Bodies and Language in Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days by z malik

Bodies and Language in Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days

Leaving mobilizes a body. Leaving Pakistan, a border-crossing trail, also mobilizes Sara Suleri’s concepts of woman. Meatless Days zigzags Suleri’s autobiographical footprints that girdle around the company of women. In each chapter, a stopover for a visit to a friend or a family member silhouettes life stories and woman images. Living and writing converge in the autobiography. If “the concept of woman was not really part of an available vocabulary” (1) in Pakistan, it is through writing that Suleri approaches a linguistic space, in which the everyday-ness of the woman characters comes to life. “Suleri is not only questioning that definition of history, but is putting women into it, adding something to the ‘concept of women’ that she says was not there” (Burns 233). “Woman” is a linguistic space in Meatless Days. In such a linguistic space, female bodies stretch out to allusive curves. Each curve, brailled with the alphabets of family and nation, tell a story of her own. With the allusive female bodies portrayed, this essay intends to explore how Meatless Days obscures a univocal outline of Pakistani women and mobilizes the concepts of woman through the three Suleri women: Dadi, Mairi, and Sara. Diaspora parasitizes in the bacteria of friction burn at culture collision. It disperses itself later in the tongues, skins, and the heads. Given that diaspora occurs on the premise of bodily mobilization, this essay attempts further to propose a tilted hyphen, instead of a horizontal one, as a diasporic path that initiates culture collision and enables Sara Suleri’s mobilization of the concepts of women.

How the concepts of woman, in its bodily curve, sprawl along in the national and familial spaces in Meatless Days invites colloquies among critics. Diaspora studies question where one belongs, and for Suleri’s autobiographical work, “an essential aspect of Suleri’s life-writing process pivots around her attempt to recover the absent community of women”

 (Davis 125). The community of women embodies a space where Sara the author finds a sense of belonging. If her life-writing explores a diasporic path toward the sense of belonging, from the path extends not a straight route but a creeping one that negotiate both Pakistani nation and the Third World women, the bumps and humps that are apt to deadlock the identity politics. Among critics, Patricia Burns points out that Meatless Days counteracts a sketchy grab of Third World Woman in a Western embracing arm and “resists imposing outside ideas of feminism on the narrative of Meatless Days because outside, and specifically Western, feminisms do not encounter the same obstacles. Because women are ‘deminutized’ before the law in Pakistan, Suleri uses her narrative to increase their presence and power, giving them a voice that is heard” (235). Likewise, Sandra Ponzanesi observes Meatless Days as a narrative “to reconstruct the community of women and on the other to eliminate the concept of a Pakistani woman. In this way she cannot be fixed as a Third World Pakistani woman, since that concept was not part of an available vocabulary but rather an invention of the West to appropriate its referentiality” (Ponzanesi 74). Not only a re-conceptualization of a Third World woman, Meatless Days is also perceived, among critics, as a counter-discourse in response to the patriarchal Pakistani nationalism. In Meatless Days, female bodies are the sites where language is the yeast for the ferment of new concepts of women. Female bodies, through Suleri’s literary yeasts, are fermented into a linguistic space. In such a linguistic space, female bodies turn out to be allusive. They tell stories, diasporic stories that distinguish themselves from both Western intellectual society and Pakistan fatherland. “It is obvious that the female corporal presence provides an antidote to the impersonal father whose repression of personal histories mirrors the repressive state of Pakistan” (Ponzanesi 70). Everyday-ness, food, religion, reading and teaching, is the climate that both moistures and dries the female bodies. “In Meatless Days women are not limited to the roles they play nor are they held to any concept of women imposed from outside the symbolic world the occupy [. . .] It is a new symbolic, one that the narrator creates so that she can ‘properly’ ‘retell’ the meaning of women in her history” (Burns 232). Female bodies are the space where Suleri’s “new symbolic” unfolds. Brailled with alphabets of living, family and nation, female bodies are linguistic spaces that negotiate a presence of woman in the diasporic movement. Female bodies are a counter-discourse in Meatless Days. Physical existence, tinted with unique domesticity, food and residence, wiggles its hoedown with the soils and air on the Pakistani land.

