kidneys and testicles stewing in one another's juices is, on the other
hand, very fine: I wish I had had the imagination to intuit all the unwonted jokes people tell
when they start cooking food. I should have remembered all those nervously comic edges, and
the pangs, that constitute most poignancies of nourishment.
The whole creation is one lunatic fringe. If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't
have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom,
smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that. No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-
fetched as a single giraffe.
In these passages, both authors talk about the shortcomings of their imagination in terms of
their respective subjects. In the following passages, Suleri looks at creation of food and Dillard
looks at the creation of the Universe.
Gol guppas are a strange food: I have never located an equivalent to them or their culinary
situation. They are an outdoor food, a passing whim, and no one would dream of recreating their
frivolity inside her own kitchen. A gol guppa is a small hollow oval of the lightest pastry that is
dipped into a fiery liquid sauce made of tamarind and cayenne and lemon and cold water. It is
evidently a food invented as a joke, in a moment of good humor.
In the Koran, Allah asks, "The heaven and the earth and all in between, thinkest thou I made
them in jest?" It's a good question. What do we think of the created universe, spanning an
unthinkable void with an unthinkable profusion of forms? Or what do we think of nothingness,
those sickening reaches of time in either direction? If the giant water bug was not made in jest,
was it then made in earnest?
While Suleri looks at creation in terms of food, Dillard looks in terms of nature. These examples
show an inherent difference in their subject matter but also demonstrate how the two authors
approach the subject matters in a similar way.
Food and Death

In the urban western world, at least in modern times, eating a piece of meat does not usually
remind the consumer of exactly what is being consumed. A hamburger, fried chicken, steak, and
in the ugliest example -- the hot dog -- are all meals, fuel with taste, divorced from their original
origins as the body parts of living things. For many westerners, eating meat is similar to eating
anything else, it is simply food. Not so in Pakistan, and not so for Sara Suleri. Suleri goes to
great lengths to drive home where "meat" actually originates. In a truly repugnant example, let's
look at Suleri's grandmother, Dadi, after she caught on fire and received what sound like serious
third degree burns.
She lived through her sojourn at the hospital; she weathered her return. Then, after six weeks at
home, she angrily refused to be lugged like a chunk of meat to the doctors's for her daily change
of dressings: "Saira Begum will do it," she announced. Thus developed my great intimacy with
the fluid properties human flesh...[and] on more exhilarating days I'd peel like an onion all her
bandages away.
And later when talking of kapura:

The culinary humor of the kidneys and testicles stewing in one another's juices is, on the other
hand, very fine: I wish I had had the imagination to intuit all the unwonted jokes people tell
when they start cooking food.

33
Romance and Family

Sara Suleri's intricate, dense prose presents her family, her country and its history with the
sagacity of retrospection and the originality of individual autonomy. Meatless Days is stream
of consciousness not in style but content, leaving a winding narrative trial of bread crumbs for
the reader to follow; each chapter follows a structure of free association, exploring a plethora of
loosely configured stories. Each sentence, a mental and intellectual rumination, is constructed
as a self contained epiphany. The end of every chapter is a miniature conclusion: the narrative
line rounding back to its original subject and subtly tying together the chapter's main theme.
From the title "Goodbye to the Greatness of Tom," one would predict that the chapter is
centralized with describing the dissolve of a great love. The chapter is indeed anchored by
Suleri's relationship with Tom. However, Suleri devotes just as much time to her family and
Pakistan as she does to her doomed love affair. She weaves stories of empty phone calls and
failed promises with the creation of the state of Pakistan and her sister's and mother's graves.
What an irritant I was to my intimates in those times. "Leave," they would conjure me and then,
with angry impatience, "Leave." " Yes" I'd answer with alacrity." I will!" But barely had the
conversation turned its back than I could feel my mind rise up like a supplicant and say, " Give
me a habit; let me wear the same clothes from season to season." Or I would wince to admit that
my rash claims had failed to acknowledge the precision of things, which left me with nothing
worth leaving. And so I never knew quite how I should have responded when Tillat, gazing
sorrowfully away from me and out upon the arid stretch of desert-land, said, "Sara, you must
learn how to settle now." She was talking about the stringent graces of monogamy. " Oh sister
most monogamous," my brain groaned, "how can I tell you what it is to have a hand upon your
head that shapes itself unwittingly to someone else's cranium, so that every nerve end of fidelity
in you leaps up to exclaim, 'This is not the cup my skull requires'?"
In this passage, Suleri blends her reaction to her deteriorating relationship with a conversation
with her sister. The seamless transition between the two scenes mirrors that of the natural
progression of thought.
The line between romantic and family life is usually one that stays fairly stark and obvious for
most people. Why does she juxtapose the intensely personal and individual experience of
dealing with a deteriorating relationship with stories of her family? Suleri gives the reason for
her attraction to Tom as that "He made things: that I think was it, in the early days of my lack of
custom with such prodigious tangibility". Later on, she states that "Ah god, I thought, the man is
dying, dying of invention" .
Suleri's question to the audience: Conclusion

At about the mid-point in her title chapter Meatless Days Sara Suleri breaks the narrative tone
of her essay to interject a question to the audience. This makes my work as a response-question-
writer substantially easier.
Am I wrong, then, to say that my parable has to do with nothing less than the imaginative
extravagance of food and all the transmogrifications of which it is capable?
Major issues, themes and concerns in Sara Suleri's

Meatless Days
Introduction

34
‘No, it is not merely devotion that makes my mother into the land onto which this tale must tread.
I am curious to locate what she knew of the niceties that living in someone else's history must
entail, of how she managed to dismantle that other history she was supposed to represent.
Furthermore, I am interested to see how far any tale can sustain the name of "mother," or
whether such a name will have to signify the severance of story. Her plot therefore must waver:
it must weave in her own manner of sudden retreating, as though I could almost see her early
surprise when she found herself in Pakistan, on someone else's land. I, who have watched her
read a book, and teach it, should be able to envisage the surrendering of black and white behind
her reading of the land. No wonder she nuanced, when her progeny was brown’
Suleri's mother is of Welsh origin; motherhood explains that Suleri's mother represents the
"land onto which this tale must tread," when the story most strongly reflects Pakistani culture,
and certainly nothing of Welsh culture?
One of the striking contrasts between Rushdie's Shame and Suleri's Meatless Days is the
simplicity or at least "everydayness," of Suleri's subject matter, whereas Rushdie makes
everything so- grandiose. Where Rushdie wrote about characters whose lives had enormous
repercussions on those around them, the risings and fallings nations' leaders and such, Suleri
writes a much more personal tale about her family, in which cooks marked the progression of
time. Furthermore, Rushdie took great pains to remind the reader that the bizarre and wild tale
he was unfolding was a made-up story. Suleri, (or her surrogate narrator) presents her text like
autobiography (fictionalized or not), a literal prose, much more like a memoir than an epic.
Nevertheless, both Rushdie's and Suleri's works concern (directly or indirectly) Pakistan, and
there is overlap of background subject matter: The rise of Islamic fundamentalism, for example,
and the unfortunate succession of Pakistan's leaders. "...Islam predictably took to the streets
shaking Bhutto's empire." "By this time Bhutto was in prison and awaiting trial, and General
Zulu was presiding over the Islamization of Pakistan. But we had no time to notice."
Just from these lines, I automatically (accurately or not) equate Bhutto to Rushdie's fictitious
character Iskander Harrapa and General Zulu to Raza Hyder. In Rushdie, these events were
dramatic forces in the book, cataclysmic even. In Suleri, "we had no time to notice." Can we
better understand the intents or functions of these authors by comparing the overlap of their
novels, and their different strategies of addressing the same issues? [Jennifer Ellingson]
...But I was baffled by her lesson: if I am to break out of the structure of affection, I asked her
silently, then what is the idiom in which I should live? She would not tell me, but even today --
as I struggle with the quaintness of the task I've set myself, the obsolescence of th these quirky
little tales -- I can feel her spirit shake its head to tell me, "Daughter, unplot yoursel; let be." But
I could not help the manner in which my day was narrative, quite happy to let Mamma be that
haunting world at which narrative falls apart.
In a way, this is Suleri's way of doing what other author's we have read also do, examine her role
as story teller, asserting the context in which she has the right to tell stories. It is interesting to
compare Suleri's humble and at times self-effacing way of doing this with Rusdie's devil-may-
care, humorous, and perhaps even arrogant way of doing so. While Rushdie (and others) seems
to argue that given the validity of many interpretations of an event, his may as well be the
considered first, Suleri continually reminds us that given the complexities of the matters at
hand, she regrets she did not have more helping hands (specifically those of her admired family
members) to help her. Examine this in the light of Suleri's relatively light use of the fantastic.
A favorite meatless day breakfast, for example, consisted of goat's head and feet cooked with
spices into a rich and ungual sauce - remarkable , the things that people eat. And so, instead of

35
creating an atmosphere of abstention in the city, the institution of meatless days rapidly came to
signify the imperative behind the acquisition of all things fleshy. [Margaret Hander]
What I found were hunks of meat wrapped in cellophane, and each of them felt like Mamma, in
some odd way. . . .I stole away a portion of that body. It was a piece of her foot I found, a small
bone like a knuckle, which I quickly hid inside my mouth, under my tongue. Then the dream
dissolved, into an extremity of tenderness.
So in the end there was no place left where Ifat could return: in each room she was new. "Will no
one ever let that girl be at home," I thought, protection spluttering in me like the sulphur flare of
a match that flares beyond the call of duty. Ifat watched my face; "It doesn't matter, Sara," she
once told me ruefully. "Men live in homes, and women live in bodies"
"When Mustakori first arrived, she at once fell victim to the vagaries of the city and wanted a
vocabulary to do justice to the perfect postcards in her mind. and the word with which she kept
rubbing shoulders--dangerously--was "subtlety." "Subtlety": that word cropped up often when
Pakistan attempted to talk about itself in history. It was at the cutting edge of our border with
India, that great divide of sibling rivalry, when India described our portion of the map of the
subcontinent as ferociously mean and skinny, we bridled and said that actually it was subtle and
slim..."
[Mustakori] would seek out the slender Gandhara statue of the fasting Buddha and its lovely
intricacies of sinew and rib. There, she would frown at it, trying to locate the subtlety principle,
instead only feeling flummoxed by the obviousness of it all. That she should feel flustered
staggered me. 'Can't you see, 'I tried to explain, 'that you aren't being stupid at all?
that Lahore plays on the enchantment of the obvious?? that it is arrogant because it refuses to be
anything besides what it seems to be?'...Mustakor had perfected beyond all normal ken an
ability not to see which made her terribly nervous about what a subtle thing the obvious can be.
After having tried out every angle of possible explanation, I was finally driven to the dead end of
proverbs--'wisdom in the vernacular'--as a way to alleviate my extreme sense of irritation...'Is
the brain bigger or the buffalo?' 'Buffalo' blurted Mustakor. Then she ran, and would not stay for
a reply."
"Remember," I said warningly, "that I've lived many years as an otherness machine, had more
than my fair share of being other, so if my brother or my father start picking up the trend, I have
every right to expostulate!"(105)
"Oh, home is where your mother is, one; it is where you are mother, two; and in between it's
almost as though your spirit must retract...your spirit must become a tiny, concentrated little
thing, so that your body feels like a spacious place in which to live...". Of Ifat's death, Suleri says,
"A curious end for such a moving body, one that, like water, moved most generously in light."
"And so with painful labor we placed Ifat's body in a different discourse, words as private and
precise as water when water wishes to perform both in and out of light" [Molly Yancovitz]
A Fetishistic Reading in Sara’s Meatless Days

Introduction
It has been acknowledged as a common psychoanalytic understanding that women rarely
fetishize, the view that has been widely accepted since 1927 when Sigmund Freud suggested that
the fetish develops out of a bread form of castration anxiety the time that young boy first realizes
that his mother does not have a penis. For women have not penis so they seldom have the
fetishistic inclination. Indeed, Freud does vaguely in describing the female fetishism and

36
attributes this behavior as man’s category. To provide the alternative reading of Freudian
phallicizing of fetishism, Lorraine Gamman and M. Makinen, in their book Female Fetishism,
explain why a woman who has not a penis but still qualifies herself as a fetishist. Their theory
focuses on the pre-oedipal instead of the oedipal and challenges the concept of penis envy and the
phallus as the only signifier of desire.
Freud and Fetishism

The postcolonial critic Homi K. Bhabha has borrowed from Freud’s fetishism to endow with the
meaning of mimicry in postcolonial contemplation which turns the exterior sameness into the
interior otherness. Yet more important, the way that Bhabha’s employment of mimicry is actually
to expound his meditation for the possibility of the third space, the hybridity, the liminality. The
notion of cultural change and transmission, the liminal, could be traced back to the anthropologist
Victor W. Turner who was recognized as one of the most important cultural theorists from mid-
1970 to 1983, the year he died. Following the Belgian folklorist Arnold van Gennep, Turner calls
these transitional third spaces the “liminal,” and describes “the liminal” as “the seedbed of cultural
creativity [from which] new symbols and constructions then feed back.” Following Turner,
Bhabha explores the idea of liminality from the anthropological filed to the post-colonial society.
Both Turner and Bhabha are trying to formulate a position for cultural criticism by expounding
the concept of liminality in rites of passage, a state of being in in-between phases. Turner suggests
formulating a rite of passage for the individual and societal in a liminal phase: “Liminal entities
are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arranged by
law, custom, convention, and ceremonial”. While Turner extends the liminal concept from the
individual to the modern society, Bhabha, on the other hand, elucidates the place of the liminal
into a broader national and political implication: “a place of hybridity, figuratively speaking,
where the construction of a political object that is new, neither the one nor the other. . . ”
(Location). For Bhabha, the model of liminality that dramatizes the interstitial space between
theory and practice—a liminal space that does not separate but rather mediate their mutual
exchange and relative meanings. There is a tension between them that in turn produces their
hybridity, the “third space,” the liminal, as an ambivalent, hybrid space that is written into
existence.
Meatless Days and Fetishism

In this study, Bhabha’s hybridity, the double discursivity and the “third space” as a space of
translation, “invention and intervention,” which is found is particularly suited to the project to
examine the liminal space of postcolonial cultural identities in terms of the female fetishism that
is presented in the Pakistani writer Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days. It is considered that the analysis
of the fetishistic food is decisive for its widespread association with the woman bodies.
Furthermore, I shall relate fetishism as linked to a love of clothes and photographs and hence to
the object-choice of feet, which prevails in Suleri’s novel. In this autobiographical narrative, apart
from the narrator, we can focus on the three major characters, Suleri’s mother Mairi, sister Ifat,
friend Mustakori, and how their unique fetishistic liminality described by the narrator. Suleri
creates the liminal space for the narration of the absent community of women in Pakistan by

37
collaborating the audacious cannibalistic images and female fetishes as a way fighting back the
patriarchal society.
Intimacy and Estrangement in Meatless Days

Introduction
Sara Suleri opens Meatless Days, her memoir of her childhood and youth in Pakistan,
with this sentence: "Leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the
company of women." She immediately continues by describing, in her words,
"perambulating through the grimness of New Haven" and of the pleasures of her
"conversational way" .
This sets the tone for the entire work: she will render a deeply personal and in many
ways intimate account of her life and its settings in prose that is airy and academic and
even over-nuanced, making use of words like tantamount and perambulating as she
describes the sights and sounds and feelings of her world and of herself as a child in
Pakistan. She describes her brother Irfan's project of dove cultivation in the same
mode:
He preferred to grow them rather than eat them. There was a time when he had a
hundred doves on the roof of the Khurshid Alam Road house, which was quite a feat,
considering that they'd had to be kept a strict secret from my father. Papa hated doves,
associating them with the effete gambling of Deccan princedoms or with Trafalgar
Square and his great distaste of the English ability to combine rain and pigeon
droppings. So Irfan built dovecote after dovecote on our roof, while Pap had no idea of
the commerce and exchange beneath which he was living.
Suleri closes this anecdote by describing the chagrin and disbelief of her father when he
discovers Irfan's rooftop dove cultivation and moves on to the next thought by declaring
that her "parable has to do with nothing less than the imaginative extravagance of food
and all the transmogrifications of which it is capable". Throughout the book she
continually describes intimate memories and language that is strangely removed from
them, as in the phrase "transmogrifications of food", and in describing her father's
reaction to her younger brother in terms of "Deccan Princedoms", Trafalgar Square, and
commerce and exchange.
With a First-hand Knowledge of the Country: Meatless Days
Suleri treats America uniquely because she lives there part-time. Though she resides
there as she finishes her book, she does not feel she belongs to it, or it to her. "Rain in
America has never felt to me like a condition of glad necessity, and Tom and I will never
know the conversations we might have had on something like the twelfth of August in
Lahore," she explains wistfully . It keeps her stagnant, cut off from her real life. While

38
her mother died, she was "sitting in the American Midwest" . She refers to her move to
America as "my American retreat", refers to herself as "away in America". After her
sister's death, "I returned to America conscious of my vanity, the gay pretense with
which I had believed that I could take a respite from my life".
By choosing to permanently relocate to America, she has betrayed her father, she feels,
"our adulthood would often seem to him betrayal's synonym". She often feels that in
America she has lost her "sense of place." "For a while it felt quite true, so that during
my sojourn in the American Midwest the vast strangeness of the place to me was
humanized by such a presence as Dale's face, just as in my first horror at the
unmitigated prettiness of Williamstown I could turn to the grayness of Anita's eyes".
Her book ends with her despondency in exile. She hopes some definition will rise from
the tangle of her life which she compares to a body with broken bones. Her final
sentence reveals a weary desire to let go of her weakened self, "I join its buoyancy and
hide my head as though it were an infant's cranium still unknit, complicit in an Adam's
way of claiming, in me, disembodiment".

39
Time May Change Me, But I Can't Change Time in the

context of Meatless Days - a novel by Sara Suleri
Introduction
The inevitability of change is an underlying them in the first two essays of
Sara Suleri's Meatless Days At times she describes positive changes. These
positive moves often involve birth or resurrection. A particularly arresting
passage is one in which Suleri describes the regeneration of her
Grandmother's flesh after a particularly heinous burn.
Thus developed my great intimacy with the fluid properties of human flesh.
By the time Mamma left for England, Dadi's left breast was still coagulate
and raw. Later, when Irfan got his burns, Dadi was growing pink and livid
tightropes, strung from hip to hip in a flaming advertisement of life. And in
the days when Tillat and I were wrestling, Dadi's vanished nipples started to
congeal and convex their cavities into little love knots.
At times Suleri describes entirely negative changes. These negative moves
are infused with dark imagery and death. I think we could have mourned
Dadi in our belated way, but the coming year saw Ifat killed in the consuming
rush of change and disbanded the company of women for all time. It was a
curious day in March, two years after my mother died, when the weight of
that anniversary made us all disconsolate with quietude. "I'll speak to Ifat,
though," I thought to myself in America. But in Pakistan someone had
different ideas for that sister of mine and thwarted all my plans. When she
went walking out that warm March night, a car came by and trampled her
into the ground, and then it vanished strangely. By the time I reached Lahore,
a tall and slender mound had usurped the grave space where my father had
hoped to lie, next to the more moderate shape that was his wife.
And sometimes Suleri merely describes changes. She doesn't ascribe
positive or negative values to these changes, she merely shows the
inevitability of movement.
We knew there was something other than trying times ahead and would far
rather hold our breath than speculate about what other surprises the era
held up its capacious sleeve. Tillat and I decided to quash our dread of
waiting around for change by changing ourselves, before destiny took the
time to come our way. I would move to America, and Tillat to Kuwait and
marriage. To both declarations of intention my mother said "I see," and
helped us in our preparations: she knew by then her elder son would not
return, and she was prepared to extend the courtesy of change to her
daughters, too.

40
Morsels of Tom and Memory in Sara Suleri's Meatless

Days
Introduction
The associational logic of memory shapes Sara Suleri's Meatless Days. As such, Suleri
moves from one anecdote of her life to another and leaves many stories and characters
unfinished. Though Tom ostensibly receives an entire chapter in her book, "Goodbye to
the Greatness of Tom," details about Tom and her relationship to him are fragmentary.
A mentioning of Tom's large body size leads into a discussion of Pakistan. An account of
a motorcycle accident while with Tom is followed with a discussion of Suleri's aversion
to visiting Muslim tombs. The reader is left wondering about the gaps and shifts in
Suleri's tone when reminiscing about Tom. While some short tales about their
relationship are humorous and marked by Suleri's blunt, indifferent language, such as
the following quotations:
"You do not have the backbone of a shrimp," I mourned, gazing up at the spread-sheet
of that man-mountain. "You have a head the size of a bowl of porridge and the brain the
size of a pea." This was in a restaurant. I was surprised beyond measure when that big
head bent back and wept a quick summer shower of tears. By the time he left, all
surfaces were dry.
"I have known you for five years," I once cried out, "and I don't even know your blood
type.". . . Tom was stricken, desperate, and appalled, as streams of information went
coursing down my face.
Poignancy of Tom
In other passages where Tom is the subject are poignant, yet spiteful: "I am flying to
London, Sara," Tom would say, "and then to Germany." I could only be silent . . . he
would quickly add, "And when I'm back, we'll talk." I felt as though I were being offered
the consolation that flight attendants present when, one in each aisle, they jointly hold
out yellow life jackets.
In yet other passages Suleri seems remorseful: I...early began to conceive of Tom as that
which must be renounced, forgone. Of course that tripled his value in my head, lending
him to something of a sharp intake of breath that betokens the conclusions of a
cigarette, making him a mourning-place, monument before his time.
Years later I am still surprised to see how something as innocuous as an airline schedule
can resound in my head like an echo chamber or the transient memory of tears.
But still a stubborn adhesiveness in me made me loath to give up the notion, long after
we had done away with the pretense of plausibility, that it was Tom who was the
quickening presence of my day.
In the end the nature of Tom and Suleri's relationship it is not perfectly clear to the
reader. Her tone seems to change from humorous to resentful to hurt as if she herself is
trying to figure out exactly how she feels about Tom-and we never know what
conclusion she makes.

41
Memories in Meatless Days

In Meatless Days, Sara Suleri weaves her narrative with the threads of memory,
darting through images, feelings, and conversations of the past. As opposed to a
chronological straight-line story, Suleri's narrative meanders and bends, jumps and
circles back around, much akin to the chaotic digressions and daydreams of a
reminiscing mind. But, unlike a random, free-association of thoughts, Suleri is
constantly aware of the structure and order in which she presents her stories. In the
following passage, she openly addresses the construction of her text, allowing the reader
to glimpse the voice behind the narrative — the woman behind the curtain, so to speak.
What then are my options? I suppose I could recall that I first met Mustakori in college,
at Kinnaird, but then what a Jonah my voice feels to the whale of that context. It makes
mind and body boggle: Kinnaird College! for Women! on Jail Road! in Lahore! A place
to imprint on unsuspecting faces looks of indelible surprise! The college was indeed on
Jail Road, as was the jail, and the racecourse, and the lunatic asylum, too: daily we
found it hard to believe ourselves, but it was true.
Public and Private History in Sara Suleri's Meatless

Days
Introduction
Suleri constantly reminds the reader that she is writing a public history. Even the death
of her sister Ifat connects to chaotic politics in Pakistan, for her family fears Ifat was
murdered as a result of her father's political leanings.
The "alternative history" that Suleri calls Meatless Days is an attempt to deal with
private history in a public sphere, setting the two "in dialogue." According to Suleri, she
tried to create "a new kind of historical writing, whereby I give no introductions
whatsoever. I use the names, the places, but I won't stop to describe them" (Interview).
In contrast to other third world histories, which she criticizes as too "explanatory,
“Meatless Days simply presents Pakistan as it appeared to her. Using names and
places without much definition, description, or explanation was her "attempt to make
them register as immediately to the reader as it would to me."
Some might argue with her assertion, however, that she does not interpret. The New
York Times Book Review claimed, for example, that Suleri takes "one step back for
analysis with every two it takes toward description." Indeed, some amount of reflection
and interpretation is to be expected when one writes from the present looking back on
the past. At one point she writes as she recounts a memory in the book, "Could that be
itŠ?" Here she is wondering, as she reflects back. Indeed, Suleri readily admits, "How
does one maintain a sense of privacy when you construct a text like this?" and she
acknowledges, "I'm sure I did reveal a lot" and that Meatless Days is "a very private
book".
Personal elements in her work
Suleri, like Anglo-Pakistani author Salman Rushdie, weaves her own personal history

42
into that of Pakistan because the two entities are, as she says, "inextricably connected to
one another." Thus entwined, the food feeding her book (Pakistan, her siblings, her
parents, relatives and friends, the West and her professorship of English at Yale) are
intertwined while Suleri's own personal history acts as a woven bag holding and linking
the content together. However, at the same time, Suleri hesitates to characterize
Meatless Days as a memoir or autobiography and asserts instead its status as an
"alternative history" of Pakistan. For this reason, those critics who accuse her of writing
a distant, cold autobiography may have missed the point: Suleri set out to write a
historical novel, but one that is not based solely on facts and figures but rather is based
on the facts in interconnected public and private histories. The deeply intimate aspect of
the work, then, is not subjugated to the history of Pakistan but, combined with her
remarkable use of syntax and diction, works instead to complement and redefine the
country itself.
Suleri: the new fragrance for women
The pages of Sara Suleri's Meatless Days are concerned in large part with notions of
kinship and family ties. Suleri, like us all, sometimes expresses confusion and weariness
regarding what seem like the inescapable bonds of blood relations:
I missed Tillat's children when they left. There are too many of them, of course--all of
my siblings have had too many. Each year I resolve afresh that my quota of aunthood is
full, that I no longer am going to clutter my head with new names, new birthdays. But
then something happens, like finding in the mail another photograph of a new baby, and
against my will they draw me in again. I did not see Ifat's children for four years after
she had died, and when Tillat and I visited them in Rawalpindi, in the pink house on the
hill, Ayesha, the youngest, whispered to her paternal grandmother, "My aunts smell like
my mother." When she repeated that to me, it made me tired and grave. Tillat and I
slept for ten hours that night, drowning in a sleep we could not forestall, attempting to
waken and then falling back exhausted into another dreamless hour.
Conclusion
Rather despite herself, Suleri is drawn in again and again to new additions to the family,
by what seem to be mystical forces beyond her control. Similarly, when she visits with
her sister's children, they recognize their mother's familiar scent on Suleri with ease.
Why, though, does this cause in Suleri such disturbance? She and her her other sister,
Tillat, seem troubled by it to the point of insomnia. Is Suleri merely being melodramatic,
or is there something truly disturbing about the fact that blood, and sisterhood in
particular, is thicker than water? These are the very points of discussion about Sara
Suleri’s Meatless Days.