Dadi: a curve of a shrimp

A bodily curve of a shrimp shapes Dadi in her own fashion, one of the Suleir women in her Pakistani family. “You did not deal with Dadi” (Meatless Days 2), a provocation from Sara the narrator in face of her non-Pakistani audience who could not comprehend her stories and her sense of the community of women. Sara’s provocation delivers messages in two folds. A disclosure of a repressed space saturated with Dadi and her idiosyncratic story. A closure of a hegemonic discourse inscribed with patriarchal name. If “you,” the audience, is entitled to those who reside in the patriarchal Symbolic, the dealing with Dadi would thus invite the audience’s curious glimpse into a unique female presence in a different linguistic space in her narrative. Dadi speaks for uniqueness. Her obsession with food and religion exceeds her body beyond the threshold of a Pakistani woman role. “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” (MD 2). Dadi’s “posture of a shrimp” fades the true-blue faith in a univocal Pakistani woman image. It remarks on Dadi’s eccentric gesture that writhes Pakistani chisel for a woman. Family estrangement is one of the twitches for Dadi’s eccentric curve. Alienation with children, for death or distance, wanes a mother to a lonesome curl, a curl that palms

could hold the laps for warmth. “Satan was to blame: he had after all made her older son linger long enough in Lnglestan to give up her rightful wife, [. . .]. Satan had stolen away her only daughter Ayesha when Ayesha lay in childbirth. And he’d sent her youngest son to Swaziland, or Switzerland; her thin hand waved away such sophistries of name” (MD 3). With no child around to share life, Dadi turns her words to God. She turns to God to end the twitching haul of loneliness. Religion, therefore, is a means for Dadi to make life more bearable. The connection to God, talks and prayers, moisturizes the family drought that parches her. “God she loved, and she understood him better than any one” (MD 3). And while religion sprinkles Dadi’s sterile soul and is a means to end Dadi’s twitching haul of loneliness, food vigorizes her physical mobility and enables Dadi to walk across the desolate domestic doorway. “Food, too, could move her to intensities” (MD 3). Through food, the Suleri woman derives delight and mobility. “There was Dadi making her return, and she was prodigal. Like a question mark interested only in its own conclusion, her body crawled through the gates” (MD 5). Food brings delights. It mobilizes Dadi. And as it sways her body in and out of the family threshold, it deterritorializes domesticity that squares the conception of woman. “Suleri’s descriptions are very specific and they remain specific. Personal story in autobiography avoids sweeping generalizations because of the particularity of their nature” (Burns 238). Dadi’s story is thus unclassifiable into available vocabulary. Her physical curve stretches her eccentricity to two ends: food and religion. Everyday-ness shapes the body curves of Suleri women. Food and religion, for instances, illustrates the uniqueness of woman in the vocabulary of Suleri’s new symbolic. “Most women of the lower classes are ‘busy’ struggling on a much more basic level, trying to hold body and soul together. The Suleri women, by contrast, seem to be concerned here chiefly with the luxury of seeking intellectual self-fulfillment” (Dayal 255). Nevertheless, in addition to the intellectual self-fulfillment, everyday-ness is also a ground for Suleri women to taste the sense of luxury of life.