43
The Chapter "Meatless Days" in Meatless

Days
The chapter "Meatless Days," which is the only chapter which does not deal
explicitly with just one person, begins with Suleri's revelation that the
Pakistani dish her mother had told her were sweetbreads (pancreas) are
really testicles. This discovery launches her on passages resplendent with
ruminations about food and its significance.
Stories about her surreptitious childhood scavenging of cauliflower eaten
directly from plants in their garden, being burned by hot sauce, and the
marvelous feasts preceding and following the Ramzan fasts, mix in with
stories about her siblings' eating habits, her sister's visit to New Haven, and
the meaning of days without meat. With the latter Suleri prods the reader
back into a public realm, characterizing a country deprived of meat for two
days each week after Pakistan was founded in 1947 and comparing it to
liquor laws: "What you are denied you want more," she says. Yet the food,
ultimately, "has to do with nothing less than the imaginative extravagance
of food and all the transmogrifications of which it is capable", including a
somewhat unexpected passage near the very end of the chapter.
In an image akin to the Victorian sage's symbolical grotesque, Suleri details
a dream she has of her mother after she dies, in which she lovingly caresses
her mother, represented by slabs of meat in a meat truck, and takes a
knuckle of flesh under her tongue, secreting away a part of her mother in
herself. The reader, stunned by the dream, sees how Suleri ties in not only
comical family feasts and the politics of withholding food but also a
profoundly intimate love for her mother.

44
Geographical Ontology in Sara Suleri's Meatless

Days
Geography provides one of the most important, of Suleri's ontologies. Not only does the
plurality of countries in which she lives fragment her narrative, but the very concept of
the ontological landscape itself is given full life in the context of geography.
In other words, consider each world as if it were a "zone," in postmodern jargon, and
McHale provides two mechanisms by which, with geographic material, such a zone can
be constructed. The first involves the conceptualization of a country, for example
Suleri's Pakistan, as "opposite to the European world (including Anglo-America),
Europe's other, its alien double" (McHale) Suleri makes this dualism known in several
ways, the most grotesque of which is her treatment of food, particularly kapura, a
traditional Pakistani food which Sara had always assumed were sweetbreads. Yet once
out of that world, removed to New Haven, Sara learns the truth from her visiting sister:
"Kapura , as naked meat, equals a testicle" . This is not only the breakdown of a story
that Sara had believed all her life, but a startling reminder of how narratives themselves
are ruptured by the collision and combination of different worlds. Sara learns about
Pakistan while in New Haven, and, trying to relay the story to other Americans, elicits
the response, "'Balls, darling, balls'". The duality is distinct, and the consequences are
alienating: the meals of Sara's Pakistani childhood are the setpieces of American cocktail
party slang. Any attempt to negotiate between the two only widens the gap between
them.
The second mechanism, complementary to the first, relies upon the conceptualization of
Pakistan as inherently plural. As McHale points out, "even a 'straight' realistic
representation of [Pakistan] would have to take this multiplicity into account; and from
such a representation to a postmodern one is only a few short steps" (McHale). Suleri
devotes an entire chapter, "Papa and Pakistan," to this precise issue. With a father of
tremendous political influence, Suleri is able to access the ferment, urgency, and
confusion of creating a Muslim state. She creates the political sphere of her country with
stories of her father's crusade for Pakistan, his support for particular leaders, and the
onset of military government and nationalized newspapers. Against this history, she
gives her own impressions of a country organized on ideological ground:
Today I often regret he was not in Pakistan at the time of the partition, to witness those
bewildered streams of people pouring over one brand-new border into another, hurting
as they ran. It was extravagant, history's wrenching price: farmers, villagers, living in
some other world, one day awoke to find they no longer inhabited familiar homes but
that most modern thing, a Muslim or a Hindu nation.
Her country represents not only the collision of a remote world with modern standards,
but also the multiplicity of religion, and the larger, more combative climate of life in the
twentieth century. Pakistan is every bit as disjointed and jarring as Suleri's narrative
structure.

45
Sara Suleri's Meatless Days -- Novel or

Autobiography?
Although in private conversation Suleri herself does not term Meatless Days an
autobiography, her publisher markets it as one, presumably with her permission. Is
Suleri then duping the reader, making -- or allowing others to make -- a claim for
authenticity when she has created some of the events and people? Suleri counters, "Why
would a novel be any less true than someone saying this is my life?"
(Interview). She asks for a viable definition of authenticity, implying that fiction, too, is
as authentic as the so-called real events in someone's life. Not interested in writing a
confessional, which she feels is "too expansive and revelatory" for this task, she returns
to her thesis that she wanted to write a history, a chronicle of the inextricably married
histories of her own and that of Pakistan. The distance, then, that reviewers from The
New York Time Book Review and The Library Journal have criticized her for is
intentional. Daniel Wolfe wrote in The Book Review that "Her writing is beautifully
constructed and yet a little cold; Sara Suleri expertly paces out the boundaries of her
subject without giving the reader the pleasure of getting inside." Suleri would respond
that the novel is not about getting inside but is about showing what happened, without
explanation, with "no introductions" (Interview).
To be sure, she acknowledges that genre of autobiography, by its very definition,
engenders a form of self-censorship because it is one's own choice what to include and
what to leave out of the text. However, she adds, "Forgetting is just about as important
as what you remember." At the same time, she does not believe in authorial control,
saying that "a narrative should shape itself." When she writes, "a lot of it is being
dictated by what is down there on the page; what I remembered and forgot was beyond
my control." Perhaps for this reason Suleri's prose is peppered with the phrase "of
course," as in the opening sentence cited above: "Leaving Pakistan, was, of course,
tantamount to giving up the company of women." The book, as Suleri sees it, creates
itself so that the things she writes down become, in a way, obvious. The fact that her
memory somehow chose to recall selectively only certain events is, for her, not
altogether that mysterious, because she believes the narrative "shapes itself." Of course
she remembered -- her memory allowed her to recall -- this particular thing and not that
particular thing, for the process of memory is beyond her control. Related to this is that
Suleri finds she does not need to make many if any revisions to her work; her first draft
usually is her last, and she avows that her writing is a mirror of her speech and not
created artifice as some say it is.

46
Contemporary Nonfiction and Sara Suleri's Meatless

Days
Like other late-twentieth-century authors -- like, for example, Wolfe, Dillard, McPhee, Chatwin,
Raban, Didion, -- Suleri creates a form of nonfiction that has much in common with the writings
of the Victorian sages, Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, and Thoreau.. Like all of them, Suleri shows
points of view that readers by themselves cannot perceive or comprehend. By describing
lifestyles alien to the average reader and making sense of them as Wolfe attempts to do, or by
revealing personal histories that perhaps the reader will identify with and apply to his own life,
the writers impart interpretations that inform. They make things accessible, able to be
comprehended, knowable to the reader. As such, all are masters of experience. Each shows his
or her gift for communicating private, very personal experiences to the reader.
The writings from New Journalists, Victorian sages, satirists, travel writers and autobiographers
push the boundaries of fiction and blur distinctions between nonfiction and the novel by
introducing elements of both. They suspend fiction's dependence on plot, on its goal of reaching
of a degree of closure, by playing with how literature usually is temporally and spatially
arranged. The stories do not follow a set chronology but instead are pastiches, layers of set
pieces, that create a novel in their combination. Yet they do not eliminate plot completely;
characters and storylines still exist to provide, at the very least, an interesting story. Suleri, by
constructing an intimate history covering personal lives of individual characters taking place in
(but intrinsically and inseparably related to) the public sphere of international history,
epitomizes that writer of a compelling story that, ultimately, hopes to speak to each reader.
Suleri and the Resistance to Definition in Postmodern Writing

Another technique of the postmodern author, one that almost acts as an umbrella term, is the
resistance to definition, particularly to conventional definitions. The ploy of postmodernism is
to rupture traditional associations, attributing "ad hoc, arbitrary, and unsanctioned" meanings
to given terms or ideas. Suleri's virtuosity with this strategy is stunning. Her misattributions
display themselves in her love of metaphor, as she twists mild pleasantries into complex,
multifaceted positions. To describe, for example, the "miraculous companionship" of her sister
Ifat, Suleri draws on an old Muslim tale, reordering it to fit her vision of her sister:
To sleep on Ifat's bed was milk enough, to sleep in crumbling rest beside her body. Sometimes
like water she runs through the sentences of sleep, a medium something other than itself,
refracting, innocent of all the algae it can bear and capable of much transmogrification. Her
water laps around me almost in reproach: "You were distracted, when I requested your
attention. You were not looking. I was milk."
Suleri distorts and expands on the traditional Muslim attributions of water and milk, a polarity
that, in the folktale, applied to the benefits of devout worship Instead, water and milk become
degrees of Ifat's attraction, her vanity, her "immoderation." The idea of sisterly companionship
is problematized by Suleri's definition, becoming more a question of sensational, even erotic
sparring, rather than the tradional, more antiseptic nurturing and support. Creating a tidy
description is particularly difficult when it comes to female relationships, because of the
unavailability of proper descriptive words: "By this point admittedly I am damned by my own
discourse...formulating that definition [of women] is about as impossible as attempting to locate
the luminous qualities of an Islamic landscape". Not only are her cultural and sexual worlds
multifaceted, they also resist any assessment of their plurality with conventional language. Her

47
non-traditional attributions seem to be more out of necessity than the impetuous desire to be
arbitrary.
Metaphorical interpretation of the title: Meatless

Days
Introduction
One great literary merit of Sara Suleri’s biography, Meatless Days, lies in the way she has
developed the metaphor of meatless days - a literal event in life of Pakistan, through a mazy
round of tales about food and her family (Talaat). The figurative treatment of literal events is a
familiar device in English literature.
It goes back to ancient classical writers like Chaucer, Blake, Milton and Eliot. Suleri, a
postmodernist writer, has gathered all great traditions of symbolist narrative that allow her to
fill every rift of literary narrative with the ore of symbolic meanings. Despite the diversity of her
tales, meatless days is the central concept around which all nine tales of Meatless Days have
been woven. In this paper, we look at the first two tales Excellent Things in Women and
Meatless Days in which Suleri tells all major events of her life and has developed the metaphor,
through a carefully organised scheme of narrative.
Scheme of Narrative
Suleri’s schemes of narrative are determined, like all collections of tales in literary history, by
her concern to bring a unity to tales in which she narrates a variety of personal incidents about
different characters, for no other purpose than to reminiscence.
This unity comes from some major recurrent symbols, which are then fused together in a
hierarchical order to form one major thememeatless days - a symbol exclusively of Pakistan
rather than of the whole sub-continent.
The narrative in each tale has been designed to deal with ironies and contradictions, as well as to
enunciate a major theme, with a maze of several sub-themes to play around it. Therefore, the
episodes about a given character appear to have been selected, and connected in an order of
paragraphs that allows her to work out and conclude a particular theme, to carry it forward
through an intricate pattern that also allows her themes (Talaat). For examples, her first tale
called Excellent Things in Women is about her Dadi, grandmother, which begins from the
following sentence:
‘Leaving Pakistan is tantamount to leaving the company of women’ It end at the following
conclusion:
Against all my own odds I know what I must say. ‘Because’ I’ll answer slowly, ‘there are no
women in Pakistan.’

48
This sounds like a contradiction. The paragraphs that happen in between must tell us one by
one, not only what company of women it was, but also allow the transition from her first
declarative to the opposite end, the contradiction.
In this first tale, Suleri does not mention meatless days at all. But she has chosen to describe two
loves of Dadi’s life:
God she loved, and she understood him better than any one.
Food too could move her to intensities Obvious problems, however, occurred whenever the two
converged. One such occasion…. was Eid…when the animal is killed .. and shortly thereafter
rush out of the kitchen steaming plates of grilled lung and liver… This then leads her to her
anecdotes about meat and food. This she would join with Dadi’s worship of God in form of
prayer and fasting in the month of Ramzan. For fasting in the month quickly turns into feasting.
Therefore, this is an occasion that allows Suleri the tales about contradictions and ironies such
as food and fasting, but also the concurrence of food and talk, family conferences, amplitudes,
and ties of love and hatred that bind them together. For she would talk not only about love of
her parents, but also her father’s clash with her mother. Together they constitute a network
of themes, ideas, that must work their way, from one end of the story, called beginning, through
to the other, the middle and the end.
Then each paragraph is planned to carry forward an idea to a desired end, and hence each
sentence too! Each next paragraph, while carrying forward the idea executed in the previous
paragraph, also makes a new beginning. It ends a thought, but ironically, starts a new one too.
Hence, just as each tale is complete in itself, and constitutes an entity, each paragraph is
complete too. So are m st of the sentences, if not all. For, sentences appear to have been
designed, not only to carry forward an idea, but also, somehow to become an end in themselves,
like poetry, self-contained, packed with many meanings, both literal and symbolic.
Similarly each tale is governed by its system of symbols – major and minor. They will recur and
echo in other tales too, though not in the same fashion, nor in the same pattern as before. These
symbols may become general and dominant, such as food, meat, talk, lingo, death, killing and
forgetfulness. These pervade the whole book.
Alternatively, they may be words and phrases, with variant meanings and ideas; words and
phrases like structure, houses, prayer or seasons and rain etc. In this kind of narrative, one can
afford to ignore nothing, abandon no idea. Each word is a thought that can recur, echo and gain
new meanings, and become a metaphor.
The narrative has a plan, therefore. In fact it has two plans. One along the linear dimension, that
carries a tale through, from beginning to the end. The other along the circular motion of
repetition, recurrence, that allows devolution to deal with ironies and double meanings inherent
in an idea or event. Though it is a plan that has not been announced, it has to be discovered. Its
discovery is important for it sets up a powerful tradition of English writing. Its ultimate power
lies in uniting eastern ways of life and sentiments with Western mode of thought and
expression. In the next section, we gradually move to this discovery.
Developing Symbolism in the Narrative

49
The most important quality of Suleri’s narrative is that a realistic narrative is fused with
symbolic meanings that ordinary, words, and incidents are turned into metaphors
(Talaat:2003). For example, it appears only natural that all major events in Dadi’s life should
centre round food, eating and talk. Food, eating, cooking and feeding are in fact are the most
natural activities associated with women. In a way, it is a universal symbol of women’s life.
Similarly Dadi’s devotional acts - from prayer to ritual sacrifice of goat, her ‘berating of the
Devil’ and Ramadan mastications are routine events of every Pakistani household. But Suleri
turns these ordinary events into powerful symbols of the Islamic landscape of the country and
the role that it plays in Pakistani politics. Thus meat through a number associations comes to
stand for religious ritual, sacrifice, death and religion.
At least, the first ten or fifteen paragraphs one can read unsuspecting that there is a design in
the selection of events. It is only when the events, both personal and political, are described
according to eras named after different cooks, that the a plan, inthe form of a dominant motif
appears. These events are about food, meat, killing of a goat, excessive habits of eating,
intensifications, prayers, fasting and feasting – normal events of Asian life. Yet the (pro?) fusion
of food, talk and religion in Suleri’s personal life and its parallel (pro?) fusion in public life –
especially of religion and politics, leading to deaths in both domains, and then to the danger of
possible forgetfulness is so natural that ordinary reader remains ignorant of the symbolic
dimensions of her narrative.
Yet it is the growing symbolism that lends Suleri’s narrative the ultimate power. It comes from
the selection of events, their repetition, and from Suleri’s musings upon these events that
pinpoint and highlight various significances. In the narration of a given event, two things come
together almost simultaneously: the realistic detail of an ordinary event and Suleri’s reflection in
the form of loud interior monologue on it. Then, sometimes later another event, another detail,
another symbol or word recalls a previous event, symbol or significance, enhancing the power or
significance of each to each.
Meatless Days is one such concept that has been constantly enlarged in meaning and
significance to develop it into a metaphor for not only Pakistani cultural life but
also for Suleri’s personal grief more intense than anything else described in the tales.
Meatless Days: The Metaphor

As said before, the first story about Dadi, has nothing to do with meatless days. In fact, it is a
story about ‘meat’ and drink, and all the gossip that accompanied eating. Although, the month of
Ramdan is mentioned, but it is mentioned more for its feasting, than fasting. Suleri’s second
story, called Meatless Days can be read and enjoyed on its own, without reading the first one
Dadi. It begins in a rather dramatic manner, with her sister Tillat’s visit in New Haven with her
‘entourage’ of three children. She announced one day her discovery about kapuras - they were
not sweetbreads – as they had been told by their mother, but testicles!
I had strongly hoped they would call them sweetbreads instead of testicles, but I was wrong. The
only reason it had become a question in my mind was Tillat’s fault, of course: she had come
visiting fromKuwait one summer, arriving in New Haven with her three children, all of them
designed to constitute a large surprise. As a surprise they worked wonderfully, leaving me
reeling with the shock of a generation who attends on infants and all the detail they manage to

50
accrue. But the end of the day would come at last, and when the rhythm of their sleep sat like
heavy peace upon a room, then Tillat and I could talk. Our conversations were meals, delectable,
but fraught with a sense of prior copywright, because each of us was obliged to talk too much
about what the other already did not know. (Meatless Days)
This led Suleri to delve in her past, and recall stories about her childhood – mainly about food,
eating and meat. She started by narrating how she stole and ate ‘cauliflowers’ and carrots from
her vegetable garden to the surprise of servants. When finally she was discovered one day, she
was made to eat ‘kirrne’ (kidneys) at the recommendation of their cook. The mother told her she
was to eat ‘sweetbreads’. Now,
‘kirrne’ (kidneys) and kapuras are traditionally cooked together. So she ate kidneys and kapuras
cooked together, presented to her as ‘sweetbreads.’ Although Sara was told by ‘wicked Ifat’ the
older sister that what she was eating ‘made pee’ in the human body, she continued to believe
that what she ate was ‘sweetbreads.’ Tillat’s information sets upon thinking, what
otherdeceptions were involved in food that they ate in Pakistan.
In the stories that follow, Suleri narrates a few incidents about food adulteration in Pakistan,
and how Irfani, the younger brother learned to fear food. Food becomes associated with some
kind of deception. But, to change the tone, she turns again to Ramdan, and what pleasures of
food and feasting were associated with it. It was a fine excuse for company and affability. That
swerve from severity to celebration happened often. It certainly was true of meatless days.
Then begins the central episode of meatless days, described in detail not only for Suleri’s
(especially western ) reader but also to map on to it the whole range of potential meanings her
imagination had grasped to turn it into a personal and political symbol.
This is reproduced at some length below:
The country was made in 1947, and shortly thereafter the government decided that two days out
of each week would be designated as meatless days, in order to conserve the national supply of
goats and cattle. Every Tuesday and Wednesday the butchers’ shops would stay firmly closed,
without a single carcass dangling from the huge metal hooks that lined the canopies under
which the butchers’ squatted, selling meat, and without the open drains at the side of their
narrow street ever running with trace of blood. On days of normal trade, blood would briskly
flow, carrying with it flotillas of
chicken feathers, and little bits of sinew, and entrails, or a bladder full and yellow that a butcher
had just bounced deftly into the drain. On meatless days the world emptied into a skeletal
remain: the hot sun came to scorch away all the odors and liquids of slaughter and shrivelled on
the chopping blocks the last curlicues of anything organic, making them look both vacant and
precise. As a principle of hygiene I suppose it was a good idea although it had very little to do
with conservation: the people who could afford to buy meat, after all, were those who could also
afford refrigeration, so the only thing government accomplished was to make some people’s
Mondays very busy indeed. The begum had to remember to give the cook thrice as much the
money, the butchers had to produce thrice as much the meat; the cooks had to buy enough flesh
and fowl and other sundry organs to keep an averagely carnivorous household eating for three
days. A favorite meatless day breakfast, for example, consisted of goat’s head and feet cooked
with rich spices into a rich and ungula sauce – remarkable, the things that people eat. And so,

51
instead of making an atmosphere of abstention in the city, the institution of meatless days
rapidly came to signify the imperative behind the acquisition of all things fleshly. We thought
about beef, which is called “big meat” and we all thought about mutton, “little meat,” and then
we collectively thought about chicken, the most coveted of
them all.
Thus far, the incident is narrated in a seemingly simple, bare down-to-earth manner. The detail,
aims at clarity, but it is careful, economic and precise. Nobody can suspect that such a bare
narrative will have a network of hidden symbols. But as the reader moves on further to the next
two paragraphs, a new significance of meatless days begins to dawn upon him:
But here I must forget my American sojourn, which has taught me to look on chicken as a
notably undignified bird, with pimply skin and pockets of fat tucked into peculiar places and
unnecessarily meaty breasts. Those meatless days fowls were a thing apart. …Naturally we
cherished them and lavished much care on trying to obtain the freshest of the crop. …Once I was
in Karachi with my sister Nuz
when the though that she had to engage in the social ferocity of
buying chicken was making her quite depressed. We went anyway, with Nuz assuming an
alacrity that had nothing to do with efficiency and everything to do with desperation. Nuz stood
small and dark in the chicken monger’s shop, ordered her birds, paid for them, and then
suddenly remembered her house-wifely duty. “Are they fresh?”
the chicken monger looked at her with some perplexity. “But, Begum sahib,” he said gently,
“they are alive.” “Oh,” said Nuz “so they are”…… But “Oh,” she said again half an hour later, “So
a fresh chicken is a dead chicken.” “Not too dead,” I replied. It made us think of meatless days as
some vast funeral game where Monday’s frenetic creation of fresh things beckoned in the burial
meals of Tusedays and Wednesdays. “Food,” Nuz said with disgust – “It is
what you bury in your body. To make her feel less alone we stopped at Shezan on the way home,
to get her an adequate supply of marzipan; for she eats nothing but sweet things. (Meatless
Days)
Now, although the most obvious purpose of this description is to drive home the conclusion that
meatless days were, ironically, in the context of Pakistan, abundantly rich in food, stored on the
previous days. However, through a careful choice of words, no doubt an outcome of intense
reflection upon the event and scene, Sara works out another symbolic meaning of meatless days.
This meaning is the reverse of the first, that is, meatless days, were a large ‘funeral game.’ But
the notion of meatless days has been selected precisely for this irony and its symbolic value in
Sara’s life.
The power, and beauty, of Suleri’s narrative lies in the fact that she begins by introducing the
scene of empty butchers’ shops on Tusedays and Wednesdays, introduces the characters, Nuz
and I, engaged in acquiring ‘things fleshly’ and then the enactment of a little drama, Nuz’s
confusion ending in her final grasp of reality “Food… is what you bury in your body”. The most
prominent quality of her narrative
lies in her ability to ‘connect’ what seems unconnected like ‘food’ and ‘burial’ – for one thinks of
food as symbol of life – not of burial and death. The connection is worked out through a series of
words and images that provide necessary detail of the scene being described:

52
…..butcher’s shops ……. a single carcass dangling … the butchers’ squatted, selling meat….. the
open drains…… running with trace of blood…. blood would briskly flow… odors and liquids of
slaughter and shrivelled on the chopping blocks…..vacant and precise.
One also notices a huge amount of detail about other matters only indirectly related to the
meatless days. She talks about the begums, the cooks, the eating habits of Pakistani nation, joys
of abundant eating and food, chicken and then the rather
Prufrokian phrase ‘Nuz and I’ introducing the element of drama and dialogue. These images of
bustling life energy stand in sharp contrast to the images of death signified by butchers’ shop,
dangling carcasses and briskly flowing blood. It is this contrast and irony that are structural
basis of her narrative. It also highlights Suleri’s power of reflection and her way with words.
Through a series of incidents related to food and eating, even casual descriptions, she seems to
have impelled huge waves of thoughts in all directions, mainly through a skein of words. These
words move the narrative forward, or turn round to some previous thought or notion. They
become recurrent images and symbols. This symbolic significance of the pleasure of eating food
is worked upon in the last episode of Meatless Days. So she describes a dream, after her
mother’s death: And then, when I was trying to move away from the raw irritability of grief, I
dreamed a dream that left me reeling. It put me in London, on the pavement of some unlovely
street, an attempted crescent of vagrant houses. A blue van drove up: I noticed that it was a
refrigerated car and my father was inside it. He came to tell me that we must put my mother into
her coffin, and he opened the blue hatch of
the van to make me reach inside, where it was very cold. What I found was hunks of meat
wrapped in a cellophone each of them felt like mamma, in some odd way It was my task to carry
those flanks
across the street and to fit them into the coffin at the other side of the road, like pieces in a
jigsaw puzzle. Then my father’s back was turned, I found myself engaged in rapid theft – for the
sake of Ifat and Shahid and Tillat and all of us, I stole away a portion of that body. It was a piece
of her foot that I found, a small bone like a knuckle, which I quickly hid inside my mouth, under
my tongue….. It is hard to believe
today that I thought the dream too harsh a thing.. perhaps my mind had designed me to feel
rudely tender. I had eaten, that was all, and woken up to a world of meatless days.
This is the end of story, then. This is her conclusion. This is the significance of meatless days.
She had eaten too much, like the prefast meal of Ramdan, not for one time but for all times of
dearth, famine or fast, and abstinence. All incidents about eating and fasting, food and
abstinence begin to make sense. Her dream is about ‘hunks of meat’ that felt like Mamma and
eating of ‘a small bone like a knuckle’ was
done as much for her siblings as herself. The meat is food for one living creature, but it is death
of another. The life of one is the death of the other. The dream makes her secretly eat a bone of
mother’s body, because she is going to ‘wake up’ into ‘meatless days’.

53
The meaning of meatless days extends beyond what is already known to us. An ordinary event
becomes a symbol. The word meatless becomes synonymous with motherless, fatherless,
sisterless and brotherless. In short it is loveless, homeless – and finally lifeless. This extension of
meaning is also a compression – since so much personal emotion, grief and sorrow has been
thrown into it. The significance of a public ‘funeral game’ comes home through private deaths of
so many loving bodies.
The tales that follow Meatless Days do not talk about meatless days any more. They simply talk
about her ‘hungering,’ a craving for the lost bodies and their tales. The days of Suleri’s American
sojourn become, at least for some time, barren days, devoid of her mother’s body, and her love.
They make her sigh while sitting alone in America:
‘Flavour of my infancy, my mother, still be food: I want my hunger as it always was, neither flesh
nor fowl’ ( a pun on ‘foul’ intended?).
The notion of ‘food’ and ‘eating’ are re-current not only because the main events are built
around them, but also because they inhere in the entire mode of thinking and feeling reflected in
the minute details of the narrative in all contexts:
1. I liked it, the waking up an hour before dawn to eat the prefast meal and chat in whispers.
2. That face and I occupied the same playpen, ate sand out of the same sandbox together… eaten
another
3. Little Tunsi boy telling her nurse…. that Ama had eaten another baby so he’d have another
brother or a sister soon.
These examples show how the physical forms of food and eating are made to stand for
metaphors of abstract forms of ‘food’, ‘diet’ and ‘eating’. It is the most fundamental thought
wrested from the body of food, to connect the physical with the spiritual. It is significant to note
that in all the examples quoted above, the idea of ‘food,’ ‘eating,’ and ‘diet’ is placed in an
intimate relation with talk, chat, lingo (our
conversations were meals). On the one hand this connection is quite natural and universal. This
association may have suggested itself to her, at least in some contexts,
without effort or plan. But, in all major incidents it is put together with food as a part of
conscious design.
The notion of food is bound up with talk in a physical way – because in most natural setting if
family members sit down to eat together, they talk. Talking is a part of eating. In fact ‘food’ is
physical eating. But it is also spiritual. ‘Talk’ is food for human spirit. Talk is a form of ‘food’ too.
It feeds your soul, mind, intellect, emotions.
Many incidents in Meatless days emphasize a symbolic use of ‘food’ ‘diet’ ‘eating’ as much as the
literal. Sara was fed, among other things on talk, conversation, tales and stories. She grew
among people who were, excepting her mother, immensely ‘talkable’. Her father, siblings and
friends talked, read and acted stories and told each other tales. “In our early days,” Sara tells us,
“the most intensely talkable, Dale, and I savoured the taste of articulating in each other’s
presence…” Therefore, she has an inner urge to articulate those tales she was fed on, or to

54
reverse the analogy, are ‘buried’ in her. To find their significance in one’s adulthood they must
be re-visited - retold – given another life in art, through writing!
The notion of food through its symbolic connection with talk/tales, is directly related to her art
of writing, aesthetic design and other related ideas. In order to understand these connectedness
of different notions through words, we look at this play upon words and images, beginning from
‘food’ and ‘talk’ first and what they lead on to, in the next section.
‘Food’ and ‘Talk’ : A Play Upon Words

It is significant to note that the stories that come after Meatless days are not about ‘meat’ and
drink, nor so much about food, as about ‘talk’ and ‘lingo.’ The story of her friend Mustakori is
third in the series, it is mainly about her language – what names she had, what languages
characterised her. Similarly the story about Papa is lso
about how Papa talked, as did Shahid. Mama was reticent, but her quiet ways were as dear to
Sara as others’ speech or Ifat’s stories. She was ‘fed’ on these languages and stories.
Talk is the food of spirit. She had been fed on many voices in Pakistan- of mamma’s, papa’s,
Ifat’s, Shahid’s …the list is inexhaustible. So she learned to talk early:
“You learned to talk early Sara,” Mama told me of my forgotten past. “You were so interested in
sentences.” It made me the quaintest baby that she had- What sounds of conversation filled my
infancy, patterns of urgent and perpetual talk! I heard my parents talking to each other all the
time, but never of themselves,…an abundant talk-filled era,…
The most talking people in the family were Papa and Dadi. About her Dadi, she notices:
She would creep down the driveway…. to stop cars and people on
the street to give them all the gossip she had on God
Dadi behaved abysmally at my mother’s funeral….she set up loud and unnecessary lamentations
in the dining room
….. she lay…uttering most awful imprecations…. Dadi could berate Satan in full eloquence only
after she had clambered on top of the dining-room table.
Dadi sent wraiths of wail toward the ceiling “Irfan, Irfan, Irfan” About her father, she says:
My father spoke, and when Papa talked, it was of Pakistan, But we were glad then, at being
audience to that familiar conversation.
There were always a few words that his flamboyant English insisted he mispronounce; words, I
often imagined, over which his heart took hidden pleasure when he got them by the gullet and
held them until they empurpled to the colour of his own indignant nature. “Another” was one of
them – I cannot count how many times we would hear him
say “Anther?” “Anther?” It did not matter whether it was another meal or another government
or another baby at issue: all we heard was a voice bristling with amazement at the thought that
anther could exist. It seemed his patience could not sustain itself over trisyllabic, tripping up his

55
voice on most trisyllables that did not sound like Pakistan- for there was a word over which he
could slow down, to exude ownership as he uttered it! But something like “beginning” -
that is something more mundane – had to become “bignig” a hasty abbreviation that was
secretly aware of the comic quality of slapdash, the shorthand through which slapdash begins.
(Papa and Pakistan)
She says her Papa’s speech was ‘ferocious,’ ‘fearsome.’
Mairi said my father to my mother what’s the greatest thing you have done in your life? – hardly
my mother’s favourite lingo, but pip was in a chatty mood and liked to talk of greatness. Papa’s
powerful discourse would surround her night and day – when I see her in her room, she is
always looking down, listening!” This is a significant image – her mother surrounded by her
father’s powerful discourse! She was also surrounded by her Dadi’s loud ‘gossip’, ‘imprecations’
and lamentations. Sara describes her Dadi’s ‘intensities’ which distressed her mother. In her
father’s home there was not only an inclination to talk and talk too much, but she also notices a
loudness, raucousness and noise in all Asian characters and settings. When she talks to her
sister Tillat: ..then Tillat and I could talk. Our conversations were meals, delectable, but fraught
with a sense of prior copy wright, because each of us was obliged to talk too much about what
the other already did not know.
Ifat was full of tales about pregnancy, and Shahid would ask her to rally round. The only reticent
woman in her household was her Welsh mother. Deprived of the food of talk, what is Suleri left
with now? She says – she is left with only ‘words’ free from the syntax, – like mama, papa, Ifat –
words like empty shells. In America, she feels the urge to find a different ‘idiom’ to live. This is
another theme of her stories then. She feels the necessity to construct memory of those names,
like museums in history. It is a struggle that she must engage in, as a safeguard against
‘forgetting.’ So she has found a refuge in the intellection of the West. This is another
life altogether, not of talk or conversation, but of writing stories, her art and craft. This is not a
conversation with people, but a conversation with one’s own self, a lonely journey into one’s
mind.
Writing, says Suleri is like turning water into milk. This is another dimension of meatless ness,
then. Meatless Days – is reference to transcending life of meat and drink, the life of body and
physical pleasure, and to learn to survive without meat, for there are other forms of food, other
manners of eating. One learns this when one has eaten sand, and grief. So she spent hours in
thinking what will or will not jell together in her tales. Suleri’s language and expression have
provided an essential outlet to bottled up emotions that block normal living and progress in a
migrant society – for many Asians, Pakistanis in particular. Her style is of great importance for
those who might face similar dilemma. This is the point illustrated in the final section of this
paper.
Significance of Suleri’s Style
Suleri has laid the foundation of a great tradition of writing in English in this country by finding
an apt symbol for the theme of ‘migration’ to other foreign lands. For this was the hardest job of
all – to find it for Pakistan! For, Pakistan’s situation is peculiar, in spite of universality of
migrant experience all over the world. Suleri’s tales typifie the pangs of sorrow, the agonies of
soul, and scattering of families of all Pakistani migrants to foreign lands. She has invented a
powerful metaphor for the anguish of millions who have or might in future tread a similar path

56
of sorrow and suffering to embrace ‘western intellection’. Without these metaphors of common
life, writers cannot talk meaningfully about their experience to their reading public. There is no
doubt that
it was hard to find an adequate symbol of Pakistan’s Islamized Asian life that would express our
specific personal sorrows intensified by the political disasters of the country. Only a woman of
Suleri’s calibre, in possession of a great historical sense (Suleri) could do it. Sara has found the
right image ‘Meatless Day’ for all those who have spent their
childhood and had had adult education in Pakistan before leaving the country for foreign shores.
Since they can never erase their memories, or drop them away just like that, they will, in the
absence of ‘meaty life of past pleasures’ live off ‘the refrigerated meat’ of memories. That Sara’s
attitude to politics and religion is critical may not be of great consequence for those who do not
share her political views. What matters is, however the fact that the essence of her experience,
the essentials of life she depicts, is non- American, non-European. Her unreserved assent to
Shahid’s cry of pain ‘we are lost Sara’ is shared by us all who have experienced similar loss of
family ties through death and distance in a similar way. No literati before Suleri, who emerged
on the international scene from Pakistan, could give expression to common sorrows and joys,
while still retaining a critical posture to evils that blight our culture and politics.
It is not just this, but other aspects of life from Pakistan that no writer before Suleri has had the
courage to turn into symbols of aesthetic power. True that she has criticised Islam, and some of
us will not agree with her views, but she has turned veiling, praying, courtyard, mosque, and
shab-e-meraj turned into powerful literary
symbols. She has used them not only to depict the contour of Islamisation in Pakistan, but also
as neutral symbols to describe her personal feelings and emotions. Never
before they have been employed in a secular setting to symbolise merely a ‘human condition.’
She has, on top of everything else, turned to the landscape of Pakistan – the essential feature of
postcolonial literature (Ashcroft and Tiffin:1989) - and has depicted it with all its beauty,
confusion and chaos. She has talked about Murree hills and Nathia Gully, because they are
beautiful and among the mountain she came for healing, to feel free. But she has mentioned all
other places no matter how dreary - Jehlum, Cambulpur, Sargodha, besides Lahore, with the
same faithfulness. It has taken all the courage, patience thought, to do it. Above all it has taken
firm commitment and a great depth of feeling too. If she did not throw herself in the heart of
Pakistan, like Ifat, she has still done it, only in a different way. Meatless Days a refutation of her
calm assertion in the book ‘Pakistan and I were coming to a parting.’ Suleri’s voice is distinctly
that of a woman from Pakistan. None of the Pakistani writers among men have thought about
Pakistan with this much intensity and concentration. ‘Leaving Pakistan was like leaving the
company of women. I have tried to imagine, if any one from India would say ‘Leaving India is
like leaving the company of women.’ To me, it does not sound right, in spite of similarity of
cultures. She has depicted bold, powerful women unlike those depicted in Urdu poetry. Ifat is a
model for that courage that Urdu mystic poets eulogise but the culture never accepts. The most
important is Ifat’s liberated language, for Suleri dilated upon her facility for ‘imprecations’ and
bold inquiry and experiment in sex. Suleri has
talked about Ifat’s courage to know, and ask and inform Sara about all she knew about sex. It is
no secret now that one major triumph of English over Urdu is its ability to allow both sexes the
freedom and provide vocabulary for sex-talk (Rehman).

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The greatest contribution of Suleri in laying the foundation for superb tradition of writing in
English is that Suleri has shown to the prospective writers of English, how to avoid or overcome
‘sentimentalism’ which according to Rehman spoils English in Pakistan. This is in spite of the
fact that Suleri has expressed strong emotions. She has mentioned Heba’s baby sobs, Shahid’s
painful statements, Dadi’s lamentations, yet, she has moved quickly away to change the mood.
She has turned to some drama to some new episode, or event to metamorphose sentiment – or
its exuberance in any case. Suleri has made use of all great classics of English and has combined
several traditions of realistic and symbolist narrative, from Chaucer down to Eliot, and also
further down to the Postmoderns. The decision to write character portrait seems to have been
inspired, at least partly by Chaucer. The narrative design follow different devices of narrative
Milton, Eliot and Frost. In spite of all dramatisation and detachment drawn from different
sources of English literature, the emotional power of her tales touches a rare lyricism associated
with only poetry in Urdu.
A Stylistic analysis of Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days

Introduction
Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days is applauded the world over for its linguistic ingenuity. There is no
doubt that Sara has used language to achieve a diversity of stylistic, even poetic effects. But what
is regarded to be ‘style’ in literature is so infused with a subjective and emotional element in
language that, any analysis of that language is regarded to be injurious to it. Besides, it is
believed to be elusive element in that analysis will ‘defuse’ what is essentially a work of
‘synthesis’ and ‘fusion.’
Linguists, however, disagree and believe that whatever literary ‘effect’ and ‘vision’ is
reconstructed in a poem or piece of fiction, it is constructed through language and should be
subject to linguistic analysis like any non-literary language.
Attempts of linguists to study literature, especially literary prose have, however, revealed that a
long piece of fictional prose can be studied only when, firstly, guided by readers’ intuitive
judgement, and secondly, by a ‘judicious’ selection of language (Leech, Widdowson and Short)
made by a discriminating mind about what constitutes the emotional, expressive or visionary
element of a text. The intuitive judgment is considered to be an important ‘tool’ of investigation
in qualitative research methodology in general (Hakim), and in the study of literary discourses
in particular
(Carter and Burton).
Analyzing the Language of Fiction

Since fiction is written in prose, all discussion about the language of fiction necessarily concerns
with the language of ‘prose’ in fiction. For the word ‘fiction’ taken alone may refer to invention of
character, plot and other schemes that create and present a world of imagination. In linguistic
studies, however, our concern is not with the invention of characters, or plot construction - not
directly, that is. The primary concern is with those linguistic features, or patterns of the
‘narrative’ which distinguish literary prose from non-literary prose. Literariness is considered to

58
be an elusive quality. At best it is defined as the emotive or expressive element of language in

poetry or prose fiction. The only linguistic
element associated with the ‘emotive’ element in literature has been found to be lexis or
vocabulary. There is a special vocabulary of literature, which will look ‘deviant,’ outside
literature, but it conveys the subjective and emotive meanings in literature. But then, much of
literature is written in normal language. In that case the literary element is always difficult to
define in purely linguistic terms – especially in lengthy prose.
There is generally an agreement that apart from metre, the differences between the language of
poetry and the language of prose may not be readily discernible. The study of some forms of
poetry may sometimes reveal more readily some linguistic features of vocabulary and grammar
which appear to be ‘deviant’ (Widdowson) when compared to the ‘norm.’ But then a careful
examination of literary prose, especially in fiction, also reveals the same features- only
differently distributed (Lodge). The literary element in both, poetry and prose fiction, consists in
the fashioning of ‘patterns over and above those required by the actual language system’
(Widdowson). Now these ‘patterns’ need not be ‘deviations’ nor may they appear to be lying
apart from the patterns that form the norm of language. The components of these patterns my
be ‘deviant’ or ‘non-deviant’ or both. The literary ‘patterns’ fashioned ‘over and above’ the
normal language are recognised to be images, metaphors, similes, symbols, figures of speech,
irony paradox and a host of other rhetorical devices that may or may not be specific to certain
‘genres.’ And they may be composed of deviant, or non-deviant or both kinds of components.
A linguistic study of the literary language may concern itself with any form of these components,
deviant or non-deviant; or alternatively, with how both components knit together a specific form
of ‘literary’ pattern, or effect. Therefore, in any given investigation one must ‘select’ some
features for stylistic analysis in one study and ignore the rest. This is done for the following
reasons:
There is no objective way of determining a statistical norm, against which to evaluate a deviant
structure or pattern. So for the sake of convenience and practical necessity we have to rely in
general on relative norms.
It is not possible to have a complete list of the properties of a text; therefore, we have to select
the features to study.
There is no direct relation between statistical deviance and stylistic significance: Literary
considerations therefore must guide us in selecting what features to examine. There is no
absolute consistency of style within a given domain, and therefore, in measuring the overall
statistical properties of text, we may fail to capture significant variations of style.
Therefore, there is no agreement on the set of descriptive categories required for an adequate
account of a language such as English; consequently different investigators
are likely to differ in the way they identify linguistic features in a text. (Leech and Short)
Hence in this investigation, only those sentences are studied that strike me as ‘ingenious’
expression of some kind on the basis of my intuitive judgement as an ordinary reader. My aim is
merely to explore and find some linguistic patterns in Sara’s sentences. I have used linguistic
tools and terminology primarily for the sake of precision. But in the study of ‘literary’
expression, it is absolutely essential not to be confined to/ by it. To seek linguistic ground for

59
reactions or responses intuitively aroused in the reader through the experience of literary or
poetic language, linguistic structures must be interpreted for functions in a literary context.
Hence intuition guides linguistic analysis made here, and analysis and interpretation merely
seek, at least at this initial stage of enquiry, to account for reactions and responses that Sara’s
expression arouses in ordinary readers, like me.
In the following section 1.3, I simply present a general but also a systematic and explorative
account of what appears to me ingenuity of Sara’s language.
Intuitive ‘Cue’ to Ingenious Expression

In this section, I quote a selection of sentences that I have felt intuitively to be the most
‘expressive’ in the language of Meatless Days. Although the effort to work out prominent
patterns of Sara’s style is momentarily deferred, I have divided these examples in three parts for
general comment, again on the basis of ‘intuition’. The measure of Sara’s mastery over the
creation of such ingenious sentences is that one can quote a handful out – of the (con) text,
though such an act would rob them of their beauty and significance.
The first list of sentences that strike me as unusual are given below. I have made an effort to
make this list as representative as possible. Italics here and elsewhere are all mine: I thought she
was the very air I breathed, but Ifat was prior, prior. Karachi’s traffic grew lunchtime crazed.
She gulped on her own eloquence, her breakfast bosom quaked… I was surprised beyond
measure when that big head bent backward and wept, a quick summer shower of tears. By the
time he left, all surfaces were dry. Dadi with her flair for drama had allowed life to sit so heavily
upon her back that her spine wilted and froze into a perfect curve, and so it was in the posture of
a shrimp that she went scuttling through the day. Sometimes, to my mother’s great distress,
Dadi could berate satan in full eloquence only after she had clambered on top of the dining room
table and lain there like a molding centerpiece.
Dadi…. waited for the return of her eldest son, my father. He had gone careening off to a place
called Inglistan, or England, fired by some of the several enthusiams made available by the
proliferating talk of independence.
I can tell this only to someone like Anita…as we go perambulating through the grimness of New
Haven and feed upon the pleasures of our conversational ways.
There are many more like these. About these examples we notice that they contain different
linguistic categories of ‘ingenious’ expression.
These categories are the following:

1. Words (Ifat was prior, prior)
2. Collocations (lunchtime crazed, breakfast bosom)
3. Phrases ( a quick summer shower of tears)
4. Clauses (She gulped on her own eloquence, her breakfast bosom quaked)

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In linguistic description, we shall regard, ‘lunchtime crazed’ and ‘breakfast bosom’ as ‘deviant’
collocations. And though the words ‘gulp’ or ‘eloquence’ are not in themselves ‘deviant,’ the
clause ‘She gulped on her eloquence’ is not a ‘norm’ either. According to semantic rules of
English ‘gulp’ requires a food item and not ‘eloquence’ as its object. Since it is an unusual
combination of ordinary words, it is ‘deviant’ – a form of ‘ingenious’ expression which has
symbolic meaning in its ‘context.’ Similarly ‘summer shower of tears’ is symbolic description of
tears – it is not an ordinary ‘shower’ but the literal meaning (of an image) are extended to apply
it
to a different kind of phenomenon. This symbolic use of language is what we call ingenuity of
literary expression.
One can infer from this brief discussion that Sara’s ‘ingenious’ literary expression consists in the
blending of some deviant patterns into non-deviant patterns in her language. The full
significance of their power and beauty can come into notice only in a larger context. A sentence
like, “I try to lay the subject down and change its clothes, but before I know it, it has sprinted off
evilly in the direction of ocular evidence” cannot make much sense without its immediate
context: My audience is lost and angry to be lost, and both of us must find some token of
exchange for this failed conversation. I try to lay the subject down and change its clothes, but
before I know it, it has sprinted off evilly in the direction of ocular evidence. It goads me into
saying, with
the defiance of a plea, “You did not deal with Dadi.”
Or, alternatively, only the context explains a particular ‘collocation’ or combination of words,
revealing Sara’s freedom of invention:
The following morning General Yahya’s mistress came to mourn with us over breakfast,
lumbering in draped with swathes of over scented silk. The brigadier lit an English cigarette – he
was frequently known to avow that Pakistani cigarettes gave him a cuff - and bit on his
moustache. “Yes,” he barked, “these are trying times.” “Oh yes, Gul,” Yahya’s mistress wailed,
“These are such trying times.” She gulped on her own eloquence, her breakfast bosom quaked,
and
then resumed authority over that dangling sentence, “It is so trying,” she continued, “I find it so
trying, it is trying to us all, to live in these trying, trying times.” Ifat’s eyes met mine in complete
accord: mistress transmogrified into muse:”
One can notice how Sara draws on the ‘context’ to create unusual patterns of language and
meanings. The origin of ‘breakfast bosom’ becomes evident. So does the expressive quality of the
sentence ‘She gulped on her own eloquence, her breakfast bosom quaked,’ when it follows the
comment uttered by Yahya’s mistress, “These are such trying times.” And then it is followed by
Sara’s own comment “and then resumed authority over that dangling sentence.” One also
notices the impact of Sara’s cheeky reflections, like ‘mistress transmogrified into muse’ or her
perceptions of sound effects
‘yes he barked’, and Yahya’s mistress ‘wailed’. There is a variety in the use of innovative
expression. Such innovation is the result of Sara’s deep, intimate, intensely personal reactions in
her private thoughts.

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A good many sentences gain power and beauty from the conclusions she draws from her
thoughts. These form the second kind of sentences I want to comment on:
There were times, as with love, when I felt only disappointment In summers, too, we slept
beneath the stars… until sleep came as a confirmation of the magnificent irrelevance of
beauty. Darkness after all is too literal a hiding-space, pretending as it does to make a secret of
the body: since secrecy annuls, eats up, what is significant in surface, it cannot be sufficient to
our tastes. There is nothing that can disappoint someone who has learned to be engaged by the
wavering course of disappointment To mourn perhaps is simply to prolong a posture of
astonishment
Something is coming to strip us to the bone.... Nobody can miss the suggestive power or the
implied thought of these sentences, though full significance and the cutting- edge sharpness of
these sentence will come home only when we put them back in their context. These are
metaphoric or symbolic uses of language. They contain metaphors, comparisons or contrasts –
sometimes identified by a linguistic element like ‘as’ or ‘since.’ Or, they may sometimes contain
some ‘figures of speech’ (nothing can engage someone who has learned to be engaged by the
wavering course of disappointment) or rhetorical devices (since secrecy annuls,….it cannot be
sufficient to our taste). But most of the sentences have merely semantic connections with other
ideas and images scattered in the texts. For example, the sentence ‘Something is coming to strip
us to the bone…’ is a reference to the arrival of the ‘summer’ in its immediate context – but the
statement also refers to ‘death’ through association of ideas like changing weather and passing
time. There is another very special feature of Sara’s style. She frequently uses sentences, echoing
some already heard idiom or quotation, or gives subtle twists to some famous literary expression
or phrase for her desired meanings:
Let sleeping giants lie, I would say [about Tom] and widely skirted all subjects that might make
him stir. “Go, find yourself another legend and then return,” she quoted from
a forgotten rhyme. I had not yet had my fill of educating America ….but how could I do it,
become Lilliput to the Gulliver of Tom? What a Jonah my voice feels to the whale of that
context Ifat before him and me following so fast behind
After the hurly burly of our childhood’s constant movement
But the hurly burly of it all ?… for the trouble with hurly burly is that it can sound
convincing… Those tales would wend their way into a final story.
I …watching my friend T.K formulate and reformulate sentences I knew he would never say.
Down on the ground there was too much chatter anyway .... We dangled quiet thought into the
water until our sentences happened to tug us… into the kind of startlement that says: “My
goodness – there’s actually a crab at the end of my line I felt put out of joint by such bodily
statement …then chastened to imagined the arduous ness of what it means to scaffold me: poor
winter tree, put upon by such a chattering plumage…
These sentences resonate with what has been said elsewhere, or before; Sara draws on several
contexts, near and far. I am reminded of Chaucer, T.S Eliot, Donne, Shakespeare (particularly
Hamlet), Swift and several others. No doubt, deviant collocations like ‘chattering plumage’ are

62
understandable from the immediate context, but their full suggestive power comes into play
only when a reader can hear echoes of the classical writers of English literature. These examples
are, then, what form the ‘suggestive’ and ‘evocative’ power of her language. She evokes in the
reader a meaning, an association, already known and a response already formed. It makes her
language rich and powerful – for she adds to the meaning and significance by applying them to
her personal and emotional life and experience.
This section has shown that the ingenuity of Sara’s literary style lies in: creating some deviant
patterns of language and meaning - out of ‘normal’ patterns of grammar and vocabulary, that
gain an expressive quality from several contexts both ‘near’ and ‘far’ Although we have already
seen to some degree how ‘deviant’ and ‘non- deviant’ patterns are created, drawn from and
blended with new and old contexts, this information is rather sketchy. It consists of examples
randomly selected from the text. Since fiction is a large piece of ‘prose’ it will be advisable to
look at the selection and choice of vocabulary and grammar together in larger pieces of
discourse, to look for regular patterns of style beyond words.
Viewing Patterns in Discourse

As already demonstrated in section 1.2, the significance of a word, collocation, sentence or
phrase can be grasped only in its context. This is so because the context provides the necessary
connections. However words and collocations may refer to meanings beyond the context of
discourse. We have already seen phrases like ‘the hurly burly of it all ” look for meaning outside
the context. It is for this reason that Sara believes that words give her a freedom that grammar
does not: “— as an infant I was absorbed with grammar before I had fully learned the names of
things, which caused a single slippage in my nouns: I would call a marmalade a squirrel, and I’d
call a squirrel a marmalade. Today I can understand the impulse and would very much like to
call sugar an opossum; an antelope, tea. To be engulfed by grammar after all is a tricky prospect,
and a voice deserves to declare its own control in any way it can, asserting that in the end it
is an inventive thing.” Words give her the freedom to ‘recall’ many ‘contexts’ and then
reconstruct them with words. Hence to study certain ‘deviant patterns’ one may have to go
beyond the immediate (con) text. An extreme example of this kind can be represented through
the following example. Talking about the Muslims who migrated from India to Pakistan, at the
time of India’s partition in 1947, she makes strange use of ‘wail’ and ‘clattering’. The italics
represent ‘deviations’ from the norm:
They tell me, nightmare trains had wailed them there, clattering
irreversibility over the tracks of that long unmaking The immediate context of the text enables
a proficient to work out that: ‘wailed them there’ means ‘brought them there’
‘clattering irreversibility’ means ‘making it impossible to reverse this situation’ In order to grasp
the implication of these words, however, the reader should know that her reference is to trains
which came to Lahore loaded with amputated dishevelled migrants from all over India who
presented pictures of gruesome massacre, and unbearable misery. There was a lot of mourning,
literal ‘wailing’ (a word that she has frequently used in Meatless Days) over the loss of human
life. Of course the trains came ‘clattering irreversibility’ after the horror of 1947. She calls them
‘tracks of long unmaking,’ because the making of Pakistan for her is also its ‘unmaking.’ Unlike
‘breakfast bosom’ where the (con)text explains a deviation, it requires some knowledge of

63
history to understand what ‘trains wailed them there’ refers to. Those who do not understand
the context will be like the reader who does not grasp in full that ‘Ifat before and me following
fast behind’ echoes Donne, or ‘hurly burly of it all’ refers to Shakespeare. One has to look ‘far’ to
other ‘contexts’ or - other ‘texts’ to hear echoes of Swift, Chaucer and Shakespeare.
In contrast to these ‘deviations’ that require ‘contexts’ for meaning, Sara can also use a perfectly
ordinary word to extraordinary effect. Notice, for example the use of wrinkle’ in her description
of her friend Mustakor’s origin:
The first place where she lived was East Africa. My most trustworthy sources intimate me that
Mustakori was born in the early 1950s, in the Tanganyika that was, the Tanzania of today. Her
birthplace was Arusha, a coffee growing girdle of a district, lying in the shadow of Mount Meeru:
a mountain, they say, which is far more shapely and satisfactory qua Kiliminjaro’s inflated
slopes. Her parents, Asiatics,
claimed origin from Indian Punjab and Kashmir, via a de tour through Hong Kong, but I cannot
stop to explain that complex wrinkle.
Here, we suddenly come upon it, to receive the new meanings of wrinkle, like all of her other
comments that follow statements, qualifying them, colouring them with her feelings,
perceptions and moods. Evidently, her mind has been working upon the map of geographical
distances from India to Africa in terms of an image. She talks about ‘a girdle of a district’, ‘a de
tour through Hong Kong’ that must indeed form a ‘complex wrinkle.’
Words not only help her to ‘recall’ or allude to context, but also ‘build’ (con)texts of her own
choice – in relational patterns all her own. Hence I have noticed, one very special feature of her
‘style’ is to stay with some one word or idea through a number of sentences within a given
paragraph, and move on to the next sentence or clause with the help of word associations,
semantic connections and so on. In fact her paragraphs are built around the significance of one
idea. Or, sometimes, in one paragraph she may simply be trying to reach from one idea to
another associated thought. It will be useful now to look at a paragraph in order to understand
this. I have chosen a representative paragraph of pure ‘reflection’ connecting a present
moment with the past. It is an example of self- incriminating thought, a reflection over the use
of ‘bullying litanies’ while in love with Tom. But as they part ways, Sara learns about the folly of
love, and admonishes herself for hiding a ‘Mother Baptist’ in her attitude without knowing it at
first. Each sentence diverges far from the other, but the whole series aim to reach at the word
‘Mother Baptist’ connecting ‘stern pronouncements’ and bullying litanies’ in ‘her imperative
mood’ to suggest her ‘transmogrification’ over the years.
This paragraph is selected from the story called “Goodbye to the Greatness of Tom.”
The habit broken, it was sweet relief to me to be spared the follies of each of my stern
pronouncements, those bullying litanies I would deliver up to Tom, litanies of proper behaviour
that sprang from hidden funds of my corrective zeal. At the time of their uttering, I was roundly
persuaded by myself, but learned after a while to suspect the lack of conditionality in my own
imperative mood. I had gone to
school in a convent, that must be it, the fault of a building in which nuns walked in unison to the
whirring of a fan. 4For us their very habit was admonitory, a reminder that our souls were a
little disheveled, always in flight from the duty instigated by the dawning of each day. But who
could think of dawn when already by midday the combination of heat hunger and all manner of