Dadi ruptures Pip’s discourse of Pakistani nationalism. In Sara’s recall, as her father “had gone careening off to a place called Inglestan, or England, fired by one of the several enthusiasm made available by the proliferating talk of independence. Dadi was peeved” (MD 2). Pip’s enthusiasm to Pakistani independence distracts his emotional attachment from Dadi, his mother. Pakistani nationalism parallels with the Suleri domesticity of intimacy and remoteness. Intellect abstraction parallels with everyday materiality. By the juxtaposition Dadi and Pip, Sara Suleri in her life story has succeeded to disclose potential ruptures in the Symbolic narrative her father stands for. “Reentering women into history demands a reevaluation of their presence, and Suleri broadens the concept of women in ways that redefine and subvert existing discourse, [. . .] Thus, she is establishing her own “regulatory norms” in a process that defines women by the space their bodies create rather than defining them by (male-dominated) space alone” (Burns 233). If the reentering into patriarchal history illustrates how female bodies could be the linguistic grounds in negotiation with the male-dominated discourse, in the process of negotiation there breeds the yeasts for the female bodies as a linguistic space, a space that juxtaposes itself with the patriarchal symbolic space. Dadi’s gesture of a shrimp is a linguistic space that ruptures the patriarchal symbolic space. Her body is, in Burns’ lights, a “new symbolic” that retells her story through the autobiographical narrative. Her body is therefore allusive. It tells stories, specific ones that could hardly be comprehended in patriarchal vocabulary. Meatless Days constructs a linguistic space, in which through the negotiations of female bodies that the concepts of woman are mobilized. And in the first chapter, “Excellent Things in Women,” Dadi speaks for one of the concepts of woman in Suleri’s portrayals of women characters. Samir Dayal proposes his observation on Pakistani women that “[i]n the public sphere female subjectivity is an empty category, but in the private sphere women are enabled to enter into community among themselves, as a vital collectivity” (Dayal 254-5). Nevertheless, Dadi’s life story does not live on the vitamins of female collectivity in private sphere. She creates her own fashion. In a reminiscent scenario in which Dadi used to sew for reticules secret pockets with fragments of cloths she had saved, Sara comments that “none such pockets did she ever need to hide, since something of Dadi always remained intact, however much we sought to open her. Her discourse, for example, was impervious to penetration, [. . .]” (MD 6). Like the secret pockets, Dadi’s discourse is woven with the threads of personal idiosyncrasy. It is impenetrable even by the force of collectivity, the company of women. Whimsicality codifies her discourse, a discourse that is too specific be incorporated in the patriarchal Symbolic.

Mairi: empty sleeves

The image of empty sleeves visualizes Mairi’s invisibility and weightlessness in her movement between families and nations. And this resemblance of invisibility and weightlessness, similar to the portrayal of Dadi’s “posture of a shrimp,” illustrates another example of Sara Suleri’s “new symbolic.” Marriage initiates Mairi’s diasporic experience and bodily mobility. For romance and for love, Marie marries the Pip and migrates to Pakistan from her Welsh homeland. The marriage of Marie to Pip, in Sara’s observation, witnesses how “love renders a body into history” (MD 164). Pip signifies the history of Pakistani nationalism. And Mairi, the discursive body that wigwags in the diasporic path without a definite destination, illustrates Sara Suleri’s another juxtaposition of linguistic space and patriarchal Symbolic. With a glimpse to the wedlock of her parents, Sara believes her 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. [. . .] So of course she never noticed the imprint on her face as it wore, for she was that imprint [. . .].” (MD 168). Mairi is the imprint of how a diasporic body gives way to history. The imprint on her face remarks how a body is inscribed with alphabets of nationalism and family. The scarf of Pakistani nationalism conceals her lips to verbalize her self. And yet a scarf on the face could be smothering. And the need to breathe thus urges Mairi finally to shift from tolerance to relinquishment. In an episode when Sara’s father asked his wife, Marie, to name the greatest thing she has done in life, Mairi responds: “Why, enduring you, you impossible, you moving man!” (MD 158). Endurance indicates conflicts. Mairi’s endurance implies her once negotiation in the discourse of Pakistani history. And yet tolerance comes to an edge and finally to a resignation. Mairi’s negotiation at the end turns out to be her gradual realization that she once shared with her daughter: “You can’t change people, Sara” (MD 154). Marie’s subject position therefore is lost in the relinquishment to negotiate. To say that “[C]hild, I will not grip” (MD 159), Mairi expresses her humble limb that results in the fact that “her sleeves were always empty” (MD 154). “Empty sleeves” visualizes Mairi’s lenient hands to put on identities. “Men! There is more goodness in a woman’s little finger than in the benighted mind of man” (MD 7). If what resides in Dadi’s little finger is the creative nerve that mobilizes her body in negotiation with the patriarchal Symbolic, it is Mairi’s empty sleeves that encompass her body in invisibility. The image of empty sleeves is Mairi’s strategic posture to drift in the diasporic path between Wales and Pakistan. The posture to be invisible so as to always remain elsewhere without a definite location becomes a harbor for Mairi to keep her intact from the continuous imprint of Pip’s nationalist scarf. Being non-Welsh and non-Pakistani on the diasporic path, Mairi therefore “became to that community a creature of unique and unclassifiable discourse” (MD 165-6), as Sara perceives. Mairi’s body represents a unique and unclassifiable discourse, a linguistic space. Being unclassifiable, her discourse of body is thus a counter-discourse that ruptures Pip’s discourse of history. Sara’s portrayal of Marie “stages the re-membering of the mother’s story as a subversion of the nation’s figuration as Fatherland” (Koshy 47). As critics have perceived, “[i]n retaining the deconstructive word (“Mamma”) at the center of her narrative, Suleri constructs a paranarrative or parable in which a daughter is able finally to set the deterritorialized mother against the nationalistic, phallocratic, patriarchal Pakistani father” (Dayal 260).