64
inkiness sent us wheeling down those quiet corridors impulsively calling for carnival? In those
days my friend was that wonderful woman, Kausar
Mehmood, who had artist’s hands and whose face always amazed us because it could look like
James Mason and Ravi Shankar and Nazrul Islam, the mad Bengali poet, all at the same
moment. "Why do photographers always catch me,” she once wondered aloud, “before my smile
has reached its summit?” Well she would smile today if she saw my transmogrifications and in
the cast of scold or frown recognize continuing traces of Mother Baptist in me. There are eight
sentences in this paragraph. None is simple. All are clause complexes (Halliday). So we find
various arrangements of alpha, beta, gamma and theta clauses (Halliday), but alpha or super-
ordinate clause comes always first except in the sentence which starts with ‘The habit broken’ –
a subordinate clause. The clause complexes, one can see are built in such a manner that co-
ordinate or subordinate clauses allow her to ‘comment’ or ‘muse’ on the ‘statements’ given
usually in the main clause. Or sometimes, the following sentence ‘comments’ on the proposition
in a preceding sentence. Now, the ratio of her declarative statement in the main clause to her
‘musings’ in co-ordinate or subordinate clauses is one to several at least in this ‘reflective’
paragraph. The only variation of this pattern is that sometimes comments act like statements, or
statements like comments – producing sentences that form a chain of comments or chain of
statements, indistinguishable from each other and other sentences.
But Sara always comments, even when she is not reflecting. In her style of writing is mirrored a
need to ‘color’ with her perception even the most mundane of descriptions. Even a totally
descriptive piece of her prose fiction will demonstrate this tendency. Notice, for instance, the
following example:
Dadi, my father’s mother, was born in Meerut towards the end of the last century. She was
married at sixteen and widowed in her thirtees, and by her latter decades could never exactly
recall how many children she had borne. When India was partitioned, in August of 1947, she
moved her thin pure Urdu to Punjab of Pakistan and waited for the return of her eldest son, my
father. He had gone careening off to a place called Inglistan, or England, fired by some of the
several enthusiasms made available by the proliferating talk of independence.
In this paragraph one cannot fail to notice the use of ‘appositives’ structures - semantic
reformulations in grammatical units, mainly of nouns, that stand in the relation of co-ordinates:
Dadi, my father’s mother, was born in Meerut …waited for the return of her eldest son, my
father. …a place called Inglistan, or England…
To this one may add, the use of qualifying clauses like ‘fired by one of the several enthusiams…’
expressing again Sara’s view of things. Qualifiers are, then, the most obvious and direct form of
her personal thought. It is essential to identify ‘qualifiers,’ then, for not all sub-ordinate or
coordinate clauses are ‘qualifiers’ representing the writer’s subjective view, emotions and
feelings in the following paragraphs:
So, worn by repetition, we stood by Ifat’s grave, and took note of narcissi, still alive, that she
must have placed upon my mother on the day that she was killed. 2It made us impatient, in a
way, as though we had to decide that there was nothing so farcical as grief and that it had to be
eliminated from our diets for good. It cut away, of course,

65
our intimacy with Pakistan, where history is synonymous with grief and always most at home in
the attitude of grieving. Our congregation in Lahore was brief, and then we swiftly returned to a
more geographic reality.‘We are lost Sara,’ Shahid said to me on the phone from England. "Yes,
Shahid’ I firmly said, ‘we are lost.’ Qualifiers double almost in every sentence, especially of
nouns, whether lexical or grammatical. One can notice that double qualifiers occur in a series of
alternate subordinate and co-ordinate clauses, here and in the following paragraph too. Today
I’d be less emphatic. 2Ifat and Mamma must have honeycombed and crumbled now, in the
comfortable way that overtakes bedfellows. 3And somehow it seems apt and heartening
that Dadi, being what she was, never suffered the omposities that enter the most well-meaning
of farewells and seeped instead into the nooks and crannies of our forgetfulness. 4She fell
between the two stools of grief, which is appropriate, since she was greatest when her life was at
its most unreal. 5Anyway she was always outside our ken, an anecdotal thing, neither more nor
less. Some sweet reassurance of reality accompanies my discourse when I claim that when Dadi
died we forgot to grieve. There are many things to be noted here. One can start by mentioning
the number and variety of qualifiers: in the comfortable way that overtakes bedfellows Dadi,
being what she was.
She fell…, which is appropriate,… ..since she was greatest when… she was always outside our
ken, an anecdotal thing, neither more, nor less. The variety of structures however, can be
classified in co-ordinate ‘paratactic’ or sub-ordinate ‘hypotactic’ relations (Halliday). The next
important thing to notice is how different clauses functions at lower ranks of phrases to qualify
verbs, adjectives and nouns. Also sub-ordinate structures on a lower rank have been used to
express paratactic or co-ordinate relations on a higher rank, or vice versa.
For to be lost is just a moment’s respite, after all, like a train that cannot help but stop between
the stations of its proper destination in order to stage a pretend version of the end. Dying, we
saw, was simply change taken to points of mocking extremity, and wasn’t a thing to lose us but
to find us out, catch us, where we least wanted to be caught. 3In Pakistan, Bhutto rapidly
became obsolete after a succession of bumper harvests, and none of us can fight the ways
that the names of Mamma and Ifat have become archaism, quaintness on our lips. Finally, there
is also what Leech and Short call ‘parallelism’ – considered characteristic of literary sentences
(Leech and Short). Parallelism is created through juxtaposing of similar grammatical units to
work out comparisons and contrasts around one or similar notion(s). The sentence branches out
in different directions to work around these comparisons, through semantic and lexical
cohesion of some sort. There is a great variety in parallel structures. Hence both grammatical
and lexical patterns are used systematically to qualify ideas.
The use of qualifiers is then the most significant aspect of Sara’s style. She stops frequently, it
would seem, at each step, in the middle of a statement to insert a comment with the help of a
word, some phrases, or a variety of clauses. Hence, nouns, adjectives and verbs in each phrase of
each clause are properly qualified, as she moves to the end of the sentences. Through qualifiers,
she ‘foregrounds’ (Leech & Short) both her thought, and the thing thought upon. She uses both
modifiers (through adjectives, or adverbs pre-modifying adjectives) and qualifiers in a given
piece of discourse, but qualifiers (following verbs, nouns or adjectives) exceed by far the
modifiers.

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Qualifiers: Patterns of Ingenious Expression

This section will illustrate the linguistic patterns of sentences we have noted in the previous
section of this paper. I have already commented in some detail on the use of literary vocabulary
and deviant collocations. It has been shown how the choice of literary verbs, nouns, adjectives or
deviant collocations make an important feature of Sara’s style. In this section, my aim is to focus
on patterns of sentence into which this notably literary vocabulary is organized. Therefore, one
can conclude on the evidence of paragraphs analysed here that Sara has a distinct ‘literary style’
with deviant and non-deviant structures blended together in a variety of contexts. The
representative paragraphs analysed here bespeak of Sara’s dexterity in composing sentences
that convey the most trivial detail strongly coloured by her perception of things, her feelings and
her angle of thought. The construction of her sentences seems to have been consciously designed
to make room for an essentially personal, intimate ‘comment’ which follows some statement
already given. The comment is made, generally, through the use of qualifying remarks, through
a number of patterns – particularly through appositives, paratactic constructions (juxtapositions
of co-ordinates) and relational patterns in hypotactic constructions. This leads us to conclude
that Sara’s ‘musings’ determine the structure of her sentences and paragraphs, as well as the
choice of vocabulary and combination of collocations in a particular way - especially where
qualifying remarks are to be made. An abundant presence of qualifiers at different ranks in her
sentences provides a linguistically determined feature of ‘style’ that allow her to build her vision
into the very texture of narrative art.
A search for feminist identity in Meatless Days

Introduction
“You learned to talk very early, Sara,” Mamma told me of my forgotten past. “You were so
interested in sentences.” It made me the quaintest baby that she had—as an infant, I was
absorbed with grammar before I had fully learned the names of things, which caused a single
slippage in my nouns:
I would call a marmalade a squirrel, and I’d call a squirrel a marmalade. Today I can understand
the impulse and would very much like to call sugar an opossum; an antelope, tea. To be engulfed
by grammar after all is a tricky prospect, and a voice deserves to declare its own control in any
way it can, asserting that in the end it is an inventive thing.
Think how much a voice gives way to plot when it learns to utter the names of people that it
loves: picture looking at Peter and saying, “Peter”; picture picking up the telephone to Anita’s
voice and crying out, “Nina!” How can syntax hold around a name? Picture my mother on the
beautiful old campus of the Punjab University looking straight at her daughter and
saying, “Yes?” (Suleri)
Sara Suleri’s fascination with syntax as an infant led to confusion between individual words.
Unaware of the definitiveness of nomenclature and eager for contextualization, she tended to
substitute one noun for another. In her adulthood, the author of Meatless
Days not only sympathizes with this childish disregard for the rules of speech, but ironically
aspires to reenact the same “impulse.” As the grammatical conventions of

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language and society threaten to “engulf” her and subsume her individuality, her younger self’s
naïve linguistic lapses emblematize a feasible mode of resisting normative meanings. By
demonstrating “inventiveness” in nomenclature, she can forge an individualistic mode of
communication and thereby “declare” her authority.
In accordance with her childhood self, then, Suleri would like to call “sugar an opossum; an
antelope, tea.” However, the anticipatory rather than affirmative nature of her declaration
highlights her difficulty in practically “asserting” this independent linguistic “control.” She
realizes a voice’s inevitable subjection to “plot” or to a larger syntactical structure; despite her
idealistic notion of the “inventiveness” of language,
the act of speaking itself denotes an accession to socially determined signification.
Suleri consequently wonders—“How can syntax hold around a name?” How can she reconcile
herself textually to the fixed rules of syntax and to socially entrenched constrictions when she
subscribes to creativity in nomenclature, multiplicity in
identity? She recognizes the speaking subject as a site of negotiation with multiple discursive
and linguistic obligations—her voice must “assert that it is an inventive thing” while
simultaneously conceding to the conventions of “plot.”
Self and the theme

Suleri celebrates the inherent flux of diasporic identity, consequently rendering an unstable
subject position empowering rather then debilitating. Pakistan’s colonial history and intrinsic
patriarchy make Suleri’s Welsh mother a marginalized entity in this country; yet, Mair Jones
retains expressive potential in her dignified adaptability and her reproductive capacity.
Through the linguistic medium of Meatless Days, the author seeks to emulate this fluid
equilibrium of the maternal existence. She translates the generative flux of the female body into
the male-dominated inscriptive space, thus recuperating women’s latent capabilities despite
their obvious repression.
The above passage inevitably turns to Suleri’s mother in seeking an answer to the author’s
question. Mair’s profession as a teacher at the Punjab University in Lahore necessitates adopting
the position of either teacher or mother depending on the space—academic or domestic—of
interaction with her children. In this instance, the impersonal “yes?” with which she meets
Suleri’s gaze conveys Mair’s detachment despite the profound maternal connection. Mair, then,
successfully alters her demeanor as context changes. Instead of attempting to “cast in fixed
terms” her “selfreflexive,
discontinuous shifts in modality and perspective, temporal and spatial” (Brodzki), her speech
echoes the shifts in the subject position that she occupies.
If “self-representation is the effect of a constructed similarity or equivalence between identity
and language” (Brodzki), then Mair’s articulation must reflect the multiple roles that constitute
her identity. She repudiates the notion of determinate social signification, refusing to search
futilely for “a single subjectivity.” Instead content with her own tendency towards a variable
existence, she achieves a fluid equilibrium between “syntax” and “name,” between social
interactions and individuality.

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Mair Jones’ courageousness in renouncing her Welsh culture to follow her husband to Pakistan
figures prominently in Suleri’s narrative. The author points out the “sudden linguistic
incompetence” that must have proved disconcerting to a woman who “liked to speak precisely”
(Suleri). Her linguistic incongruence asserts itself even in her Welsh name, a name that must
eventually give way to the Urdu that “surround[s] her like living space” (Suleri). Mair’s status as
an outsider in Pakistan becomes explicit in Suleri’s account of this renaming: What an act of
concentration it must have required, after all, the quick conversion through
which Mair Jones became Surayya Suleri! She had to redistribute herself through several new
syllables, realigning her sense of locality until—within the span of a year—she was ready to leave
London and become a citizen of Pakistan. (Suleri).
The colonially “resistant” nation distrusts Mair Jones, who “chose to come after the English
should have been gone”—“what did she mean by saying, “I wish to be part of you”?” (Suleri) The
color of Mair’s skin thus poses a undamental impediment to effective integration. Therefore, just
as she figuratively disembodies herself through reconfiguration of her name, she must
“abnegate” her physical representation of colonial history in order to be assimilated into
Pakistan. In other words, in order to achieve this acceptance, Suleri says that Mair must “walk
through her new context in the shape of a memory erased” (Suleri). However, Mair’s physicality
cannot be obliterated. She continues to serve as a visual reminder of colonialism even though
she does not actively exercise her power. Further, along with the animosity that she faces, an
“unthinking structure of adulation” (Suleri) surrounds her as a consequence of her whiteness.
The socially ingrained deference to the British colonizer becomes redirected towards Suleri’s
mother in immediately postcolonial Pakistan, a “devotion” that causes Mair “annoyance.”
Therefore, the conflicting nuances of history bring Mair into confrontation with both hostility
and reverence, making her body a site of cultural and political tensions. However, Suleri
foregrounds Mair’s preservation of her individuality despite these overwhelming historical
forces that threaten to figure her as a mere emblem of a politically resonant position. The
compromise Mair reaches with potentially delimiting external influences allows her to remain a
distinct, definitive presence.
Suleri perceive the written word as primarily responsible for the perpetuation of historical
influences. She depicts her father’s political journalism as centered around the functioning of a
“great machine”: “It had a manufacturer’s name emblazoned on one side: when we learned how
to read, we bent down and spelled out h-i-s-t-o-r-y” (Suleri). The typewriter that writes history
appears instead as produced and branded byhistory. In thus reversing the metaphor, Suleri
indicates the
inevitable effect of past events upon the occurences that the typewriter now records.
Suleri’s and her siblings’ apprehension of the machine’s historical nature only after acquiring a
familiarity with language further illuminates the centrality of the written word in historical
pervasiveness. The father actively endorses, as his children observe, the infusion of past events
into journalistic accounts—historical prejudices are inevitably built into current writing. Pip,
further, also possesses the power to make “each front page fit into his control of the aesthetic of
his history” (Suleri). He inflects his presentation of cultural and political events with his own
interpretations, thus imbuing his personal biases into preexisting historical ones.

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On the other hand, Mair rejects history by demonstrating her repudiation of speech and writing.
During her husband’s imprisonment, she publishes a blank version of the Times of Karachi. She
ostensibly expresses her dissatisfaction with governmental censorship; further, she responds to
her own marginalization by figuratively erasing the prejudices that she encounters in a nation
rife with patriarchy and colonial history. Suleri emphasizes that her mother turns “censorship
into sedition” (Suleri) by inhering opposition into deliberate speechlessness; indeed, this
rebellious act culminates in the lengthening of Pip’s jail sentence. As Mair thus declares her
hitherto unproclaimed political potential through silence, the author’s narration imparts a
physical dimension to this protest. Suleri’s mother’s wordless dissent concurs with her literal
pregnancy1, and is evinced through the “nudeness” of newspaper. Thus, despite Mair’s position
both as a racially isolated and as a gendered subject, Suleri’s account invests her with corporeal
power.
However, this power encounters cultural limitations. Suleri highlights the infeasibility of a
comprehensive female identity in Pakistan by declaring that “there are no women in the third
world” (Suleri). In fact, the autobiography commences with the insistence that in Pakistan “the
concept of woman was not really part of an available vocabulary: we were too busy for that, just
living, and conducting precise negotiations with what it meant to be a sister or a child or a wife
or a mother or a servant” (Suleri). Individualistic womanhood remains an unknown concept,
since women are defined by social and familial ties. Shazia Rahman asserts that “there is no
such thing as a woman removed from her context” (Rahman); therefore, as demanded by the
cultural context of Pakistan, Mair must concede to definition by relationships. Nevertheless,
Mair does not allow this devaluing mode of existence to confine her. Suleri describes her
mother’s political assertions even in ostensible diffidence to patriarchy:
My mother… let history seep, so that, miraculously, she had no language in which to locate its
functioning but held it rather as a distracted manner sheathed about her face, a scarf. “Mamma
was more political…” I essayed the idea to Tillat. “She did not have to put it into print—it was the
sheet in which she slept.” (Suleri)
According to Suleri, history seeps into Mair’s body and inextricably integrates itself with her
very being, rather than remaining an impersonal account of events. However, Mair prevents this
history from discombobulating her core identity: she holds it, like a “scarf” or a “sheet,” close,
yet external to her body. The resemblance of the face-scarf to the Muslim burkha denotes Mair’s
external acquiescence to traditional Islam while concealing her Welsh identity beneath this
disguise. Suleri states that women in Pakistan thought of their womanhood as “hidden
somewhere among [their] clothes” (Suleri); but Mair transfigures this veil of diminution into an
empowering rather than an obstructive entity. She accepts her embeddedness in cultural
context, ironically appreciating the protection that encasement within a symbolic status affords
her intrinsic Welshness. According to Suleri, Mair “never noticed the imprint on her face as it
wore, for she was that imprint: she was her own dust before her bones had dreamed that they
could crumble” (Suleri). Despite her outwardly Pakistani way of living and the stamp of
conventionality that she bears, she essentially remains imbued by her own heritage. History
determines her daily routine and marginalizes her in the social realm; yet, her misleadingly
passive external identity safeguards her independent authoritativeness.
Thus, abstaining from a futile effort to undermine the resistance that she faces or to occupy a
socially authoritative position, Mair gracefully retracts into her private

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world. She “cut[s] away the sentence with which she wish[es] to be liked” (Suleri), forswearing
any reliance upon appreciation or cognizance of her identity by
other people. Suleri recalls the motto of her mother’s existence: “leave it, let it go away, this
grammatical construction of what it is to like and be liked!” (Suleri)
“Grammatical” here alludes to both the linguistic and social syntax of relationships in which her
mother ostensibly sought approval; instead, Mair harbored a “curiously powerful disinterest in
owning, in belonging” (Suleri). However, the author realizes that this “posture of disinterest”
(Suleri) and “vagueness” does not preclude Mair’s performance of her duties as wife, mother and
teacher. Mair reveals the philosophy of her existence to her daughter:
“I must say, Mamma,” I said to her as we went walking in companionable conversation, “It was
most incongruous, most perverse of you to take to Pip.” She looked amused. “You must not
minimize my affection for him,” she replied with slight reproof. “But you’re the one who says it
doesn’t count!” “Oh,” said Mamma vaguely, “as conduct I suppose it counts,” and then turned
towards some nearby shrub, but I pulled her back into our talk. “If affection’s conduct, then
what’s history?” I asked her, curious. “…Bearing…” she answered, vaguer than ever, “… even
posture, perhaps…” (Suleri)
For Mair, then, “bearing” and “posture” i.e. the apparent comportment of her body, remain
historically significant as they convey the isolation effected by society’s discrimination against
her evident Welshness and femaleness. However, this marginalization does not detract from the
“affectionate” nature of her relationships in the present moment (Suleri). In fact, since the very
necessity of existing in this historical context arises from the love that she feels for Pip, she
insists to her daughter that “love renders a body into history” (Suleri). Interpersonal
relationships take precedence over her historically generated alienation as she affirms her
affection for her husband— regardless of history’s inflection of her “posture,” the “conduct of
affection” remains fundamentally important to her sense of self. Therefore, Mair fabricates a
novel mode of interaction by engaging in simultaneous affective interaction and restraint. She
goes against the grain of Pakistani society that allows women to be exclusively either “sweet and
simple” or “cold and proud”; Mair’s coexisting “sweetness” and “coldness” (Suleri) allows for
distinction.
Meatless Days thus demonstrates Mair’s unique individualism despite the inescapable “burden”
of history that she carries. As Susan Koshy observes, Suleri is “able to reveal the resources and
capacities of her mother’s way of knowing and interacting that, judged by the standard of
assertion and public activity, would only reveal a lack” (Koshy). The author stages this revelation
through the generative flux of Mair’s body, which potential is concentrated in the inherently
fluid maternal womb. Suleri’s mother admits that she expresses herself through her children: “I
wrote Ifat and Shahid, I wrote Sara and Tillat; and then I wrote Irfan” (Suleri). Shirley Geok-lin
Lim, speaking of the experience of the Asian woman writer, insists that a woman’s “energies,
which for writers are inscribed in writing, in the graphic creations of self, must necessarily be
dispersed or dispensed on material “creations”…” (Lim) Reproduction being posited as one of
those creations, Mair channels her latent expressive abilities into the biological function of
procreation.
Julia Kristeva’s exposition on the childbearing woman draws attention to the threat posed by
this act. The pregnant woman, says Kristeva:

71
slips away from the discursive hold and immediately conceals a cipher that must be taken into
account biologically and socially. This ciphering of the species, however, this pre- and
transsymbolic memory… does make of the maternal body the stakes of a natural and “objective”
control, independent of any individual consciousness… The maternal body is the
module of a biosocial program. (Kristeva) Dalal
Mair’s pregnant body, revealed to the reader in the account of the blank newspaper2, indeed
emphatically liberates itself from “objective control.” Suleri’s mother violates her conventionally
silenced position and asserts her “individual consciousness,” thereby ciphering into her
daughter a “biosocial program” that not only diverges from but blatantly contravenes socially
imposed marginality. Thus, even as Suleri figures all Mair’s children as representations of her
“lost obsessions,” she perceives herself in particular as the tangible manifestation of her
mother’s “need to think in sentences” (Suleri). Mair’s defiant act during her pregnancy with the
author inevitably imbues Suleri with the propensity towards mutedly subversive linguistic
expression.
However, although Suleri deems her mother’s reproduction as redirected verbalization, she
indicates that Mair’s children do not comprehensively embody their mother’s personality. Mair
refrains from unconditional investment in her children’s lives despite the maternal bond that
she shares with them. The author and her siblings remain external to Mair’s core identity, acting
as “brash foils to her neutrality of
color” (Suleri). On account of their mixed racial heritage, they evince greater solidarity with
Pakistani society than their mother. Therefore, they become “complicit in her habit of hidden
variety” (Suleri). Mair’s “habit” returns us to the figure of clothing as concealment—like the
historical scarf and sheet that sheath her, her children, both external to and intimately affiliated
with her body, contribute to the preservation of her whiteness, her “neutrality” of color, by
constituting her deceptive historical disguise. Their “brash” tints signify her concession to
Pakistani culture,
thereby permitting her to remain in her “neutral regions of low color” (Suleri).
The external representations of herself ostensibly move towards historical accession and cultural
integration, and Mair remains secure in her indigenous identity.
Suleri’s text reenacts Mair’s mode of balancing the cohesion afforded by social discourses with a
declaration of individualism. Even while Meatless Days acknowledges the author’s indebtedness
to multiple languages and discourses, it nevertheless remains intrinsically comfortable with a
unique position at the interstices of divergent racial, cultural and linguistic influences. The
author admittedly seeks to learn the lesson of equilibrium from her mother.
…it is not merely devotion that makes my mother into the land on which this tale must tread. I
am curious to locate what she knew of the niceties that living in someone else’s history must
entail, of how she managed to dismantle that other history she was supposed to represent
(Suleri).
The term “dismantle,” implying the shedding of the historical “scarf” and “sheet” wrapped
around Mair’s body, figures Mair as divesting herself of the garb of her original history and
allowing herself to be cloaked by new context. Living like her mother in a country and culture
alien to her upbringing, Suleri “reveal[s] a longing to adopt and valorize [her] mother’s mode of

72
disinterested love, and the negotiation of a life formed by an oblique connection to the society in
which she lives” (Grewal, 246).
However, Meatless Days makes the author’s navigation rooted in not only the social, but also in
the linguistic realm. As she writes, she faces the challenge of preserving the fluidity resulting
from the multiple influences that shape her identity while embedding herself within fixed
linguistic signifiers. In other words, since the author’s accession to an inscriptive mode of
expression may threaten her loyalty to the legacy of maternal flux, Suleri looks for instructions
on managing the contextual “mantle” that she wears. The author’s reliance upon her mother’s
memory evinces itself in her statement: “…I am interested to see how far any tale can sustain the
name “mother,” or whether such a name will have to signify the severance of story” (Suleri). For
Julia Kristeva, the maternal body represents the “ordering principle” of semiotic chora, a space
within which the “linguistic sign is not yet articulated as the absence of an object and as the
distinction between real and symbolic” (Kristeva). As a child enters the thetic phase and
recognizes the symbolic distinction between the signifier and the signified, “dependence on the
mother is severed and transformed into a symbolic relation to an other” (Kristeva). Narration of
Suleri’s story, an act inevitably constitutive of language” and “indebted to, induced and imposed
by the social realm” (Kristeva) threatens to sever her from the mother.
Demonstrating her refusal to repudiate the maternal connection in Meatless Days, however,
Suleri speaks in the transgressive “sentences” (Suleri) imparted by
Mair.
In her account of a dream shortly after her mother’s death, the author emphasizes her
undiminished loyalty to the maternal mode of expression:
A blue van drove up: I noticed it was a refrigerated car and my father was inside it. He came to
tell me that we must put my mother in her coffin and he opened the blue hatch of the van to
make me reach inside, where it was very cold. What I found were hunks of meat wrapped in
cellophane, and each of them felt like Mamma, in some odd way. It was my task to carry those
flanks across the street and to fit them into the coffin at the other side of the road, like pieces in
a jigsaw puzzle. Although my dream will not let me recall how many trips I make, I know my
hands felt cold. Then, when my father’s back was turned, I found myself engaged in rapid theft—
for the sake of Ifat and Shahid and Tillat and all of us, I stole away a portion of that body. It was
a piece of her foot I found, a small bone like a knuckle, which I quickly hid inside my mouth,
under my tongue. Then I and the dream dissolved, into an extremity of tenderness. (Suleri) The
dismemberment of Mair’s body here mirrors the redistribution of her identity through “several
syllables” in entering her husband’s land. Suleri, then, seeks to literally re-member this body, to
put her mother to rest by rejoining the pieces of her fractured identity. Pip’s presence in the
refrigerated truck serves as a reminder that Mair permitted her husband to “colonize her body”
(Suleri); however, although he governs the pieces of his wife’s physical self, he also points his
daughter towards the coffin within which the body must be reassembled. Suleri’s father, then,
despite his responsibility for—or at least, concomitance in—Mair’s disintegration in Pakistan,
provides their daughter with the receptacle within which she can render her mother whole
again. Susan Koshy insists that Suleri engages in a “covert transgression of paternal jurisdiction
over the maternal body” (Koshy) by “stealing” a part of the body behind her father’s back.
Instead, however, this dream also enables the reader to perceive the constructive influence of
Suleri’s patriarchal father; paradoxically, his gift of public writing enables the author to reinstate