It is by this “unclassifiable discourse in Mairi’s body that this paper finds a moment to examine “diaspora space,” a theoretical concept introduced by critic Avtar Brah. Brah proposes that the “diaspora space” is a space that embraces inclusively the entanglement, the intertwining of the genealogies of dispersion with those of ‘staying put’. The diaspora space is the site where the native is as much a diasporian as the diasporian is the native” (Brah 209). In lights of Brah’s criticism, “diaspora space” is a site that juxtaposes identities, native and non-native, at peripheries and topples the fixity and eases the tension between majority and minority. Within the space, everyone is at the same time of minority without the possibility of subordination and privilege. Within the “diaspora space,” however, the “diaspora space” seems in fact non-diasporic. Given that conflicts and struggles among nations and ethnics are the forces that ground culture collision and fluidity of power flow, in the Utopian diaspora space therefore identities are frozen from possibility of border crossing. Identity politics, in the harmonious space, looses its sparkles for cultural bangs. In other words, Brah’s “diaspora space” conceptualizes diaspora as an avenue that “offers a critique of discourses of fixed origins, while taking accounts of a homing desire which is not the same thing as desire for a ‘homeland’” (Brah 180). Nevertheless, “diaspora space,” in order to historicize identity formation by tracing time and place, loses track of the origin when cultural subjects first encounter. And if “diaspora space” is a remedy to cultural hierarchy and alleviates the soreness at cultural encounters, there in the “diaspora space” thus breathes friendly air that hand-shaking and head-nodding are the only gestures among cultures. And if that is the case, paradoxically, within the “diaspora space” diaspora does not even exist.