73
Mair’s body, an entity whose power was ironically mitigated by patriarchy. Koshy also insists
that “memory enables the retroactive theft of prohibited meanings symbolized by the mother’s
body [and] allows the incorporation of the maternal body into the daughter’s narrative” (Koshy).
However, it is not simply memory, but memory relayed through the act of writing that permits
Suleri to foreground these “prohibitive meanings” and the generative possibilities of Mair’s
physicality.
Further, in putting a “piece of [Mair’s] foot” under her tongue, the maternal remains become the
source from which the author’s voice in Meatless Days emanates.
The dream’s dissolution into an “extremity of tenderness” following ingestion posits this act
itself as responsible for the consequent production of Suleri’s text. Therefore, Mair serves as the
inspiration for the language of Suleri’s autobiography as well as relies upon the text to reveal her
suppressed political potential. Suleri’s account of her dream thereby manifests the collaboration
between the maternal body and the paternal treatment of language in constructing Meatless
Days. She accepts the way in which “the maternal legacy of language becomes charged with
ambiguity and fraught with ambivalence” as she writes, provoking her to “locate and
recontextualize” her
“mother’s message” (Brodzki) within paternally imparted signifiers.
Suleri’s act of putting Mair’s body in her mouth evinces a progression from the transfer of liquid
sustenance from Mair to the author in the latter’s childhood. Suleri reenacts the intimate
relationship of nourishment that defined the maternal connection, even as this relationship is
now resignified. Explicitly, she states: “Flavor of my infancy, my mother, still be food: I want my
hunger as it always was, neither flesh nor fowl!” (Suleri) She betrays an affinity for the fluidity of
maternal sustenance despite the solid “flesh” that she ingests. The fluid “sentences” imparted by
Mair in nursing her daughter, then, represent a reprieve from unyielding prevalent idioms. The
author’s resistance to fixed signification in the social realm appears predicated upon the
disadvantages of straying from the semiotic as posited by Mair:
“Take disappointment, child, eat disappointment from me…Since I must make you taste, let me
put gravel on your tongues, those rasping surfaces that years ago I watered! If you cannot, will
not, live—as I insist—outside historical affection, then I must be for you the living lesson of the
costs of history.” (Suleri)
Despite her resistance to her children’s acquisition of language, Mair realizes that they must
“taste” “flesh and fowl” divergent from the maternal mode of satisfying
their hunger. As they insist upon seeking a culturally and socially inscribed identity, she has no
choice but to substitute “gravel” for the fluid nourishment of their infancy.
In Kristevan terms, then, along with the deviation from the maternal and the subsequent entry
into the social, a movement from the semiotic to the symbolic occurs
in this act of eating. Nevertheless, the distastefulness of the gravel that Mair feeds her children
warns them against investment in language as a means of grounding. She fears that inscribed
historical context may incapacitate them as it marginalizes her; therefore through the
instruction of inevitable disappointment, she shields her children from the necessity of
predicating their identities upon “non-spaces” (Krückels).

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Indeed, as Suleri ingests part of her mother’s body, she incorporates this gravelly, unpleasant
disappointment into her labor of love.
Consequently, for Suleri, her autobiography seems to lack traction: “Somehow it will not grip
me, the telling of this tale, not with my mother’s aura hovering nearby
to remind me of one of her most clear announcements: “Child, I will not grip” (Suleri). Suleri’s
project becomes volatilized by the characteristic fluidity of her mother’s body and her resistance
to fixed signifying systems. Mair’s refusal to “grip,” culminates in her daughter’s inability to
“tread” (Suleri) upon a firm surface, since the mother admittedly serves as the foundational
element of Meatless Days. In order to faithfully represent her mother, Suleri must articulate the
rejection of representation in her tangible text. She acknowledges the complexity of her task:
“…it saddens me to think I could be laying hands upon the body of her water as though it were
reducible to fragrance, as though I intensified her vanished ways into some expensive salt”
(Suleri). Just as distilling the sea’s water into the salt that gives it flavor deprives it of its
distinctive fluidity, the author’s text must guard against reducing Mair’s “dispersed aura”
(Suleri) into “salt” via signification.
The solidity and coarseness of salt opposes the fluid “flavor of [Suleri’s] infancy” (Suleri),
thereby accentuating the potentially delimiting nature of translating maternal fluidity into the
symbolic. Furthermore, even the less tangible image of the “fragrance” of bathing salts
exemplifies Suleri’s “sadness” in simplifying Mair to a mere element, rather than the very form
of the textual fluid of Meatless Days. Like the amniotic enclosure of the maternal womb, Mair’s
presence is the diffused, ubiquitous aroma or “flavor” within which the authorial identity
develops. The text, despite its inherently symbolic nature, mirrors Mair’s natural abstraction
and the repudiation of linguistic fixedness.
In fact, Suleri posits her text as the fluid womb space in which the women of her family are
imbued and through which they are reconstructed. As the text encompasses Mair’s message, it
renders “[the author] and Meatless Days as Mair Jones/ Surraya Suleri’s transmogrified book”
(Lovesey). Suleri explicitly plays out this dialectic between writing and reproduction:
I was imitating all of them, I knew, my mother’s laborious production of her five, my sisters’ of
their seven (at that stage), so it was their sweat that wet my head, their pushing motion that
allowed me to extract, in stifled screams, Ifat from her tales. We picked up our idea of her as
though it were an infant, slippery in our hands with birthing fluids, a notion most deserving of
warm water. Let us wash the word of murder from her limbs, we said, let us transcribe her into
some more seemly idiom. And so with painful labor we placed Ifat’s body in a different
discourse, words as private and precise as water when water wishes to perform both in and out
of light.” (Suleri)
The sweat and physical exertion of her mother and sisters in childbirth becomes Suleri’s in her
literary labors; these women serve as her inspiration in reconfiguring their role as women in
Pakistan. Referring here specifically to Ifat’s mysterious death, Suleri’s autobiography becomes
the medium through which she can remove Ifat from the web of fixed social signifiers, from the
“plots” or stories in which her married life and Pakistani society embed her, and re-describe her
body in a more “seemly” fluid discourse. Suleri insists that the linguistic formulation of the
female body must emblematize the personality that pervades it; therefore, the “words” of her

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autobiography must “glide” away and renounce “solidity” (Suleri), must remain fluctuating and
variable in the manner of the corporeality of women. Further, to faithfully represent the
nuanced position of Ifat’s body, the words of her portrayal must be “as private and precise as
water when water wishes to perform both in and out of light.” This desired combination of
intimacy or privacy and determinative precision in the representations in Meatless Days echoes
the idealized dynamic of Mair’s relationship with her children—just as Mair, through her
children, both maintains her individuality as well as participates in the social realm, Suleri’s
public text encompasses a private discourse, intimate aspects of the authorial identity. In
positing her text as a product of her “labor,” in fact, the author transcends the limitations of
motherhood in the social space. Offered the option of surrogate motherhood upon Ifat’s death,
Suleri ponders re-engagement with the overwhelming
historicity of the country that she left:

And so my silence hissed to me: stay, in the face of history, harbor to those three most deserving
of a cove, since they have lost delicious wind that gave them their desire—or go, but know that
you leave with a body derogate, unfit in such desertion to conceive even the idea of a child!
(Suleri)
As Suleri returns to the United States without Ifat’s children, her “desertion” seems to indicate
physical “derogation.” In fact, Ifat believes that a woman’s identity can be realized solely
through actual reproduction: “…home is where your mother is, one; it is when you are mother,
two; and in between its almost as though your spirit must retract…your spirit must become a
tiny, concentrated little thing, so that your body feels like a spacious place in which to live”
(Suleri). Therefore, only biological connections as an engendered and engendering entity define
a woman’s existence.
Furthermore, in insisting that “men live in homes and women live in bodies” (Suleri), this
feminine home must necessarily remain distinct from the actual tangible constructs of a house.
In Ifat’s opinion, women cannot decisively occupy the “home” territory; instead, their “spirit,”
essence or “salt” must be contained within the body itself, to create a space of inhabitation
withdrawn from the social sphere. In the same way that Mair propagates a preservation of her
essential identity in intrinsic retraction from and external compliance with the social order, Ifat
figures motherhood as social accession despite which a woman must internally nurture the
“spirit” of her identity.
Thus, while Suleri’s womanhood inevitably impedes her from authority within an actual
residential space, she also rejects, in leaving Ifat’s children, the “home” that
motherhood would have afforded her. However, despite the physical absence of her dead mother
and her refusal to become mother herself, Suleri’s figurative child—her
text—and the memory of her mother provide her with non-corporeal notions of “home.” She
holds both Mair’s memory and her own imagination within her autobiography, thereby
conflating the two positions of comfortable inhabitation as engenderer and ngendered to which
Ifat refers. Consequently, the encompassment of the act of motherhood and being mothered in
an inscribed and not social space permits navigation between the two; in the textual sphere, the
author becomes able to privilege her own “spirit”. Her womanhood need not retract or become

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diminutive in the manner of a concentrated, essentialized “salt” that imparts flavor. Instead,
female identity remains a continuous, fluid, pervasive presence in Meatless Days.
Suleri’s text thereby blurs the distinct opposition between the symbolic and the semiotic. Like
the semiotic, implicitly maternal sphere, expression in the symbolic, too, allows for variability.
Thus implying that single, fixed signifying systems fail to suffice for her project, Suleri echoes
the Lacanian theory of language.
Language being an “endless process of difference and absence,” the entry into a symbolic order
means that one becomes susceptible to the “move from one signifier to another, along a
linguistic chain which is potentially infinite” rather than possessing the signified “in its fullness,”
(Eagleton, 145). Lacan thus formulates
language as a space of inevitable slippage, which belief in the inexorable flux of signification
Suleri herself affirms as she says: “Coming second to me, Urdu opens in my mind a passageway
between the sea of possibility and what I cannot say in English: when those waters part, they
seem to promise some solidity of surface, but then like speech they glide away to reconfirm the
brigandry of utterance” (Suleri). The “sea of possibility” here recalls both her mother’s “body of
water” (Suleri) and the womb within which the author herself was borne. In this moment, the
author depicts the language of patriarchal, historical Pakistan as facilitating the
transition between the characteristically fluctuating maternal space and definitive signification.
As it promises stability, then, writing threatens to “sever” her from hermother. However, the
presumption of “solidity” remains ill-founded—the “shore” of fixed expression to which the
author aspires itself “glides away” in the manner of water. The text becomes marked by a
“ceaseless dialectic between connection and separation” (Koshy, 50), a simultaneous linguistic
embrace and evasion. Instead of diverging from her mother’s fluidity, Meatless Days
“reconfirms” Mair’s generative transience even within conventionally unyielding signification.
For the author, then,
acquiescence to a signifying system need not detract from the fundamentally fluid premise of
her articulation—as the “brigandry of utterance” enables simultaneous reliance on English as
well as Urdu, it allows her to commingle her mother’s variable expression with determinative
language.
Suleri textually finds an identity through Koshy’s dialectic, through language that fluctuates
between accessibility and unfamiliarity. Inderpal Grewal asserts that the “postmodern selves” in
this text “seem sometimes to be disquietingly marginalized, unsure, silenced, and sometimes
seeking for some surer grounding for identity that seems not to be available to them” (Grewal);
yet Suleri revels in her position of flux without yearning for stability. Mara Scanlon insists that a
stable “homecoming in language” (Scanlon) remains unviable for Suleri. Her residence in
Pakistan, her journalistic, Anglicized father and Welsh mother render the concept of
“mothertongue” inherently ambivalent, as evinced by her propensity to simultaneously engage
with both English and Urdu in the above passage. In addition, while use of the “mothertongue”
normally enables “recovery” of “an essential maternal connection” (Scanlon) in implying
reverting back to the language of childhood, the divergence between “mother tongue” and
“mother’s tongue” for Suleri perpetuates the trope of linguistic fluidity in her life. Nevertheless,
she finds equilibrium predicated upon the tangible corporeality of her mother’s memory:

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When I return to Urdu, I feel shocked at my own neglect of a space so intimate to me: like
relearning the proportions of a once familiar room, it takes me by surprise to recollect that I
need not feel grief, I can eat grief; that I need not bury my mother but instead can offer her into
the earth, for I am in Urdu now. But just at the moment I could murmur, “the stillness of a
home,” Urdu like a reprimand disturbs my sense of habitation: “Do you think you ever lived on
the inside of a space,” it tells me with some scorn, “you, who lack the surety of knowledge to
intuit the gender of a roof, a chair?” Surely I can live in courtyards, afternoons, I muse in
departing, arenas of regressed significance—a soothing notion, genderless! (Suleri)
Suleri expresses her sense of guilt at “neglecting” Urdu in favor of Anglicized expression, as the
idiomatic quirks of Urdu offer her novel modes of expressing her
sentiments. The Urdu expression allows one to “eat grief”, to incorporate this sentiment into
onself, as Suleri literally does with her mother’s body; furthermore, Urdu offers the author an
opportunity to bury her mother ritualistically, thereby communicating Suleri’s devotion more
profoundly. Yet, the particularly gendered nature of Urdu undermines its appeal as a vehicle of
expression; she would rather inhabit the “arenas of regressed significance” that allow her to
refute socialized, gendered disparities.
Suleri describes Mair Jones as characterized by a “manner of sudden retreating” (Suleri) and as
one that occupied “neutral regions of low color” (Suleri), thereby figuring her as an “arena of
regressed significance.” The author’s childhood memory of waking up from her afternoon naps
locates Mair explicitly in the realm of the “courtyards” and “afternoons” that embody “soothing”
spaces for the adult author:
…my mother would go out into the courtyard and call up my name, which would reach me
reluctantly, breaking through rest’s liquidity to say, “Mair Jones, your mother, is standing
outside and calling up to you, asking you to wake and become this thing, your name.” An
overalliterated name, I thought as I got up, this thing I have to be. (Suleri) Mair’s directive
originates in the afternoon from the courtyard, which recollection conflates the space of the
maternal body, the temporal space of the afternoon, and the domestic delineations of the
courtyard. Just as the linguistic gender neutrality of “courtyards” and “afternoon” offers Suleri
respite from the pervasively gendered nature of Urdu, her mother embodies individualistic
expression amidst the tumult of categorical Pakistani patriarchy. Suleri goes on to say: “like the
secluded hours of afternoon, my mother would retract and disappear, leaving my story
suspended until she reemerged” (Suleri). The afternoon, a period of rest, announced a
temporary
withdrawal from the “narrative” of Suleri’s days in Pakistan, and her mother too affords a
reprieve from the “plot” of social and cultural norms. But, her mother’s “reemergence” that
allows narration to continue concurs with verbalization. As the “liquidity” surrounding Suleri’s
restful afternoon sleep, evocative of Mair’s “body of water” and the umbilical fluid, holds the
author as a child in nurturance and serenity,
Mair’s “calling out”—her vocalization of her daughter’s Pakistani name—inserts socially
constructed language into this space of reprieve. Suleri becomes able to

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develop her autobiography only when her mother’s voice fixes her identity through
nomenclature. Despite the author’s resistance to a preexisting signifying system, then, she
cannot divorce herself from identification through language. Even as it infiltrates and jars the
harmonious maternal connection, her “name,” the social signifier of her identity brings Suleri
into “being.” This moment plays out the Kristevan notion of a “signifier/ signified break” that is
“synonymous with social sanction” (Kristeva).
Yet, as Suleri undermines established notions of language by demonstrating its reconcilability

with fluid identity, she further incorporates Mair’s way of generating meaning through flux in
her non-temporal and non-linear narrative form. Davis comments upon Meatless Days’
“penchant for disrupting traditional autobiographic portrayals of space and time” and it’s
“almost mythical temporal and spatial representation characteristic of the workings of memory”
(Davis). In the subversion of conventional “autobiographic portrayals,” Suleri’s writing
further transgresses the chronological nature of historical narration. The paternal
vociferousness as concerned with issues of Pakistani history makes Pip emblematic of the
historical circumstances as well as the patriarchal order that necessitates Mair’s retraction. The
author recalls her mother’s presence in Pakistan as literally subdued by her father’s
assertiveness: “Papa’s powerful discourse would surround her night and day—when I see her in
his room, she is always looking down, gravely listening!”
(Suleri) Therefore, in speaking against sequential narration, she simultaneously makes history
and patriarchy amenable to Mair’s existence.
However, “history” does not only counter Mair, but it also subjects Pip to its effects by virtue of
its inherent colonialism. Pip occupies a linguistically conflicted position as a consequence of the
coexistence of English and Urdu as viable modes of expression during his journalistic career.
The author points out that his insistent nationalism exists in disequilibrium with his
employment at The Times of Karachi, an English daily. She perceives a tension between the
“generations of Urdu conversation in [her father’s] genes” (Suleri) and his ostensible
repudiation of this inheritance
in working for an English newspaper. However, Pip’s nationalistic loyalties ironically propel this
entry into an Anglicized mode of dealing with history. He evinces his
bitterness through his “flamboyant” yet occasionally faulty pronunciations of English words,
especially his tendency to trip over “most trisyllables that did not sound like Pakistan.” He
resents English’s divergence from the prevalent disyllabic nature of Urdu and asserts his
inability and unwillingness to detach from the language of his ancestors by pronouncing, as
Suleri recalls with amusement, “another” as “anther” and “beginning” as “bigning” (Suleri).
Further, Pip almost vengefully forces conformity with Urdu in the language of his colonizers
even although his “seduction with history” (Suleri) compels him to write in the English
language: “his heart took hidden pleasure when he got [words] by the gullet and held them there
until they empurpled to the color of his own indignant
nature” (Suleri). Pip is capable of command over the English language, as evinced by Suleri’s
insistence that got words “by the gullet”; paradoxically, however,

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he violently alters or contorts them to illustrate a greater likeness, in their deepened color, to
himself. Like his daughter, for whom linguistic choice presents the problem
of division of personal loyalties, language describes the site of incongruence between devotion to
the nation and an affinity for inscription. Thus, even this emblem of
Pakistani patriarchy exists in a position marked by linguistic, symbolic ambiguity. For Pip, as for
his wife and daughter, dependence on signification imparts an incontrovertible flux to existence.
Despite this ambivalence in the power dynamic he shares with language, however, it represents
a reliable mode of identification to Pip. Relocating to Pakistan from England, Suleri’s parents
encountered the “studiously conscious” judgment of relatives. Pip, therefore, “uttered a great
good-bye to the extended family of Pakistan before he cast himself with renewed ferocity into
the printing of its news” (Suleri). Linguistic engagement with Pakistan’s history inadvertently
replaces actual immersion in Pakistan; his life subsequently revolves around the profession in
which
he writes history in English. Suleri emphasizes her father’s limited perspective upon political
events, since a journalistic version of events remains the “only form of history” (Suleri) in his
eyes. She predicates her departure from Pakistan upon her irreconcilable difference of opinion
with her father; overwhelmed by Pip’s insensitivity to the brutal and bloody events of partition
and of post-independence Pakistan, she says “…we went our separate ways, he mourning for the
mutilation of a theory, and I—more literal—for a limb, or a child, or a voice” (Suleri). His
apparent preoccupation with objective, theoretical deliberations causes Pip to lose his sense of
groundedness when retirement impedes him from further writing. Suleri recounts her father’s
apparent desolation and feeling of emptiness when she visits him in Pakistan. Despite his “two
wives, six children, eleven grandchildren, and now also had a brand-new daughter,” Pip insists:
“I have done nothing with my life… I have written nothing!” (Suleri) Interactions with people—
interpersonal relationships,
or the “conduct of affection” privileged by Mair— possess no significance for Pip alongside the
authority inherent in inscription.
His gratification in his presumed inscriptive power becomes evinced by his newly acquired
habit, late in his life, of “using his index finger as a pen, making it in constant scribbles write on
each surface it could find” (Suleri). Futhermore, Ifat insists that the movement of the finger is
from right to left—therefore, countering the necessity of writing the history of his country in
English, the father unconsciously performs his imaginary writing in Urdu. However, Suleri
acknowledges Pip’s actual inability to determine the course and consequences of events; his
belief in his authority is misplaced. His Anglicized construction of historical events through
journalism only continues to perpetuate a subjection to colonial history despite the subversive
inflections of his speech, or the illusionary employment of Urdu:
But as [Suleri and Ifat] whispered in the half-light, we both felt cognizant of a more pressing
issue: in a room we could not see, a hand was still awake. It sought the secrecy of surface in the
dark, and its finger was writing, writing. (Suleri)
In this case, Pip’s version of history becomes nconsequential, or at least subsumed by, the
course of events created by the hand of national history, shaped first by colonization and
subsequently by Pakistan’s military dictatorship and religious zealotry. Suleri’s description of

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this unknown “hand” and writing finger echoes the function of the ”Moving Finger” in Omar
Khayyam’s verse from his collection Rubaiyat:
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it. (Khayyam, Verse 51)
Khayyam asserts the unalterable nature of the predetermined course of events, and Suleri and
Ifat experience a congruent awareness of the continuingly determinative nature of Pakistan’s
history. The “Moving Finger” belonging to the past continues to write, continues to influence the
manner in which events transpire in the present day.
Pip’s own writings only remain embedded in this larger context, and Suleri indicates his relative
powerlessness.
Suleri juxtaposes her father’s derivation of sense of purpose solely from his journalistic job
unfavorably with Mair’s unique mode of living in empowering equilibrium with historical
influences. Mair derives pleasure from the “conduct of affection” (Suleri) even as she accedes to
potentially disabling constructs; on the other hand, Pip excludes himself both from productive
professional and affective engagement by subordinating all relationships to historical events.
After retirement, however, Pip adopts the “brand-new daughter” to whom Suleri refers in the
above quote, admitting that he has “needs” (Suleri) which must be satisfied. Her father always
harbored a “tyrannical dependence upon history and women” (Suleri);
yet, he explicitly acknowledges the necessity of these women only after retirement has deprived
him of his (albeit illusionary) inscriptive authority. As he ultimately acquiesces to the
essentiality of female support in his life, he takes recourse to affirmation of his identity via
previously repudiated means. He thus echoes the politics of Mair’s concession to the power of
language and the author’s acknowledgement of the necessity of writing Meatless Days to
empower her mother.
Like his wife and daughter, Pip cannot refute constitution by both actual relationships and
linguistic signification. Regardless of the conflicts that they each face, then, Suleri’s parents
ultimately concede their indebtedness to diverse facets of familial, social, cultural and linguistic
structures. Similarly, in writing her own text, Suleri acknowledges these various constructs.
“Baffled” by her mother’s apparent disinclination to engage in social interactions, Suleri poses
her rhetorical question: “… if I am to break out of the structure of affection… then what is the
idiom in which I should live?” (Suleri) If she rejects social relationships and the cohesion
afforded by language as her mother instructs, how can she possibly secure her identity? Suleri
recognizes that denial of the structure within which she exists will only culminate in an
aggravated sense of instability; therefore, even her novel idiom must contextualize the problems
that she faces as a woman and as a diasporic subject. In other words, as she writes, she must
constantly grapple with the theoretical question she asks in her essay “Woman Skin Deep”— “If
the languages of feminism and ethnicity are to escape an abrasive mutual contestation, what
novel idiom can freshly articulate their radical inseparability?” (Suleri, Woman Skin Deep)
Irrefutably inhabiting a “structure of affection,” Suleri must find a way to reconcile and make

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empowering the counter-idioms that she proposes to this structure within its very delineations—
within the idiomatic constrictions of patriarchy and race.
Suleri attempts to foreground women’s power without seeking to undermine,discount or
overwrite any of the influences acting upon them. She echoes, in this
endeavor, Mair’s embodiment of “agency articulated through the idiom of accommodation not
mastery” (Koshy, 50) and her consequent peaceful existencewithin the delineations of the
hostile society around her. Suleri therefore emphasizes the value that paternal authority imparts
to her text instead of positing a feminism that denies this authority. Her account of Pip’s actions
after Ifat’s death includes him in the process of “placing Ifat’s body in a different discourse”
(Suleri). Instead of allowing his daughter’s victimization by the “language of investigation” that
wishes to perform an autopsy upon her body, Pip insists upon her burial. “I could not let them
violate the dignity of her body” (Suleri), he claims, manifesting a similar resistance to
dismemberment as in his instructions to Sara in her dream to re-member her mother’s body.
Since the father’s patriarchal attitudes figure him as partially responsible for the disembodiment
of these women in the first place, Suleri’s accession to his signifying system in writing Meatless
Days may constitute a fundamental transgression of a feminist agenda; yet, he admittedly aids
the author in
safeguarding and integrating the female body within her text. Suleri thus acknowledges the part
played by her father’s opinions and perspectives in shaping
Meatless Days just as she honors her mother’s strength in silence.
Pip imparts to his daughter the gift of writing; further, his particularly fraught relationship with
language becomes instructive to his daughter as she grapples with the politicized nature of
inscription. The nationalistic goals that Pip hopes to satisfy through his journalism justify his
recourse to English; the daughter similarly comes to terms with her paradoxical deployment of
symbolic structures in order to ascribe
privilege to her mother. Consequently, the “counter-history” that Suleri proposes to the
patriarchal national narrative of Pakistan becomes formulated through “a web of metaphorical
relations between [existing] discursive practices and the woman’s body” (Ponzanesi). Suleri does
not see the female body as radically separate or sustainable in absence of the “structures” of
patriarchal and historical discourse; she
can privilege it through the support of “discursive practices.” Furthermore, her Inderpal Grewal
criticizes Meatless Days for its apparent indifference to feminism by insisting that “there is very
little belief in feminism of any kind in Suleri’s work apart from a strong concern about how
women live with each other within families and outside them” (Grewal). However, the
ability writing becomes especially generative for the women in Meatless Days as it explores the
possibility of their empowerment despite and within, and not idealistically separated from the
limitations of race and gender. Mair partakes of the “luxury” of powerful independence despite
the hostility warranted by her “sex and color,” and through this individualistic existence, Suleri
refutes an equation between individualism and cultural privilege.
Along with negating the theory that assenting to overarching discourses culminates in
disempowerment, Suleri also redefines Friedman’s notion of female

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“collective identity” or “group consciousness.” The inscriptive formula of Meatless Days relies
upon “an awareness of the meaning of the cultural category WOMAN for the patterns of
women’s individual destiny” (Friedman). Speaking for and of the women in her family, Suleri
presents through her text a model for empowerment through fluctuating identity. However,
Suleri’s interpretation of “collective” female identity refrains from pretending to encompass
women separated from the Suleri women by “historically changing contexts of community,
caste, class, religious and regional difference” (Grewal). She makes explicit that her voice does
not represent a homogenous group of Pakistani women; this move, instead of manifesting her
tendency to be, as Dayal believes, “disturbingly elitist” (Dayal), only exhibits the complexity and
variability within a cultural notion of womanhood.5 Thus, even as to negotiate with these social
and familial constructs and consequently create a space of empowerment forms the
fundamental basis of the accommodative feminism that Suleri proposes. 4 Susan Friedman
asserts in her essay that “Isolate individualism is an illusion. It is also the privilege of power. A
white man has the luxury of forgetting his skin color and sex. Woman and minorities, reminded
at every turn in the great cultural hall of mirrors of their sex or color, have no such luxury”
(Friedman) Dayal himself subsequently acknowledges Suleri’s potentially meaningful eschewal
of homogenization by quoting Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s description of third world feminism.
According to Mohanty, this feminism must simultaneously engage in an “internal critique of
hegemonic ‘Western’ feminisms” and the actual formation of “autonomous, geographically,
historically, and culturally grounded feminist concerns and strategies” (Dayal). she states that
“there are no women in the third world” (Suleri), Suleri warns the reader against
indiscriminately perceiving all the women of the author’s acquaintance in Pakistan as similarly
marginalized; Meatless Days proves the divergent experiences of different groups of women.
As she speaks of her grandmother’s existence as a widow and a mother of immigrant children at
the beginning of her autobiography, Suleri concedes her inability to effectively broach Dadi’s
status as a Pakistani woman. Her failure causes her guilt: “I try to lay the subject down and
change its clothes, but before I know it, it has sprinted off evilly in the direction of ocular
evidence. It goads me into saying, with the defiance of a plea, “You did not deal with Dadi”
(Suleri). As Suleri attempts to “redress”—to change the clothes—of the subject of female identity,
it evades her grasp. In writing in English, Suleri speaks of the culturally ingrained struggles of
women in Pakistan, thereby shrouding the relevant “subject” of patriarchal suppression in a new
“habit.” Dadi consequently becomes inassimilable in this discourse. Further, simultaneously
defensive and apologetic, Suleri recognizes that her privilege impedes her comprehension of the
problems faced by her woman
servant:
Sometimes there wasn’t a proper balance between the way things came and the way they went,
as Halima the cleaning woman knew full well when she looked at me intently, asking a question
that had no question in it: “Do I grieve, or do I celebrate?” Halima had given birth to her latest
son the night her older child died in screams of meningitis; once heard, never to be forgotten.
She came back to work a week later, and we were talking as we put the family’s winter clothes
into vast metal trunks. For in England, they would call it spring. (Suleri) Despite Halima’s grief
at a child’s death and her added responsibilities at another child’s birth, she returns to work at
the Suleri household within a week. Furthermore, as the Suleris prepare for respite from the
strained political atmosphere in Pakistan by departing to England, Halima inevitably must stay
behind and grapple with the frustrating instability of Pakistani life. Suleri’s socioeconomic status

83
gives her the option of exiting the space of unrest—as apparent both in this incident and in her
ultimate permanent relocation to the United States— but the women trapped in traditional
patriarchal constructs such as Dadi or women rendered helpless by poverty and servitude such
as Halima continue to occupy exceptionally marginalized positions.
Thus, Suleri’s particular brand of feminism depicts the potential for power in marginalization
for privileged women such as herself and her family members in Pakistan. Indeed, as she ends
her autobiography, Suleri identifies her purpose in writing as reconstruction of Mair’s and Ifat’s
memories. She say: “bodies break, but sometimes damage feels like a necessary repair, like
bones teaching fingers how to work, to knit.” (Suleri) Broken bodies, the products of her mother
and sister’s violent deaths, become the motivation for Suleri’s writing in requiring her to render
their disembodied memories in her text. Suleri expounds upon her own position within this
loving memoir:
When my bone broke, I was perplexed: was I now to watch my own dismantling body choose to
unravel with the cascading motion of a dye in water, which unfurls to declare, “Only in my
obliteration will you see the shapes of what I really can be?” I felt put out of joint by such a
bodily statement, then chastened to imagine the arduousness of what it must mean to scaffold
me: poor winter tree, put upon by such a chattering plumage, castigated out of season for its lack
of green! Put upon by sentences galore—like starlings, vulgar congregations! In pale and liquid
morning I hold the Adam in me, the one who had attempted to break loose. It is a rib that floats
in longing for some other cage, in the wishbone-cracking urge of its own desire. I join its
buoyancy and hide my head as though it were an infant’s cranium still unknit, complicit in an
Adam’s way of claiming, in me, disembodiment. (Suleri)
Dye, the colored substance, is simultaneously thrown into relief and diffused by the
characteristic fluidity of water. Her mother’s “dispersed aura,” (Suleri) the concurrent variability
and prominence of her “body of water” represents a shifting textual space within which the
author may exist. Suleri initially expresses discomfort with this paradoxical manner of taking
form through fluctuation; she feels “put out of joint” or destabilized. Yet, she comes to recognize
the practical impossibility of constructing a “structure” to support and sustain a constantly
mutant identity. A fixed
textual profusion of sentences will only serve as an ineffective disguise; it will only appear as
“chattering” or as a “vulgar congregation” in its redundant wordiness. The revelation that her
broken bone is a rib lends meaning to Suleri’s “perplexed” status at its breakage. According to
Birgit Krückels, Suleri’s broken rib makes reference to a “very male myth of creativity: the
creation of Eve out of Adam’s rib” (Krückels). The fact of Adam’s association with “linguistic
creation,
because it was he who named all the animals on earth” (Krückels) further sheds light upon
Suleri’s allusion: her father’s linguistic and textual skills imbue her with
the ability to signify in language the women in her life. Even as Suleri protectively “holds the
Adam in [her],” she invests this broken rib with agency in its “longing” or
“desire” to break away from her and become part of another structure. The legacy of inscription
that she holds, child-like, within herself, aspires to escape the confines of the author’s body and
become Meatless Days, an entity independently replete with language. Just as Mair Jones

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reluctantly acquiesced to her daughter’s entry into the symbolic, historic order, Suleri relocates
her personalized musings in a public realm.
Thus, Meatless Days becomes, in its very engendering, a separate entity from the author,
echoing the severance of the infantile maternal connection as the yearning and capability for
language emerges. However, as Suleri metaphorically “joins” the rib in its longing for another
“structure” of articulation, she emphasizes her desire to
occupy the dual spaces of “home” (Suleri) in combining daughterhood and motherhood within
her text—she “hides her head” in the manner of a fetus in the text that she creates. Further, just
as acquiescence to language inescapably disembodies Mair by revealing the split between
signification and her actual identity, Suleri
indicates her own disembodiment effected by linguistic aspiration and simultaneous adherence
to the primal, pre-linguistic maternal connection. As she consents, of her own volition, to the
“Adam in her[self],” to the manner in which she is both named and possesses the potential for
naming on account of the paternal legacy, Suleri becomes actively “complicit” in this divide. She
accepts, gracefully and conclusively, the inevitability of “disembodiment” in resisting
essentialism.
"I" Versus "They": The Textual and Communal Self in

Sara Suleri's Meatless Days
Although Meatless Days is more explicitly personal than Joan Didion's The
White Album or Slouching Towards Bethlehem, it nevertheless belies a
clean categorization as autobiography. Suleri, like Didion, links her personal
story to the narrative of her culture. She conflates her internal landscape with the
external landscape so that what is personal is never simply personal -- it is part of
a larger question, a more historical assertion. In turn, Suleri begins to "lose the
sense of the differentiated identity of history and [her]self". Her mind becomes a
"metropolis" "a legislated thing".
Suleri, like Didion, lives amid fragmentation: whereas Didion grapples with the
assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, America's deepening
involvement in Vietnam, the general disillusionment and confusion of the '60s
and '70s, Suleri struggles with a feeling of national displacement: her motherland
is Pakistan, and yet her own mother -- White, Welsh, representative of the
colonizer -- can barely speak the "mother tongue." She is a woman from the
third-world, and yet, as she puts it, "There are no women in the third-world" ,
"Pakistan is a place where the concept of woman was not really part of an
available vocabulary". In "Joan Didion's Dream politics of the Self," Evan Carton
writes that "The disintegration of the times, felt in seismic tremors of the self,
may after all be held and suspended in solutions of self-consciousness, and
precipitated on the page". In Suleri's case, too, it is by means of self-conscious
gestures -- "precipitations on the page," the creation of a "vocabulary" -- that her

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identity is constructed. By rooting her self in language, Suleri addresses her

postcolonial identity. She deals with the "the unpronouncability of [her] life" by
becoming "engulfed by grammar" , by "living in plot".
The manner in which Suleri constructs the identity of her family and friends,
sheds light on the way in which she constructs her own identity for, in discussing
them, Suleri uses the same techniques as in discussing herself: she fuses somatic
discourse with civic and textual discourse. The sister who was once "a house I
rented" becomes after her death "the news" , and later, a "municipality". Her
mother, who "seemed to live increasingly outside the limits of her body", becomes
"the land [her father] had helped to make" and later, "the past [Pakistan] sought
to forget" . Her face is described as "wearing like the binding of a book" . Even her
friend, Muskatori, is represented as such a convincing piece of "land" that, as
Suleri declares, "they could build an airport on [her]" . Suleri refers to her own
"schizoid trick" of disconnecting the syntax of "life and body" and, again and
again, we see the trick, or technique, in action. The book, which is self-
consciously intertextual and academic, turns everything in its wake into a
construction of language, a piece of text. The body becomes a narrative device, a
metaphor for -- but also a way of dealing with -- its fragmented surroundings.
When Suleri leaves Pakistan, she remarks that she "was not a nation anymore" .
More than a denial of physicality, the statement contains an explicit correlation
between her self and her narrative subject. She abstracts history -- nationhood --
into her body, and then reads her body for historical clues. At various points in
the book, Suleri describes herself as a "landscape", an "otherness machine" , and
a "state" . In one particularly poignant scene, Suleri and Shahid swim together
and get bitten by fireflies. Suleri interprets the bites as "tiny writing on [her]
skin" . When Shahid attempts to apologize, Suleri tells him it doesn't matter: "It
never had any plot to it anyway" . In this scene, Suleri, like Didion, dramatically
broadens the personal and physical. She turns this scene of physical play into a
scene of textual play. She interprets the blemishes on her body as metaphors for
the place she holds in the community: she is written upon, Other, colonized.
Throughout Meatless Days , food functions as a link between body and nation.
In "Reading Communities and Culinary Communities," Parama Roy writes that
"Food in the migrant/diasporic subject's cosmos becomes -- whatever it might be
at its place of putative origin -- tenaciously tethered to economics simultaneously
and irreducibly national and moral" . In Meatless Days , this logic holds:
through food -- what the body consumes -- dramas of national identity play out.
In the second chapter, Suleri writes that "Food certainly gave us a way not simply
of ordering a week or a day but of living inside history, measuring everything we
remembered against a chronology of cooks. Just as Papa had his own yardstick --
a world he loved -- with which to measure history and would talk about the Ayub

86
era, or the second martial law, or the Bhutto regime, so my sisters and I would
place ourselves in time by remembering and naming cooks" . Whereas her father
measures history by keeping track of male heads of state, Suleri measures history
by keeping track of what enters her body. The passage makes explicit not only the
connection between body and history, but it reveals a gendered dichotomy: the
males participate directly in history; the women, on the other hand, exist only in
metaphorical relation to it. They keep track of history by what they consume, by
what enters and fills their bodies. This blurry relation between body and
nation/language, is one that structures the novel, and a particularly crucial
moment for this issue is Suleri's discussion of the kapura . The kapura are
testicles, but for the first forty years of her life Suleri has eaten them believing
they are sweet breads -- that is what her mother said, that is the name she gave
them. In a sense, Suleri has ingested the food as if it were a word, "sweet breads"
-- a linguistic symbol. If called the right thing, she would happily consume them.
This moment of cultural and linguistic displacement literalizes the process by
which body connects to nation, a process which Suleri has gestured towards
throughout the book. The kapura connect what is spoken with what is eaten; the
food connects language with one's own flesh.
Like Didion, Suleri complicates the notion of the personal by blurring what is
internal with what is external. In an interview I conducted with Sara Suleri this
past October, she discussed the public nature of her personal pronoun. "The two
books I've written that are designated memoirs," she said, "are not about me at
all." She went on: "The personal pronoun is just as academic as if I was to say,
'This Reader believes this about Conrad.' The "I" is just as much a persona"
(Suleri interview). Again we see that the "I," like the "I" in The White Album
and Slouching Towards Bethlehem , functions largely as a narrative
construction -- a means of abstracting cultural issues into a seemingly
personalized unit. The personal and autobiographical function less as a subject,
than a style: a technique of symbolically crystallizing community and culture.
The Female Landscape and Body representation in Meatless Days
Female body shapes provides descriptions of landscapes and metaphors for
natural scenery and space in Meatless Days, Shame, and Waterland.
Common phrases such as "mother earth," "motherland," "mother country" and
"mother tongue" exemplify the prevalence of conceiving one's place and space in
maternal terms. Titles within the novels reaffirm the individual author's
gendering of land and place, like Swift's "Unknown Country" and Rushdie's
compilation, "Escape From the Mother Country". In the three novels, the
maternity of home repetitively appears in different forms as gendered landmarks,
means of sustenance and descriptions of fertility.
The repetition of water: its fluidity, direction, force and female correlations

87
appear throughout Waterland and intermittently in Meatless Days. Swift and

Suleri specifically feminize water as sexual and maternal; Suleri envisions herself
"laying hands upon the body of her [mother's] water". (Suleri). The author uses
the characteristics of both body and water to depict an image of maternal
comfort. Intensity of any kind made her increasingly uneasy, and as a
consequence she worked at all hours to keep her connection with her children at
low tide--still a powerfully magnetic thing, but an ebbing tide, so that there was
always a ghostly stretch of neither here nor there between her sea and our shore.
(Suleri).
The imagery of water clearly describes the balancing act with which Suleri's
mother held her children at length. The pull of the tide and the pull of her
children sway carefully before the reader as a gentle yet forceful equilibrium of a
mother's strength. Water and mother fuse into one body of power; the imagery
makes real the delicate intricacies of mothering.
The Culinary Grotesque
Sara Suleri's Meatless Days questions her role in family and culture with
grotesque examples associated with food. She uses these grotesques to find
meaning in her life and to connect to the ethos of her country, a project
exemplified by her disillusionment in finding that kapura are, "Not
sweetbread...They're testicles" . Suleri describes the grotesqueness of food with
awe and humor. She uses the shock of kapura as a way to review her relationship
with her mother and looks at the situation philosophically:
Had I borne something of those lessons in mind, it would have been less of a
shock to have to reconceive the kapura parable; perhaps I'd have been prepared
for more skepticism about the connection between kidneys and sweetbreads —
after all, they fall into no logical category of togetherness. The culinary humor of
kidneys and testicles stewing in one another's juices is, on the other hand, very
fine . . . I should have remembered all those nervously comic edges, and the
pangs, that constitute most poignancies of nourishment.
Suleri's use of the word parable implies her search for morals or wisdom in her
testicular discovery. The search for comedy in this particular passage reveals
Suleri's desire to make something of her discovery — to find the meaning
inherent in kapura. The phrase "poignancies of nourishment" demonstrates how
Suleri brings the grotesque in food to a greater level than cuisine, equating
nourishment not only with food but also with her and her country's soul.
Suleri also calls attention to her familial relationships as a result of the culinary
grotesque One day Qayuum insisted that only kidneys could sit on my plate,
mimicking legumes and ignoring their thin and bloody juices. Wicked Ifat came
into the room and waited till I had started eating; then she intervened. "Sara,"
said Ifat, her eyes brimming over with wonderful malice, "do you know that

88
kidneys do?" I aged, and my meal regressed, back to its vital belonging in the
world of function. "Kidneys make pee, Sara," Ifat told me, "That's what they do,
they make pee." And she looked so pleased to be able to tell me that; it made her
feel so full of information. Betrayed by food, I let her go, and wept some watery
tears into the kidney juice, which was designed anyway to evade cohesion, being
thin and in its nature inexact.
Suleri makes the word betrayed especially poignant by following it with the word
food. Her sister, though wicked, is not the betrayer — food now has the power to
not only shock but also betray. The last clause discussing the nature of food
shows that Suleri's relationship to and observation of the food is not just about
consumption she describes the food as having a nature and a purpose, and
therefore subject to interpretation and human-like character flaws.
Suleri again muses about the nature of food after hearing a story about a cat
eating doves, "Am I wrong, then, to say that my parable had to do with nothing
less than the imaginative extravagance of food and all the transmogrifications of
which it is capable? Food certainly gave us a way not simply of ordering a week or
a day but of living inside history, measuring everything we remembered against a
chronology of cooks". Food gives Suleri history and meaning, and therefore her
observation of the grotesque in food is also an observation of the grotesque in
history and meaning. Her continuous use of the word parable portrays these
incidents as a series of stories meant to teach the reader, and by questioning
herself at the same time she takes the reader on the journey alongside her. Suleri
thus uses the vocabulary of food to discuss history: "There is something
nourishing about the memory of all those shadow dynasties: we do not have to
subsist only on the litany" . The words nourishing and subsist directly relate food
and Suleri's personal history.
Whereas Suleri uses the grotesque derived from food to question her
surroundings, Annie Dillard uses food slightly differently, focusing more on the
grotesqueness of the eating process rather than in the food itself. Like John
Ruskin, Annie Dillard uses her sight as her primary sense, stating before quoting
him, "Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization. Unless I call my
attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it" , and her
observations of the grotesque lead her to question herself and the meaning of life.
Her first observation of the grotesque in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek — the
deflating frog — creates a powerful image that permeates the rest of the book with
a grotesque aura.
At last I knelt on the island's winter killed grass, lost, dumbstruck, staring at the
frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and
began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied
and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He

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was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. I watched the taut,
glistening skin on his shoulders ruck, and rumple, and fall. Soon, part of his skin,
formless as a pricked balloon, lay in floating folds like bright scum on top of the
water: It was a monstrous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An
oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided
away. The frog skin bag started to sink...That one bite is the only bite [the giant
water bug] ever takes. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the
victim's muscles and bones and organs — all but the skin — and through it the
giant water bug sucks out the victim's body, reduced to a juice.
The Bodily Grotesque
Moving from what goes into bodies to bodies themselves, Suleri uses the
grotesque in the body to examine questions of beauty and humanity. In her
section titled "Excellent Things in Women," Suleri discusses two bodies
specifically — the bodies of her brother and her grandmother. Her description of
her brother's burning epitomizes her outright grotesqueness: "I slammed down
the carving knife and screamed 'Irfan!' with such ferocity that he jumped,
figuratively and literally, right out of his skin. The bowl of water emptied onto
him, and with a gurgling cry Irfan leapt up, tearing at his steaming clothes. He
clutched at his groin, and everywhere he touched, the skin slid off, so that
between his fingers his penis easily unsheathed, a blanched and fiery grape" .
This quotation shocks not only because of the burning but also because of the
sudden reference to the unsheathing of his penis. The horror of his losing his skin
contrasts with Suleri's description of her grandmother's burning:
By the time Tillat awoke and found her, she was a little flaming ball: "Dadi!" cried
Tillat in the reproach of sleep, and beat her quiet with a blanket. In the morning
we discovered that Dadi's torso had been almost consumed and little recognizable
remained from collarbone to groin...She lived through her sojourn at the hospital;
she weathered her return. Then, after six weeks at home, she angrily refused to be
lugged like a chunk of meat to the doctor's for her daily change of dressing...Thus
developed my great intimacy with the fluid properties of human flesh. By the time
Mamma left for England, Dadi's left breast was still coagulate and raw. Later,
when Irfan got his burns, Dadi was growing pink and livid tightropes, stung from
hip to hip in a flaming advertisement of life. And in the days when Tillat and I
were wrestling, Dadi's vanished nipples started to congeal and convex their
cavities into triumphant little love knots.
I learned about the specialization of beauty through that body. There were times,
as with love, when I felt only disappointment, carefully easing off the dressings
and finding again a piece of flesh that would not knit, happier in the texture of
stubborn glue. But then on more exhilarating days I'd peel like an onion all her
bandages away and suddenly discover I was looking down at some literal tenacity

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and was bemused at all the freshly withered shaped she could create. Each new
striation was a victory to itself, and when Dadi's hairless groin solidified again
and sent firm signals that her abdomen must do the same, I could have wept with
glee.
These two vivid images serve as extreme examples of the bodily grotesque. Suleri
shows her brother and her grandmother's humanity while stripping them,
literally, of their bodies. However, there are differences in the descriptions. For
example, Suleri focuses on the stripping of her brother's body whereas she
focuses on the rebuilding of her grandmother's. Suleri's words "specialization of
beauty" draw insight about beauty from her grandmother's body. By comparing
the grotesque regrowth process to love, Suleri discusses abstract concepts of
beauty and love in a surprising medium, calling in to question the reader's, and
her own, beliefs and preconceptions. The section's title —"Excellent Things in
Women" — makes these passages especially interesting because she only focuses
specifically on the regrowth of her grandmother's body and not that of her
brother. In both examples Suleri calls direct attention to the groin or sexual
organs, but in her brother's case it unsheathes and in her grandmother's case it
regrows. Suleri's grotesque images of the create meaning and a deeper
understanding of her family, simultaneously questioning beauty and love.
The Search for Meaning in the Grotesque
Suleri finds a similar difficulty in examining Tom's body: "With me the man was
so large that he could conceive of himself only in bits, always conscious of how
segments of his body could go wandering off, tarsals and metatarsals heedlessly
autonomous...Perhaps I should have been able to bring those bits together, but
such a narrative was not available to me, not after what I knew of storytelling".
Suleri's grotesque description of Tom's body separating and floating away shows
her inability, like Didion's, to impose a narrative structure on bizarre events and
situations.
Though they write about different subjects, Dillard, Suleri and Didion all search
for meaning in a hostile confusing world. Unlike the traditional Victorian Sages —
Thoreau, Carlyle, Ruskin — they travel with their audience to find meaning
instead of berating their audience with examples of absurdity. Like Bruce
Chatwin, these three women examine the grotesque to examine their world, but
unlike Chatwin they turn inward and examine themselves as well. Each author
uses the grotesque differently but each one uses it to raise questions and forge an
attempt at meaning. Though they do not use the original sage structure, these
three female authors use real-world examples of the grotesque to lead to their
own wisdom statements and, using this wisdom, create an internal sage that
cradles the audience in her arms throughout the journey.