Mairi’s “empty sleeves,” a space that enables her to remain elsewhere without a destination, resembles Brah’s “diaspora space.” Identity is invisible in Brah’s “diaspora space.” In the space of her empty sleeves, Mairi’s identity is hidden and invisible. Criticisms upon Mairi’s identity ambiguity vary. Susan Koshy, for example, suggest that Mairi’s “words speak of the mutual accommodation that permits the inclusion of difference, as well as the possibility of maintaining a distinct identity: the ceaseless dialectic between connection and separation by which we find and make the social space we inhabit” (Koshy 50). Nevertheless, contrast to Koshy’s optimism in believing the possibility of Mairi to remain a distinct identity, Sandra Ponzanesi proposes that Mairi “tries to erase herself using the excuse of her being foreign. She uses, therefore, the codes of her British cultural background to construct a subjectivity that enables her to disappear within the Pakistani society by living with her ‘dispersed aura’” (Ponzanesi 79). While Koshy observes a distinct identity in Mairi’s bodily space, however, Ponzanesi believes Mairi’s self erasure on the contrary becomes a strategy that enables her to wander in the diasporic path between British and Pakistani cultures. In Sara’s observation of her mother, Mairi “learned to live apart, then—even apart from herself—growing into that curiously powerful disinterest in owning, in belonging, [. . .] learning instead the way of walking with tact on other people’s land” (MD 164). Diaspora is an endless encounter of disowning and belonging. And yet it is by Mairi’s self erasure that this paper attempts to argue that it is not an easy route to always remain elsewhere and that Mairi, as an example of failure, her identity is lost in the drifting path between nations. “During the years of her existence, I did not altogether understand this gravity, this weightlessness, she carried with her” (MD 154). Mairi’s unrecognizability even by her own daughter evidences her effacement of self. Mairi’s bodily curve, represented by the empty sleeves, is a linguistic space that Sara Suleri portrays to re-conceptualize the idea of woman under the diasporic context. Mairi, stands for a style that Dayal proposes, a style that engenders the self in endless self-erasure. “Style, then, is not only a matter of grammar, syntax, and semantics. It is also a modus vivendi, the grammar of always becoming and never being; there is no ‘proper’ self” (Dayal 259). What complicates Mairi’s role of a woman is the intertwining forces of domesticity and nationalism that facet her life story. “In a way, she gives up possession of her body to the children, students, husband and nation” (Burns 238), and yet it is the faceted self that distinguishes Mairi and speaks for a new symbolic that is unclassifiable in patriarchal Symbolic. Domestic roles in a foreign marriage complicate and yet flavor Mairi’s perception of a self. She chooses to erase her self in the end, and “[i]t was style that defined Suleri’s mother. She had achieved, in her own way, a weightlessness and negativity [. . .]” (Dayal 259). The interlocking sophistication of woman and postcolonialism is theorized by Sara Suleri in her critical essay, “Women Skin Deep: Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition.” As Suleri realizes, the “concept of postcolonial itself is too frequently robbed of historical specificity in order to function as a preapproved allegory for any mode of discursive contestation. The coupling of postcolonial with woman, however, almost inevitably leads to the simplicities that underlie unthinking celebrations of oppression, elevating the racially female voice into a metaphor for ‘the good’” (1992, Suleri 758-59). Following Suleri’s observation, therefore, Meatless Days serves to re-examine the over-simplicity that tends to celebrate the excessively generalized category of Third World Woman. The portrayal of Mairi exemplifies a medium figure who owns a female voice and yet at the same time represents the white race. Mairi stands for an example of Suleri’s new symbolic that mobilizes the concept of woman. Her empty sleeves, a linguistic space that is fashioned through her border-crossing experience, explain her unique status circumscribed by family and nation. While Inderpal Grewal perceives that in Meatless Days “women are heterogeneous, powerful agents, but it also implies that this postmodern, postcolonial, diasporic heterogeneity that grounds itself in poststructuralist thought may have little to do with feminist oppositional and transnational practices and resist patriarchal power” (Grewal 236), nevertheless, this paper tends to find Suleri’s re-conceptualization of women, Dadi and Mairi, is feminist in that she mobilizes the concepts of woman and in doing so, she liberates the category of women.