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Sara Suleri has used A Method to Her Madness in the

writing Style of Meatless Days
Sara Suleri's Meatless Days is an incredible literary work. Part memoirist, part
sage writer, Suleri shows us the wonder and the anguish of her childhood and
surrounds us with the bold colors and sundry sounds of a volatile postcolonial
Pakistan.
Her book is a virtuoso act of interpretation of what one can discover and
rediscover through one's own past. Her intensely original style and flair for
description leave the reader with the sense of having read a complete and utterly
true story. Each chapter is brimming with anecdotes from her past and present,
interwoven with dialogue, thought, and breathtaking description. The book,
which is written in a free flowing form, resembles in many ways the way a mind
thinks: constantly drawing upon different musings in order to come a final
conclusion.
The most striking aspects of Meatless Days are how credible the story feels and
the uniqueness of Suleri's personal ethos. Suleri, who appears to bar nothing
from the reader, presents herself as a warm and trusted interpreter. She is unlike
any other writer whom I have yet encountered thus, although her credibility is
unfaltering and her personal ethos is strikingly well defined, I find that
discerning the methods by which she creates them is quite challenging. The
works of two other accomplished writers can help us to see how Suleri achieves
these effects.
Perhaps the most expedient method by which an author can create credibility is
to prove that she knows more about a topic than the reader does; more intricate
details; more complicated names and histories. Including exhaustive detail about
a topic proves to us that our author was truly a part of the event, or that she
studied the issue in great depth, either outcome solidifying our faith in her
credibility. Suleri, McPhee and Didion all use this method in their work.
Throughout Meatless Days, Suleri intermittently updates us about the
changing political situation in Pakistan, each time mentioning exact dates, and
numerous names which have not made the evening news for many decades:
How different Pakistan would be today if Ayub had held elections at that time, in
1968, instead of holding on until the end and then handing military power over
to-of all people! -- Yahya . . . If Ayub had held elections there might still have
been a deathly power struggle between Bhutto and Mujib: Mujib, the elected
leader of East Pakistan; Bhutto, of West Pakistan.
Suleri's father was a politic journalist and the political crises of Pakistan became

92
crises in their home. Her substantial knowledge of Pakistani politics and her
strong opinions about their outcome confirm her credibility as an interpreter of
the postcolonial nation.
The detailed descriptions, facts, and citations that an author puts in a book help
to build her credibility, yet strangely, what the author leaves out can be just as
important. Although Meatless Days recounts her own thoughts and history,
Suleri admits that there are aspects of her life in Pakistan that she will never fully
comprehend and thus can not explain to us. When writing about her brother,
Shahid in the section entitled "The Right Path; Or, They Took the Wrong Road,"
she confesses her imprecise understanding of her brother: "We had always
thought of him, having as he did, the greater mobility of the male, as the most
Pakistani of us: it never crossed my mind that he would choose to stay away or
choose a life that would not allow him to return" . Though she confesses that she
does not have a full knowledge of the topic on which she writes, we continue to
value Suleri's interpretation. Her disclosure of her lack of certain understanding,
in fact adds to her credibility. Nonfiction pieces are meant to be loyal to actuality
and, as fellow human beings, we understand that when one is writing about
certain significance or the inspiration of another it is impossible to possess
complete understanding. Thus, admitting a lack of expertise in certain areas
helps to confirm the actuality of the story.
What authors leave out of their stories is just as important as what they leave in.
It helps to build credibility when an author admits to us that she will not tell us
about something because her lack of understanding will not allow her, but it is
also effective when an author tells us that there are some topics about which
she chooses not indulge us. Scattered throughout Meatless Days are mentions
of a woman named Dale. It is apparent that Suleri cherishes her, yet she never
divulges where they met our even the nature of their relationship. The modest
amount of information about Dale is a clear choice made by Suleri, who even
writes in the closing pages of her book: "I will not mention Dale at any length,
although great length occurs to me (be distracted, elsewhere, Dale, as you read
through this shortest sentence)". This line adds further to the mystery of Dale and
to our frustration about our lack of knowledge. But Suleri's refusal to bestow
upon us her entire story creates credibility. Her story is a personal one. Thus, it is
expected that there are certain people and memories from her past that she
would want to keep for herself. Although we may be frustrated and curious, we
expect that if her story is in fact credible she, like the rest of us, holds certain
memories sacred and will shield them from the world.
The powerful and effective nonfiction writer like Suleri is a trusted interpreter of
events. The greater the displays of knowledge, prowess in written word, and
alluring personal style, the more effectual the author is as a trusted interpreter,

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yet she must make heed not to inject her writing with too much of her own
opinion and judgments. The most beloved and effective fictional narrator of all,
Nick Carraway, of F.Scott Fiztgerald's masterpiece The Great Gatsby, bashfully
admits to readers in the opening lines of the novel that is "inclined to reserve all
judgments" (5). We want to have a sense of our author's personality but including
a great deal of personal opinion and reaction can take away from her credibility
as an interpreter.
Suleri's seemingly emotionless and judgment-free writing style can at times take
readers by surprise because her writing is so extremely personal. Her writing
about her father's sudden divorce from his first wife, Baji, after having fallen in
love with her mother, is completely free from any judgment of her father's
insensitive action toward his daughter Nuz:
Mamma at twenty-five must have been a talking thing-but I would hardly have
thought that sufficient for him to pick up his life with Baji and just put it in his
pocket. Oh, knowing his makeup I have no doubt he sang with pain, but he went
through with it anyway. The divorce was conducted by mail, and in Karachi Nuz
at nine was told that her grandparents were her parents, that Baji was her sister.
Suleri was wise in wringing many of her own judgments out of Meatless Days.
The book is already charged with her very personal and very painful stories. Thus
if she had included more of her own judgments and emotions, her credibility
would have been threatened, and the book would be at risk for appearing too
slanted a view.
In brilliant displays of her writing expertise, Suleri, like Didion, often uses other
means then direct statement to convey her emotions or opinions. Much of the
uniqueness of her style comes from her ability to substitute other images as
metaphors for her emotion. In the chapter "Goodbye to the Greatness of Tom,"
Suleri hauntingly describes her relationship and its end with a man named Tom
by piecing together images of their time together, thoughts about being alone,
and scraps of conversations with her sisters. At the conclusion of the chapter
when she describes Tom's final words to her, she does not write about her own
sadness but instead lets her interpretation of his words portray the emotion for
her:
I knew it meant that had I in Bombay -- leaving India in the opposite direction
from the gateway that should have heralded me -- visited the Elephanta Caves, I
knew already what I would have found. The wind would have whipped its warmth
around the caves, emptying them of echo, and wrinkled out of sight across the
flatness of the sea: all that would remain for me to hear would be the way one
howled to the other, "Goodbye to the greatness of Tom!"
In these closing words of the chapter, Suleri successfully uses the image of the
wind whipping through an empty cave to portray her sadness. Further, her

94
certainty that she would hear Tom's name in the wind clearly conveys that she
was affected by the ending of their relationship. Suleri's subtle yet stirring
manner of conveying her emotions is unparalleled. This ability enables her to
weave her own personality throughout her writing while still maintaining her
credibility.
Just as central to the effectiveness of a piece as an author's credibility is her
personal ethos. A writer's personal ethos is the lens through which she views the
world and the manner in which she projects this view to her reader. The writer's
voice is of course extremely significant to the personal ethos of the piece. The
words of the people about whom the author writes also help to create its
message.
In Meatless Days, Suleri's quotes people in a style that is uniquely her own; so
much her own in fact that she often seems to be feeding her own eloquent words
right into the characters mouths. In "Goodbye to the Greatness of Tom," she
quotes what her former boyfriend supposedly said to her once in sadness: "'I am
sick,' he said in self remorse when he last spoke to me. 'It clutches at my heart
and does not let me move,' he wailed; 'It puts me out of pulse and frightens me'
(89). It can be safely assumed that her boyfriend, in a moment of intense
emotion, did not speak so poetically and explain himself in symbols. It is also safe
to assume that when her mother expressed her worry about her biracial children
she did not wonder to herself, as Suleri tells us: "What will happen to these pieces
of yourself ‘you, and yet not you ‘when you dispatch them into the world? Have
you made sufficient provision for their extraordinary shadows?" (161). Although
it is apparent that Suleri gives us her own lyrical interpretation of other people's
words, the constant weaving of her own voice throughout every aspect of her
story is enormously effective in creating the personal ethos of Meatless Days.
The book is a memoir and as such we look to be taken to Suleri's world as she
sees it. By shaping the character's words into a voice that is more her own, she
creates a world held together with the majesty of her own prose. The fluidity of
her voice as narrator is never broken, not even broken in the words of other
people.
It goes with out saying that Suleri, McPhee, and Didion are all masters of prose.
Credibility and personal ethos in the nonfiction piece can be helped by detailed
information, subtlety in employing judgment, and well placed quotations, but
what ties any great piece together, any piece that makes you quiet with
inspiration, twinge with recognition or shiver with emotion, is the writer's ability
to create brilliantly crafted words.
Suleri's greatest strength in Meatless Days is her flair for description. Her book
focuses a great deal on Pakistan, a land most readers have never seen, thus her
ability to create striking visual images is at the heart of the book. When writing

95
about her trip back to Pakistan to run away from pain in her life Suleri silences
the reader with the grandeur of her description:
I went in search of another cure from him, back to the Himalayas of my
childhood, the winsome gullies that climb up the hills beyond the more standard
attractions of Murree-a mere hill station of a place, with its mall, its restaurants,
and its jostle.
In this short description of a hill side, we can truly envision the mountain with
"its winsome gullies", a sweet haven from the bustle of the city below. Each of her
chapters are infused with awe-inspiring descriptions which make the world
of Pakistan come alive to the reader. Upon finishing Meatless Days, a silence
immediately came to me. I knew that if I were to once again crack open the now
wrinkled pages, I would immediately be taken back to Suleri's intensely visual
world, to the colorful streets of Pakistan, the dusty and uncertain roads of her
childhood, or to the cold sidewalks of New Haven.
Meatless Days is a jewel of a book, full of emotion and astounding insight. Sara
Suleri is a master writer, who creates a warm and effective personal ethos and
develops a bond of trust with the reader. Her writing style is unlike any other that
I have encountered and as such it is difficult to discern the methods and
techniques she uses to shape her words. However, by means of studying great
nonfiction, it is clear to see that writing is not deemed "great" or "effective"
simply by its own merit. There is clear technique and skill involved in nonfiction
writing, and just as a blacksmith must learn the tricks and steps to shaping metal,
writers too have steps to follow in their craft.
To read Meatless Days is exhausting. Not because the book is boring by any
stretch of the mind, but because Suleri writes so effectively that the reader feels
transported to her world. We are involved in the arguments with her father,
emotionally wrenched by the death of her sister, and touched beyond words by
the enduring love of a family that cannot be together. Sara Suleri must have
tirelessly studied the techniques and methods used by remarkable nonfiction
writers, for her implementation of their craft in Meatless Days is breathtaking.
Discuss how Sara Suleri has achieved the theme of

displacement through a handful of family characters.
Like Rushdie in Shame, Suleri also struggles with the displacement caused by
migration. Writing out of New Haven, she feels compelled to depict (and
sometimes justify) her complex relationship to Pakistan.
With a Welsh mother and a Pakistani father, she probably experienced identity
problems while living in both Britain and Pakistan. She spent most of her

96
childhood days in Pakistan and consequently developed a distaste for a history

"synonymous with grief and always most at home in the attitudes of grieving."
(Meatless Days ) Suleri eventually flees, feeling "supped full of history, hungry for
flavors less stringent on [her] palate, less demanding of [her] loyalty." Thus she
begins to float, rootless and rambling, never quite finding a spatial reality. She
finds herself "rarely able to lay hands on the shape of a city, or intuit north from
south in any given continent, its up from its down." Her eccentric friend
Mustakor (herself a compulsive wanderer) warns in a telegram, "IT WASTES
THE YEARS YOU WANDER." When her brother Shahid tells her, "We are lost,
Sara" on phone from England after a brief return visit to Pakistan, she must
agree. Far removed from Pakistan -from its history, its memories, its turmoil --
she (dis)places herself in America. Because of the autobiographical nature of
Meatless Days, Suleri does not need to transfer her experiences onto detached,
fabricated characters as Rushdie does. She simply writes about her family.
A Welsh woman trying to reconcile her race with her Pakistani existence, Suleri's
mother typifies the displacement that arises when one settles in a foreign land. In
a nation still "learning to feel unenslaved," she, with her white skin, represents a
colonial past that Pakistan was so eager to forget. Describing her mother's
"repudiation of race [which] gave her a disembodied Englishness," Suleri
recognizes the scope of her mother's hardship: "She learned to live apart, then --
apart from even herself - growing into that curiously powerful disinterest in
owning, in belonging, which years later would make her so clearly tell her
children, ‘Child, I will not grip.' She let commitment and belonging become my
father's domain, learning instead the way of walking with tact on other people's
land." Suleri's mother, aware that she can no longer hold onto her own history
yet resigned to the fact that she may never regain any semblance of it at all, does
not have to ability to plant herself on the ground, to grow a new set of roots. As a
migrant that has "floated upwards from history, from memory, from Time,"
(Shame ) she has nothing substantial enough to "grip." For her, Pakistan remains
intangible.
Conversely, Suleri's sister Ifat devotes herself to Pakistan. Perhaps shame for her
light skin compels her to marry Javed, a dark, a polo-playing Pakistani. She
learns to speak Punjabi and even masters the Jehlum dialect. She takes pains to
educate herself in the army's history and the customs of Javed's ancestral village.
Ifat denies displacement and becomes Pakistan.
Although not part of the family, Suleri's eclectic friend Mustakor appears as yet
another figure displaced by migration. Having lived in various places -East
Africa,Britain, America -- Mustakor comically acquires just as many names --
Congo Lise, Faze Mackaw, Fancy Musgrave. Acting in plays with Sara, she
attempts to create realities for herself, forming "a deep allegiance to the principle

97
of radical separation: mind and body, existence and performance, would never be
allowed to occupy the same space of time." Because of her inability to settle and
her drifting interests, Mustakor fails to create an identity for herself away from
the stage and other forms of fanfare. She remains deprived of history, bereft of
roots.
Migration, the act of moving from one place to another, instigates displacement,
for it involves more than just the abandonment of physical land. A migrant must
relinquish his past and dismantle his notion of history in order to face what he
encounters in the present, namely the "brocades of continuity and the eyebrows
of belonging." This, however, proves to be rather difficult, for how can anyone
simply forget history and disregard memory? How can anyone ignore the pain
that ensues after his roots have been severed, roots that had once firmly wedded
him to familiar ground? Furthermore, how does it feel to be rootless?
Displacement, unfortunately, rarely has a definitive terminus, for it seems to
perpetuate itself. The displaced often suffer from an almost-pathological
wanderlust. Successive migrations prevent the formation of tenacious roots and
disregard the laws of gravity. Continually roaming and shifting, migrants simply
float, incapable of being attached to something so palpable as land. This freedom,
however, becomes a burden, almost like Kundera's "unbearable lightness of
being." The displaced yearn for placement, a self-defeating cause, which now
"strain[s] and heave[s] against [their] now obsolete need for steady location."
(Meatless Days)
Common to both Rushdie and Suleri is Pakistan, perhaps the saddest, bloodiest
migration of all -- the displacement of a nation. Migration requires one to
relinquish the past in order to survive in the present. But how can anyone simply
forget history? Perhaps this is what Pakistan attempted to do, and perhaps this is
why things went wrong. Freshly partitioned and eager to rid itself of Indian
domination, Pakistan wanted to erase centuries of history and forget its Indian
heritage. What Pakistan failed to realize, however, was that it had been India just
moments ago, and only now had the freedom of giving itself a new name.
Stumbling, searching, shifting -- Pakistan took on the unfathomable task of
rewriting history.
"Dealing with a past that refuses to be suppressed, that is daily doing battle with
the present," Rushdie realizes the obscuring nature of Pakistan's fragile history:
"Pakistan, the peeling fragmenting palimpsest, increasingly at war with itself,
maybe described as a failure of the dreaming mind." By definition, a palimpsest
erases what lies underneath; it covers up what came before, ready to be written
on again and again. Pakistan, the palimpsest-country, was inscribed with an
impermanent past and a variable present, "as though history, like a pestilence,
forbid any definition outside relations to its fevered sleep." (Meatless Days )

98
Alluding to the constant presence of change (erasing, rewriting, erasing again),

Suleri claims "the country [had] grown absentminded, and patches of amnesia
hung over the hollows of the land like a fog."
Discuss how the theme of memory has been

incorporated in the structure of the novel.
Because memory rather than a timeline propels Suleri's narrative, her memoir
demands its own sequence and disregards chronology. Settling instead for a
spatial lag between event and occurrence, Suleri's alinear approach further
complicates the discursive landscape of colonial-postcolonial nations. For
example, upon hearing of her mother's death, Suleri denies the event its finality
by reveling in her ability to savor her mother's life for an additional eight hours
by virtue of the time difference between Pakistan and the United States.
Positing history as nothing more than personal stories of association, Suleri

shares her childhood method of measuring time. "We do not have to subsist on
the litany that begins, "After General Ayub came General Yahya; after the Bhutto
years came General Zulu Haq" but you can also add; "Qayum begat Shorty and
his wife; and they begat the Punjabi poet only called Khansama; he begat Ramzan
and Karam". Significantly, this juxtaposition refuses a fixed opposition of
empowered-powerless, and instead this anecdote draws attention to the
impossibility of leaders without servants and vice-versa.
In The Rhetoric of English India Suleri postulates that, "the simple correlation of
gender with colonizer and colonized can lead only to interpretative intransigence
of a different order, through which an attempt to recognize marginality leads to
an opposite replication of the uncrossable distance between margin and center" .
For example, depictions the feminized landscape of Indiaravished by a masculine
will to colonize proffers neither specificity nor context, while relying on
problematic forced binaries that reify otherness and invite further othering.
Salman Rushdie suggests a possible nuanced gender dynamic amidst his
otherwise masculinized narration, Shame that allegorizes Pakistani history:
I had thought, before I began, that what I had on my hands was an almost
excessively masculine tale, a saga of sexual rivalry, ambition, power, patronage,
betrayal, death, revenge. But the women seem to have taken over; they marched
in from the peripheries of the story to demand the inclusion of their own
tragedies, histories and comedies, obliging me to couch my narrative in all
manner of sinuous complexities, to see my plot refracted, so to speak, through the
prisms of its reverse and "female" side. It occurs to me that the women knew

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precisely what they were up to -- that their stories explain, and even subsume
men's.
Here, the ambiguously homogenous entity "the women" refused their complete
excision from history and narrative and made its presence known. And as a result
this transfer defies the common slippage that yokes nation and patriarchy in a
singular shell. With this peculiar tension between nation and masculine authority
in mind, turning to Suleri's characterization of Pip, her father, simultaneously
calls upon and rejects this gendered coding of the colonial-postcolonial dynamic.
Indeed, her narrative canvasses Pip's anecdotal hurly-burly tendencies with a
rather reproachful tone at times.
Significantly, Suleri unabashedly aligns Pip with a masculine rhetoric of Pakistani
nationalism. However, by inscribing her own tales of nationhood and the sorted
politics of Pakistan, Suleri denies national narrative a complete patriarchal
articulation. She points to her father's tyrannical dependence on history and
women, as examples of his insistent Now that carries the family from Pakistan to
England and back again in an attempt to catch up with Pakistani history.
Furthermore, following the death of his wife and the departure of all his children,
Pip's reliance on women surfaces when he adopts a daughter!
For Suleri, Pakistan and Pip seem to merge almost too easily as a selfsame entity.
And before announcing her journey to the United States to her father Suleri,
reasons, "But we were coming to a parting Pakistan and I." With good reason
Suleri fears Pip's reactions to her planned departure, for she intimately knows his
determinacy to hold on most tightly to those things that in his mind he was the
sole proprietor. Thus, contrary to Surraya's refusal to grip and take hold, Pip's life
consists of multiple demanding loyalties. Describing her feared encounter Suleri
intimates, "For a while he looked at me as though I were not a nation any more,
that I was a minority". Here Pip cannot apprehend why his daughter would want
to leave the comfort of history nor fatherhood for a less welcoming landscape.
Paradoxically, his reproachful concern does not seem to extend to his wife's early
sacrifice in leaving England. But Suleri herself seems confused by her parent's
marriage. She muses over her mother, "Could she not see that his desire for her
was quickened with empire's ghosts, that his need to possess was a clear index of
how he was possessed?". Therefore, the lingering haunts of empire evident in
Pip's insistent allegiance to the nation of Pakistan, and his zealous need for
authority and possession make the colonial-postcolonial divide difficult to
ascertain.
Closing her narrative exploits Suleri recalls her friend David's query, "For whom
are you writing?" To both David and the reader she replies, "But surely it was
preferable to pick up an empty shell, a structure bleached with the promise that it
was once home?". Here Suleri suggests that this meatless form, like the body or

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an identity, can find consolation in its former inhabited space, like the brazen
significance that characterizes Suleri's family and friends. Despite her adoration
for Surraya's achieved meatlessness, Suleri admittedly has yet to make the radical
separation of mind and body. Drawing attention to weather and the repeated
difference of seasons, Suleri shares her appreciation for the intensity of summer.
"I was elated -- at the single-mindedness of summer: something is coming to
strip us to the bone , I thought, something to make our thoughts live in interior
spaces" . Stripped to the bone like the bleached mollusk, the memory of her
mother and the company of women, all of these significant things continue --
meatless.
Meatless Days a political; personal and philosophical

novel cast in the background of Conflicts in Pakistani
culture and politics; discuss
In Meatless Days Suleri carefully weaves intimate tales of tragedy and love with
the history of Pakistan's tumultuous invention. Guided by the interpretative
figure of migrancy Suleri's narrative technique implicitly establishes a nuanced
understanding of colonialism as a means to "provide a language for the slippage
of trauma from apocalypse into narrative" (The Rhetoric of English India).
Indeed, the apocalyptic trauma of Pakistan's invention entitles Suleri's memoir.
That is, on the heels of the so-called birth of Pakistan in 1947 the government
mandated that every Tuesday and Wednesday all butchers' shops must close as a
means to preserve the national supply of goats and cattle. This initiative proved
limited in its effectiveness, as Suleri explains, "As a principle of hygiene I suppose
it was a good idea although it really had very little to do with conservation: the
people who could afford to buy meat, after all, were those who could afford
refrigeration, so the only thing the government accomplished was to make some
people's Mondays very busy indeed" . For Suleri, the daughter of a widely
published journalist and a university professor, these meatless days summoned
curiosity rather than abstinence. Of course, in addition to nationality and culture,
class further makes the category of generalized women an empty cipher. And for
that matter, implicit in the title of her autobiographical text, Suleri draws
attention to the heterogeneous economic classes among Pakistani society.
Besides a governmental imperative, Suleri introduces meatlessness as an idiom
to flesh out the indigestible declaration that "there are no women in the third
world" . This particular language of meatlessness translates "migrancy as an
interpretative figure" best through the narrator's relationship with her mother, a
white, Welsh woman living in Pakistan. Evoking the apocalyptic trauma Suleri

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queries of Pakistan, "What could that world do with a woman who called herself
Pakistani but who looked suspiciously like the past it sought to forget?"
Significantly, much of what Suleri intimates about her mother's diasporic
situation in Pakistan as an English teacher inversely describes Suleri's own
profession in the United States and her shared disembodiment from a situated
place. Repeatedly Suleri teases out of her tales the space between body and self,
making organs, muscles, and thoughts autonomous and separable. Yet like meat
and excrement, these distinctions remain intimately related to form and function.
And for the female, socially marked by the body she inhabits, a possibility of
comfort lies first in acknowledgment of this predicament and then in
(dis)embodiment. For example, when Suleri's sister Ifat marries Javed, a
Pakistani general, her father demonstratively disapproves of the marriage
without forgiveness. In response to Sara's protective concern for the cold
formality tempering her sister's occasional visits, Ifat rationalizes, "It doesn't
matter Sara." For, "Men live in homes and women live in bodies" . Granted this
assertion superficially names a fiercely determined gendered biology, at the same
time however, Ifat's observation draws attention to the displacement of women in
a society where name, family, and house figure as possessions available only to
men.
Suleri describes her mother, this meatlessness, with a painful affection. "It was
always hard to keep her in one place, make her stay with you in a way that let you
breathe, "Now she has no secrets." According to this description Mair, renamed
Surraya Suleri by marriage and conversion, appears to have freed her thoughtful
disposition from the anchor of the corporal frame--an act worthy of emulation
and wonder for young Suleri. "She seemed to live increasingly outside the limits
(delineated by race, gender, and gravity) of her body, until I felt I had no means
of holding her, lost instead in the reticence of touch" . Surrounded by an
incomprehensible restraint, Surraya does not insist on possession like her
husband. On the contrary, she appears to have relinquished ownership of any
past belongings except for the ability to articulate her discourse with precision
and tact. Ironically, in her studied perfection of being, Surraya's weightless
(meatless) aura surfaces as more political than her husband's career--a lifetime
invested in curating the history of Pakistan through numerous publications.
Deliberate acts of self-exploration and understanding, enable a new subject
formation at the small cost of renouncing the social compass that directs identity
formation. Incidentally, in referring to her mother's death, Suleri cries, "Flavor of
my infancy, my mother, still be food: I want my hunger as it was, neither flesh
nor fowl!" . Indeed, perhaps this cry emerges from Suleri's own retrospective
understanding of the body as an unreliable yet necessary harbor for imagination.
Grieving the loss of the meatless sustenance of her mother's being, Suleri

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launches into the surreal details of a dream that captures the multiple metaphors
of meatlessness:
A blue van drove up: I noticed it was a refrigerated car and my father was inside
it. He came to tell me that we must put my mother in her coffin, and he opened
the blue hatch of the van to make me reach inside, where it was very cold. What I
found were hunks of meat wrapped in cellophane, and each of them felt like
Mamma, in some odd way. . .when my father's back was turned, I found myself
engaged in rapid theft. . . I stole away a portion of that body. It was a piece of her
foot I found, a small bone like knuckle, which I quickly hid inside my mouth,
under my tongue.
This tenderly grotesque parable celebrates the meatless temperament Suleri has
adopted from her mother: the foot that travels and the tongue that enables
learning. The red hunks of meat, their texture recognizable, offer the grieving
narrator solace in her familiarity with her mother's practiced disembodiment.
Both feminism and Postcolonialism form apparent discursive cul-de-sacs.
However, deploying the interpretative figure of migrancy pushes the reader to
think beyond either curbed border. Indeed, many great texts in postcolonial and
post imperial literature integrate gender and postcoloniality to re-think the
established knowledge-power relations informing history, culture, nationalism
and discourse. For example, Alan Duff's Once Were Warriors displaces women
from Maori culture and tradition mimicking Suleri's infamous argument. Here
one of the novel's protagonists, Beth Heke meditates her nonexistence in the
Maori society, half resenting the male elders, their privileged position, their
secret language that only they and a few others knew; remembering that this very
place, its cultural practices, had always been a mystery to a young girl growing
up: a males-only domain . Belonging neither to the housing projects of Pine Block
nor the patriarchal practices of her youth Beth can be located in her racially and
sexually marked body not a home.
Women and Postcoloniality Stripped to the Bone in

Meatless Days; discuss the statement.
Sara Suleri's Meatless Days rejects any ideological ease in cataloguing
otherness. Forcing both postcolonial and feminist theory to circumnavigate the
bounded yet contested terrain of identity and discursive formations, she embarks
on her poetic voyage with the confident declaration that "leaving Pakistan was, of
course, tantamount to giving up the company of women".
Suleri then proceeds to map her discourse by telling her reader, "my reference is

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to a place where the concept of woman was not really part of an available
vocabulary: we were too busy for that, just living, and conducting precise
negotiations with what it meant to be a sister or a child or a wife or a mother or a
servant". Following this assertion, the reader can envisage how Suleri¹s
deliberate prose aims to reconstruct this absent community of women.
Suleri's listed roles that fill the displaced category of women -- sister, child, wife,
mother, servant -- name without apology only the predicated female to the male
subject. Of course, a woman's business depends a great deal on her socio-
economic standing. The servant, for example, will locate her negotiated gender
position in significant variance with Suleri. In an effort to explain her denial that
women in Pakistan live in the "concept of woman" to an otherwise lost audience,
Suleri introduces her grandmother Dadi who exists outside of any possible
Western feminist terminology.
Closing the text's first chapter with a studied irony similar to its inception, Suleri
arrives in a classroom at Yale University where she currently teaches English.
Shuttling the reader from Pakistan to New Haven, Suleri shares a classroom
anecdote that captures and guides her literary project:
When I teach topics in third world literature, much time is lost in trying to
explain that the third world is locatable only as a discourse of convenience. . . And
then it happens. A face, puzzled and attentive and belonging to my gender, raises
its intelligence to question why, since I am teaching third world writing , I haven't
given equal space to women writers on my syllabus. I look up, the horse's mouth,
a foolish thing to be. Unequal images battle in my mind for precedence--there's
imperial Ifat, there's Mamma in the garden, and Halima the cleaning woman is
there too, there's uncanny Dadi with her goat. And against all my own odds I
know what I must say. Because, I'll answer slowly, there are no women in the
third world .
What does this bold assertion signify, given that Suleri herself constitutes a so-
called woman from Pakistan, a country conveniently located in the so-called third
world? And why would a student assume that the subject of third world literature
necessarily precludes a sensitivity to gender? In her disconcerting response,
Suleri refuses the false comfort of binary extremes that haunt continual attempts
to define race, gender, and nation.
Suleri simultaneously problematizes Western notions of women within the
Pakistani context, as she complicates the popular trope in both postcolonial and
feminist theory that posits a racial or national authenticity as prerequisite to any
informed analysis. "The claim to authenticity" Suleri explains, "--only a black can
speak for a black; only a postcolonial subcontinental feminist can adequately
represent the lived experience of that culture--points to the great difficulty
posited by the authenticity of female racial voices in the great game that claims to

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be the first narrative of what the ethnically constructed woman is deemed to

want" ("Feminism Skin Deep"). A progressive feminist politics relies on a
rejection of the seductive yet restrictive boundaries of any either-or paradigm
that defines or constrains the experience or identity of women. The assumption
that a monolithic category of women exists as a result of sexual difference or
shared subordination denies the multiple yet specific overlapping entities--
political, cultural, historical, economical--that position women in particular
locales at a given time. For that matter, overly determined either-or politics reify
the very sexual confines or gendered binaries that feminism seeks to challenge.
Therefore, by emptying the dubious categories of women and third world of their
superficial authority, Suleri then moves on to a detailed narrative hosting
audacious and marvelous women.
From the first page of Meatless Days, Sara Suleri breaks down the barriers of her
authority. In contrast to the brilliant Neoclassical prose of Johnson, whose
stylistic devices function as an assembly line for the production of meaning,
Suleri's seems more a collaborative effort, an effort whose goal itself is ill-defined.
For one thing, Johnson confines himself to a single world -- the social,
perceptible world of upper and upper-middle class English citizens. -- from which
he embarks on his quest for significance in his own, unfragmented narrative. The
roles, and the theater, of Suleri's work are nowhere nearly as secure. She does,
like Johnson, fit the dominant contemporary artistic movement of her time -- her
case postmodernism. Yet, again like Johnson, these categorizations seems
inadequate to appreciate her work and its intention.
For example, the motivating idea behind postmodern prose is the defiance of
traditional narrative lines. The act of definition, the use of sententia as headlines,
is anathema to the postmodern work. Instead of dealing in pat universals, the
postmodernist explodes the whole system altogether by denying that there is one
particular reality that can be generalized. The work, instead of asking
epistemological questions about the world, becomes, as Brian McHale quotes
Thomas Pavel, "'an ontological landscape...a complex ontology, involving
different domains, populated by different kinds of beings.'" (McHale, 36) Instead
of limiting reality to one particular social sphere, this landscape reflects the social
construction of a much different kind of reality, one that includes social classes,
religious sects, occupations, a series of smaller worlds that make up either a
meta-reality, or, in McHale's syntax, an "(un)reality." (McHale)
This idea of multiple realities, or no reality at all drives in Meatless Days. From
the opening sentence, Suleri juggles the different worlds that hold meaning for
her: "Leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of
women." She immediately presents us with her national identity and her gender
identity. These are not simply two causal components of her personality; they

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comprise separate universes that either overlap or collide. Suleri spins out these
possibilities in her opening chapter, as she moves from one episode to the next,
each one adding a new tile to the mosaic, sometimes highlighting this interface
between personal and political worlds. For instance, in one episode Suleri
recounts a confrontation she had with her younger sister, Tillat, who came home
suspiciously late from an evening out, and Sara responded with jealous, helpless
violence. The implications for their close sisterhood are severe:
Till then we had associated such violence with all that was outside us, as though
somehow the more history fractured, the more whole we would be. But we began
to lose that sense of the differentiated identities of history and ourselves and
became guiltily aware that we had known it all along, our part in the construction
of unreality.
In this case, Suleri shows how her naive placement of herself in one single world
(that of sisterly affection) invariably leads to fragmentation, a sharp reminder of
the lack of secure, coherent structures. It is not simply that the significance of her
world is diminished by alternative, political realites; that world is destroyed by
the alternative, not only by its violence, but by its very existence. In fact, as Suleri
realizes, the more she identifies herself as Tillat's sister, the more she contributes
to the multiplicity of realities, creating in the long run one overarching unreality.
Interlacing texts and their consequent fragmentation runs throughout the first
chapter, as Suleri layers tales of family deaths with explosive political events. .
She recounts one especially jarring incident when her father, upon receiving a
cable from his wife, kissed it before putting it in his pocket. Suleri felt startled, "as
we all did on the occasions when our parents' lives seemed to drop away before
our eyes, leaving them youthfully engrossed in the illusion of knowledge
conferred by love." . The multiple realities span not only political and personal
spheres, but temporal ones as well. Suleri is confronted with the reality of a world
of which she is a product, but not necessarily a part. She cannot enter this world,
nor can she really negotiate with it. It simply stands as another thorn in the side
of the idealized, neat, cohesive narrative.
Sara Suleri creates a complex web of metaphoric relations between discourse and
woman's body in Meatless Days. In the episode when Sara strikes Tillat out of
sexual jealousy when she returns home late, she acts as an agent of her
internalized patriarchy, even though both knew that she was jealous of Tillat's
activities. The bodily violence/violation is coded with a message, an ideology that
frames them both within history and makes them complicit with outside violence
in their lived experience.
Till then we had associated such violence with all that was outside us, as though
somehow the more history fractured, the more whole we would be. But we began
to lose that sense of the differentiated identities of history and ourselves and

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became guiltily aware that we had known it all along, our part in the construction
of unreality.
The following passage, which concludes the novel, collects the various themes
and interweaves them:
Bodies break, but sometimes damage feels a necessary repair, like bones teaching
fingers how to work, to knit. When my bone broke, I was perplexed: was I now to
watch my own dismantling body choose to unravel with the cascading motion of a
dye in water, which unfurls to declare, "Only in my obliteration will you see the
shapes of what I really can be. . . Put upon by sentences galore--like starlings,
vulgar congregations! In pale and liquid morning I hold the Adam in me, the one
who had attempted to break loose. It is a rib that floats in longing for some other
cage, in the wish-bone cracking urge of its desire. I join its buoyancy and hide my
head as though it were an infant's cranium still unknit, complicit in an Adam's
way of claiming, in me, disembodiment." (Suleri)
At the same time that Suleri feels distanced from her own body, from the male,
Adam, in it, she also experiences her placelessness as a woman since she is
continually a migrant in the world. She conceives of the body as an entity
engaging in discussion. Without the support of her rib, the fluidity of her body
mirrors the apparent lack of "scaffold" in her novel, which exists as a collection of
integrally connected but "unknit" memories and anecdotes. The fragmentation of
her narrative appears expressed in the fragmentation of woman's bodily parts.
Her father, one of the book's central male figures, is aligned with language and
discourse in his journalism--and consequently history, and its production.
Ironically, Mair, Suleri's mother, as a Welsh woman living in Pakistan epitomizes
the theme of woman's lack of place and history. "She let commitment and
belonging become my father's domain , learning instead the way of walking with
tact on other people's land. . .I'm curious to locate what she knew of the niceties
that living in someone else's history must entail, of how she managed to
dismantle that other history she was supposed to represent."
In this way, she is a sort of backwards inverted colonial representation. In a
passage reminiscent of Rushdie, Suleri writes:
"Mairi, look at the beauty -- the balance--of this front page!" He made each front
page fit into his control of the aesthetic of his history. My mother, however, let
history seep, so that, miraculously, she had no language in which to locate its
functioning but held it rather as a distracted manner sheathed about her face, a
scarf. "Mamma was more political. . . She did not have to put it into print--it was
the sheet in which she slept. . . " So of course she never noticed the imprint on her
face as it wore, for she was that imprint: she was her own dust before her bones
had dreamed that they could crumble."
As in Remains of the Day, language signifies belonging to a place or a people.

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Suleri writes of her mother, "For a woman who liked to speak precisely: she must
have hated her sudden linguistic incompetence: languages surrounded her like a
living space, insisting that she live in other people's homes." Placelessness is
correlated with public discourse and history. Yet, "Men live in places. Women live
in bodies." Words, too, can be inscribed onto the body, so that the body carries a
message. Suleri writes after her sister's death: "Let us wash the word of murder
from her limbs, we said, let us transcribe her into some more seemly idiom. And
so with painful labor we placed Ifat's body in a different discourse, words as
private and precise as water when water wishes to perform both in and out of
light."
Discuss food and language in Meatless Days and

other novels of Sara Suleri.
Sara Suleri, in Meatless Days, uses metaphor abundantly, almost incessantly, to
weave in and out of the narrative fragments out of which each memoir is
composed. The rootless, borderless, structure of her life, which unfolds in pieces
across many cities, is reflected in the books' apparent lack of organization.
However, a closer inspection reveals an organizational technique built around

semantic associations, rather than historical or narrative sequentiality. She
centers many of her metaphors on food, which, like language, plays a crucial role
in the construction of cultures. Having successfully lived in many cultures,
spoken many languages, and digested many kinds of food, Suleri's life and work
illustrate the arbitrariness of national and linguistic boundaries.
Metaphor, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is "a figure of speech in
which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in
place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them." In other words,
it functions by mentally aligning two disparate concepts, between which a reader
formulates a third, synthesized meaning. Suleri's continuous stream of
metaphors constantly forces the reader to question the absoluteness of words'
assigned meanings. She also uses frequent repetition of her friends' and family
members' mispronunciations of English words to this same end. This technique
of repeating recognizable words with a critical difference "disrupts the
sign/signifier relationship" (Drewal) and illustrates language's permeability to
new meaning.
Why food, though, as such a recurrent trope? Food is a sensuous, material thing.
Language is an abstract concept, constructed in the minds of its users. Yet both

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are symbols of cultural identity. What you eat and which language you speak, and
with what accent, are never just that, they are fraught with class and cultural
significance. "Taste" is another word for "aesthetic," and taste is also symbolic of
social class. Furthermore, both are ways of orally internalizing the external world.
Food is ingested, processed, and excreted. Language is the means by which
people translate their sensual and material experiences into meaningful concepts.
However, to the same degree that they can include, unify and satisfy, they have
the power to exclude, divide and frustrate. Suleri's endless use of metaphor
highlights the fact that language is not indestructible; each language, like each
cuisine, like each culture, has its strengths and weaknesses, and that one cannot,
and must not, try to dominate another.
On the first page of Meatless Days, Suleri sets up the relationship between food
and language. She describes her friend Anita as the only person who understands
that her leaving Pakistan meant giving up the company of women. This complicit
sharing of culture allows them to "go perambulating through the grimness of New
Haven and feed on the pleasures of our conversational way." Although they are
located in an entirely different geographical place now, their conversation, the
words exchanged, give them nourishment and sustenance. Suleri then goes on to
explain to the reader, whom she equates with "a stranger or an acquaintance," the
peculiar situation of women in Pakistan, "a place where the concept of woman
was not really part of an available vocabulary: we were too busy for that, just
living, and conducting precise negotiations with what it meant to be a sister or a
child or a wife or a mother or a servant." Here, language as a tool for
conceptualizing becomes an inhibiting obstacle. In Pakistan, there was no
"concept of woman" as part of the "available vocabulary." Each woman was
relegated more specifically to one of many other roles, which required intricate
"negotiations" to make the reality of lives correspond with the linguistic
definition of each of those words. But the language used here, English, cannot
fulfill its purpose. It does not successfully translate their reality into words.
Suleri directly links food and language again on the first page of the chapter
"Meatless Days," calling her conversations with her sister Tillat "meals,
delectable" . Although Tillat lives in Kuwait, married with three children, Suleri
shows how by "speaking over and across the separation of our lives," indulging in
these verbal repasts brings them to a common ground. Yet, it is during this
conversation that Tillat chooses to debunk Suleri's long-held belief that kapura,
a Pakistani dish, are sweetbreads.
"Sara," said Tillat, her voice deep with the promise of surprise, "do you know
what kapura are?" I was cooking and a little cross. "Of course I do," I answered
with some affront. "They're sweetbreads, and they're cooked with kidneys, and
they're very good." Natives should always be natives, exactly what they are, and I

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felt irked to be so probed around the issue of my own nativity..."Not sweetbread,"

she gently said. "They're testicles, that's what kapura really are."
This dispute over the true meaning of the word kapura prompts Suleri to
question other expatriate Pakistanis as to its definition. "Expatriates are
adamant, entirely passionate about such matters as the eating habits of the
motherland. Accordingly, even though I was made to feel that it was wrong to
strip a food of its sauce and put it back into its bodily belonging, I certainly
received an unequivocal response: kapura, as naked meat, equals a testicle" . In
her effort "strip a food of its sauce and put it back into its bodily meaning," she is
questioning the true definition of the word, without its "sauce," or semantic
associations. Unable to accept this answer, she insists on its potentiality for other
meanings, asking "But," and here I rummaged for the sweet realm of
nomenclature, "couldn't kapura on a lazy occasion also accommodate something
like sweetbreads, which is just a nice way of saying that pancreas is not a pleasant
word to eat?"
So when we eat food, we are not just eating the substance in our mouth, we are
ingesting the word, and its mental connotations, as well.
Contemplating why her mother, the source of the misinformation, had deceived
her thus, she decides on two possibilities. Either she was just plain wrong, had
mistranslated, or, even more disturbingly, she "knew that sweetbreads are
testicles but had cunningly devised a ruse to make me consume as many parts of
the world as she could before she set me loose in it" . She explains her mother's
awareness that "sweetbreads are testicles" as a matter of cultural difference. "For
of course, she must have known, in her Welsh way, that sweetbreads could never
simply be sweetbreads in Pakistan" . She then must question the truth of
everything her mother has told her, asking "what else have I eaten on her
behalf?" The word did not translate correctly, and she is deeply disillusioned. Her
mother had been feeding her mistruths.
Kapura becomes the recurrent theme that links the anecdotes over the next few
pages. "To the best of my knowledge I had never seen kapura cooked outside of
the company of kidney, and so for Tillat's edification alone I tried to begin with
the story of the kidney". She then goes a step further back in time, recounting
how Ifat would make fake pan, stuffed with pebbles, to feed to their cook's
daughter, who ate them every time. Again, food, like language, deceives and
disappoints. The pebbles turn into stones, and "Those stones get linked to
kidneys in my head, as part of the chain through which Munni got the better of
me and anticipated the story I really intend to tell" . Identifying her train of
thought -- pebbles are stones are kidneys are this story I'm about to tell -- helps
the reader follow along, but it also shows how precariously words are linked to

110
their meanings. If one word can so easily become the other in the mind, what
does that say about language? Kidneys become the centerpiece of her next story,
the food she is forced to eat as punishment for nibbling her family's cauliflower.
Qayuum the cook insisted on making me eat kidney. "Kirrnee," he would call it
with a glint in his eye, "kirrnee." My mother quite agreed that I should learn
such discipline, and the complicated ritual of endurance they imposed did make
me teach myself to take a kidney taste without dwelling too long on the
peculiarities of kidney texture...One day Qayuum insisted that only kidneys could
sit on my plate, mimicking legumes and ignoring their thin and bloody juices.
Kidneys take on multiple meanings in this passage: they are the symbol of
penitence and discipline, they are "kirrnee," they are elusive simulations of
vegetables, who emit "bloody juices," which are "designed anyway to evade
cohesion, being thin and in its nature inexact." Ifat makes the unforgivable move
of relocating them in the body, telling her "Kidneys make pee, Sara...That's what
they do, they make pee" . When the word, kidney, is given back its original
meaning, its true function, Sara is once again distraught, "betrayed by food" .
Although she feels betrayed by both kapura and her mother, she blames herself
for not recognizing truth when it presented itself. Kapura, she decides, are true to
their word. "Anyone with discrimination could immediately discern the
connection between kapura and their namesake...the taste is altogether too
exactly what it is". She continues, expanding this to the ability of every person to
"know the flavor of each part of the anatomy: that much imagination belongs to
everyone's palate" . Acquiring this knowledge requires "the ability to take the
world on their tongues".
But what happens when the tongue rejects the world? Her infant brother Irfani,
born in London, reacts ferociously to "the idea of food" in Pakistan. "He spent
most of the next year with his body in violent rebellion" , using his "infant's
intuition to fear food," especially the food of his country. He would eat only
imported baby-food, "though with a look of profound mistrust." Pakistan, as a
country, has lost the ability to feed and nourish its people.
To some degree all of us were equally watchful for hidden trickeries in the scheme
of nourishment, for the way in which things would always be missing or out of
place in Pakistan's erratic emotional market. Items of security -- such as flour or
butter or cigarettes or tea -- were always vanishing, or returning in such
dubiously shiny attire that we could barely stand to look at them...Our days and
our newspapers were equally full of disquieting tales about adulterated foods and
the preternaturally keen eye that the nation kept on such promiscuous blending.
Pakistan has a "fear that food will not stay discrete but will instead defy our
categories of expectation in what can only be described as a manner of extreme

111
belligerence," in other words, a fear of miscegenation. Using food as a thinly

veiled metaphor for linguistic groups, or political actors, she is describing the
repressive situation in Pakistan.
Suleri asserts outright food's significance in her storytelling, asking the reader
"Am I wrong, then, to say that my parable has to do with nothing less than the
imaginative extravagance of food and all the transmogrifications of which it is
capable?" She and her sisters use food as a way "not simply of ordering a week or
a day but of living inside history, measuring everything we remembered against a
chronology of cooks." Organizing time in this way gives "a distinctive flavor to a
particular anecdote" . It is more "nourishing" than "subsist[ing] on the litany that
begins, 'After General Ayub came General Yahya; after the Bhutto years..." which
is Papa's "yardstick-a word he loved-with which to measure history" . Her aside,
that his "yardstick" was not actually a yardstick, but a "word he loved," calls extra
attention to the fact that all of these methods are merely metaphors themselves.
Yet food is the metaphor she turns to even as communication fails her. Her
arguments with her American boyfriend Tom break down as they struggle to
speak each other's language. "How those conversations and their manner of
amazing question withered me, embattling as they did his forms of information
against mine, turning all nourishment to straw upon my palate." Instead of
nourishing her, as do her conversations with Anita or Tillat, they "wither" her,
their potential for nourishment turns "to straw." Their words mean different
things to each other, and in fact go head to head, "embattling...his forms of
information against mine." When translation is impossible, language's enriching
power becomes deleterious.
Mair, Suleri's Welsh mother, had a particular gift for calibrating people's tastes in
language. Her sensitivity, especially in her role as a professor of English
literature, stems from the fact that she had so many children, "preferring, of
necessity, to configurate her mind around what need not be said, much as she
congregated all our fussy eating habits around a meal". Suleri admits she lacks
the effort to be this accommodating: "I would not like to be responsible for the
way so many people choose to eat and not to eat, for even when I teach I
sometimes think I fall into a lazy way of talking as though there were simply a
bunch of equally fed bodies in front of me." Mair's patient ways "let her learn the
limits of our private tastes, what each of us could and could not eat" .
Food, also, sets up cultural barriers. She frequently contrasts the food in Pakistan
with the food in America. America, home to people from all over the world, does
a miserable job of translating their cultures. Recalling leisurely summer
afternoons in Lahore, she describes the snacks on hand: "There were peanuts,
cashews, pistachios at hand for our pleasure, as well as pine nuts- not the stubby,
stale things that America offers you, but kernels slender, delicate and fresh".

112
What was "slender, delicate and fresh" in Lahore becomes "stubby" and "stale" in
America.
Mangoes, too, are a symbol of America's gift for mistranslation. Although Suleri
admits she was "never too much a devotee of that Potenza fruit," she is
nonetheless disgusted at thing America calls mango. Mango, in Pakistan, means
"over a hundred varieties of them," which in America is reduced to one "generic,
squat, thick-skinned" specimen. She explains this by way of a "hemispheric
difference," that makes her "lips curl with scorn" .
Summertime in Lahore also means "lassi...a marvelous lunchtime
drink...blended to perfection with some ice." This drink, too, is stunted when
faced with an electric blender, which “neutralize[s]" and "rob[s] it of the
surprising consistency" that makes it "a beverage unchallenged in its succor and
delight." America's mishandling of all things culinary is a metaphor for how it
impoverishes the cultures of its inhabitants.
The mango and nut metaphors come together in the tale of General Zulu. When
he offered a billion dollars of aid money by the U.S., he dismissed their offer as
paltry: "But that is peanuts!" he cried, implying that not even a billion dollars
could nourish his starving country. As "amusing" as this story is that of how Zulu
was blown up over Bahawalpur. "Some wag has it that the bomb was secreted in a
case of mangoes, labeled "Man-go." Here the English word, "mango," is split into
a sick joke, again illustrating the destructive nature of the colonizer's language.
Mango translates in English to the death of a man.
Sometimes food, like language, is simply inadequate. Before the war of 1971, with
its "colossal failures, its unutterable consumption of lives," Bangladesh was East
Pakistan. Suleri and her friends were obliged to make relief packages to send
there, for the victims of meteorological disasters. She calls them "scant care,"
consisting of "a washcloth, aspirin, uncooked lentils, a small bag of rice." These
items alone are inadequate to feed the Bengalis, much as words on their own are
inadequate forms of expression. "Where will they find unpolluted water in which
to cook these items," Suleri wonders, "or even in that great preponderance of
liquid a body pure enough to rinse their cloths" . The lentils and rice needs
unpolluted water to make it nourishing, just as language needs an unbiased
context to make it beneficial. Just as Pakistan could not be repaired with just a
gift of peanuts from America, nor could it nourish itself with its own supplies. She
bitterly satirizes America's hypocritical penchant for dispensing peanuts on
countries it destroys: "Think of the grotesque bounty of similar packages, rained
on Afghanistan, rained on Iraq" . But she does not exempt her own country from
condemnation, asking "Is Pakistan becoming a synonym for death" ?
Suleri does not see religion as the cure. In fact, when her father goes on the
pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, he temporarily loses his elegant aesthetic. "For

113
a man of good taste, he came back with some dubious gifts," including "the
inevitable bottle of water from Ab-e-Zam-Zam, that sacred spring in the desert
connected with a sweet story concerning a mother and a thirsty infant that I
cannot quite remember." The holy water, connected with a mother's
nourishment, tastes to her "mustily stale and somehow lackluster" . She is not
impressed with Islam.
Suleri acknowledges language's paradoxical combination of power and weakness
again and again. Describing her want to see her sister Tillat and her friend
Mehreen to meet, she says "I would like to implement that occasion," but quickly
flips the word implement into its meaning as a noun, as pieces of jewelry being
implements to enhance attractiveness. Her translation of meaning, from verb to
noun, within the English language, is reminiscent of her statement "Perhaps
without knowing it, we were changing lingoes all the time, even within our
selfsame language" . Although language is unstable, permeable to mutations and
manipulations, it is still "our only implement, after all." Within this resignation to
language as our only means of translating cultures is the implicit exhortation to
translate, successfully, at any cost.
Her and her mother's successful crossing of boundaries, or translation, invite us
to question all boundaries. By exploding language's permanent, immutable,
nature, she simultaneously explodes the concept of nationhood. As an instrument
to help us process and translate the world around us, and all the various cultures
it contains, it is essential and unifying. But when it turns from its true function as
an implement for translation, to a tool for domination and subjugation, it has lost
its nourishing essence.
Suleri's prose paints the lush background of her

family and their lives in Pakistan; discuss the
statement.
Suleri's prose paints the lush background of her family and their lives in Pakistan.
The use of the word "background" here is intentional, for the way Suleri
structures her work encompasses a web of events and happenings in which the
people are at once central and effervescent. Ignoring a linear conception or
construction of time, the novel mentions characters who then fade away only to
reappear again later somewhere else.
In other words, Suleri does not merely introduce characters into her novel; they
are mentioned in passing or described in detail, but they move and speak on their
own. Suleri, who also does not believe in authorial control, prefers to let her
novel's bevy of people speak for themselves. As she told me in a recent interview,

114
"I wanted to be democratic in the attention that I gave to all the various bodies
that come up in the text, including my own," and she therefore advocates a
multiplicity of voices reminiscent of the works of Virginia Woolf.
For this reason most of the nine chapters in the novel each center on one person,
but each incluides other matters as well. Other characters, to whom Suleri either
has devoted or will devote a chapter, flit in and out of the passages; she uses her
relaxed temporality to move from topic to topic, meshing together her anecdotes
vis à vis the person in question or herself to create a composite view of her
subject. For example, in the space of a few pages in the chapter about her former
lover Tom, Suleri details personal beliefs that connect with her family, Tom, and
Pakistan. She begins by writing about what she feels is the depressing state of
museums and how visiting one is a sort of devotional activity. Her disquieting
visits to a museum bothers her with questions about "why such precise
expressions of presentation are so hungry with the desire to please" and leads her
to appreciate not the museum's artwork but rather its walls. Then in a short
passage Suleri focuses on mosques and her father's grief over her mother's death;
that in turn leads to a talk of how she would like her house to be built like a
mosque. Finally, the narrative returns again to Tom, because she writes how she
and Tom once had talked of visiting mosques and other places in Pakistan
together, so that she may see "a traveler's vision" of her country.
A motif arises in less than three pages: that the relation of Tom's American
background to her Pakistani origins; the incongruity of their relationship
parallels the incongruity of the spare, unassuming white museum walls with the
demanding artwork it displays. Later in the chapter, Suleri returns to her
discussion of Pakistan by including an anecdote about how her sister Nuz avoids
getting her car stolen in Pakistan by leaving every door and window ajar, "gaping"
and "forlorn." Suleri, returning to Pakistan after a long absence, ``realizes [she]
was out of touch with Pakistan when it worked like a dream" . The tale is brought
full circle: Tom, who she thinks about as a builder, constructor, and creator,
inspires in her thoughts about other buildings, museums and mosques, as well as
about building her own house. This brings thoughts about her real house, the
house she grew up in, which is not a physical building of wood, nails, and
concrete but is, rather, her home, Pakistan. She returns to Pakistan as a "cure"
from Tom, realizes she is out of touch with her home and attempts to reconcile,
as she does so often in this book, her selfhood. Living amid the bustling
abundance of Nuz, I finally had time to differentiate between my mind's vestigial
sense of Tom and what it meant for me to be standing there, out on a Himalayan
bluff or next to the southern murkiness of the Karachi sea. They no longer needed
to belong to the same terminology now that my idea of him had been consigned
to time zones where I was arriving just at the point when he was taking off. It was

115
that Pakistani balance that came to my thoughts, a sharper word than ever now,
with Karachi in a state of civil war, the frontier under siege... So I looked out in
the direction of the border lines and tried to picture rewriting, teaching myself to
think through and repeat: "Your mind is a metropolis, a legislated thing. The
keener your laws the better their breakage, for civilizations will always rise and
fall upon your body's steady landscape."
The breakdown of order in Karachi is analogous to the breakdown between her
and Tom, and describing these sets of relationshsips thus links public and
personal histories. Tom, a builder, a Westerner and part of an Imperialist
heritage, appears in opposition to Pakistan, which is Eastern, foreign to Tom --
and built out of civil strife, religious intolerance, and decolonialization by the
West. But in the face of such hardships Suleri relies upon herself, upon her
"body's steady landscape" that will continue to provide the background for
further meditations that gather her friends, family, country together with her own
self.
The chapter's motifs are strung together, overlapping with rich metaphors and
set pieces: construction and creation of a house and a home, devotion and
religion, a mosque, Pakistan, a relationship between a Western man and an
Eastern woman. This organization, then, helps to comprise Suleri's multiplicity of
voices: the words, though written by her throughout in the first person, are those
of her subjects and her own, and her own thoughts serve to embellish and
enlighten the reader about the subject at hand. The chapter, then, shows how the
personal reflects the public and the autobiography reflects the historical, and vice
versa.

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1

Post-Colonial Literature in English

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Novels Based on Partition

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Issues of Gender in Literature and Theory

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postcolonial context? How is it a consequence of a kind of postcolonial resurgence of

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A Short History of Pakistani Literature in English

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Beginning of Indian Literature

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The lack of criticism on Pakistani literature

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Pakistani authors of English literature on the global scene

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Sara Suleri – life, works and critical reception

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Sara Suleri’s A Daughter Remembers

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Sara’s narrative voice and fictional technique

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Suleri's Pay-Off and Set-Up Anecdotes

What Suleri Knows of Storytelling

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Sara Suleri as a stylistician

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the end of the discussion on Dadi and God:

Names and language

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The Metatextual and the Hermeneutic in Meatless Days

Marmalade Squirrels: A Love of Language

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Introduction and Short Summary of Meatless Days

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Main Characters in Meatless Days by Sara Suleri

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The Character of Mustakori

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Critical appreciation – Meatless Days

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The Joys of Motherhood

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Tongues, Meat and Corpses: Fragmentation and Disembodiment in Suleri's Meatless

Time and Chronology in "Meatless Days"

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Suleri's use of time

Burying the Lede

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passages exemplify some similarities and differences in their two styles.

Food and Death

And later when talking of kapura:

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