Sara: a tilted hyphen

“Passing in a radicalized world offers no harbor and the self, site of so many invented identities, must perish” (Alexander 152). To see the self as a site where multicultural hues tint the self without harbor, Alexander finds passing a tragic path to the death of one’s identity. One’s flesh is a parchment where both calligraphy and cacography imprint. “Yet it is only as my body enters into, coasts through, lives in language, that I can make sense” (Alexander 143). The “enter into”, “coasts through”, and “lives” demonstrates a sense of liveliness. The body, therefore, should have consisted of not only the alphabets of flesh but also alphabets of bone that when the flesh is inscribed, there is bone to defend and resist. And it is the resisting bone that defends the flesh that this paper tends to shift to Sara. Unlike her mother, whose “empty sleeves” is a space that intends to grip nothing but to conceal the self in a non-Welsh and non-Pakistani status and remains the self elsewhere, Sara writes with her body, like a tilted hyphen, to wigwag an autobiographical self in the slop of cultural encounters.

A tilted hyphen that spans Pakistan and the U.S. illustrates Sara’s bodily shape, her physical stretch of border-crossing. The tilted hyphen that Sara embodies, moreover, is another example of Suleri’s new symbolic. Like other Suleri women, Dadi and Mairi, bodily mobility could be also found in Sara’s recall of her departure from her nation, Pakistan. “We were coming to a parting, Pakistan and I” (123). The parting between Pakistan and self waves farewell to Sara’s homeland. And a departure as this one, a boundary-crossing trail from Pakistan to the U.S., illustrates the flow of a self in a restless vagabondage. Sara’s departure witnesses the fluidity of power contestation between cultures. It promises an endless becoming of subject position in continuous shifts. “Sara embodies, therefore, the condition of post-independence migrants who feel slightly un-homely wherever they go” (Ponzanesi 73). A hyphen is a path that mobilizes a body, and a tilted one guarantees fluidity of power. A sense of un-homelessness sways Sara back and forth in the tilted hyphen between two nations. Instead of a horizontal one, a tilted hyphen mobilizes Sara and her diasporic migration. This sense of un-homeliness echoes what Iain Chambers proposes the idea of “the drama of the stranger”: every now and then one is the stranger to the self. “That stranger, as the ghost that shadows every discourse, is the disturbing interrogation, the estrangement, that potentially exists within us all. It is a presence that persists, that cannot be effaced, that draws me out of myself toward another” (Chambers 6). Self is a becoming. The departure from Pakistan begins her re-rooting. For Sara, her being a Pakistani-American initiates a re-rooting to the American land and promises a blossom of transformative identities. “Each time I return to Pakistan, I realize that I have quite forgotten what it is, the fragrance of real tea” (MD 86). The forgetfulness, instead of an uprooting from Pakistan, is refreshment on the itinerary of re-rooting journey. It is a rupture of memory that allows Sara to reconstruct her relation to a nation in her writing.

Sara’s life writing is a hyphenation swaying in the path between the nations. As she writes, at the same time she situates her self on the hyphen, a diasporic path that enables her to unplot herself from the narratives of both her mother and father. “But I could not help the manner in which my day was narrative, quite happy to let Mamma be that haunting word at which narrative falls apart” (MD 156-7). Sara’s mother’s haunting words are the allusive rupture to her father’s discourse, “an alternative to her father’s masculinist rhetoric in her mother’s oblique style. In attempting to disavow the masculinist narrative of nation, Suleri also distances herself from her father” (Dayal 254). “Daughter, unplot your self” (MD 156) is Mairi’s words that haunt Sara’s writing to unplot herself. And yet Dayal goes on to point out that “In portraying her mother as an ideal to be emulated, the author/daughter subordinates herself to her teacher/mother” (Dayal 260). To see Sara’s body, her linguistic space in an endless swaying, this paper would thus find Mairi not “an ideal to be emulated” but a diaspora space that “strategically rejects the notions of center and periphery, and proposes her mother as a model for diasporic ‘disinterest [. . .] in belonging” (Ponzanesi 73). Sara’s gesture of distancing her self from both her mother and father, furthermore, remarks her transformative mutation of identities.

Female bodies are linguistic spaces in which both flesh and bones are alphabetized to tell their own stories. “Men live in homes, and women live in bodies” (MD 143). Bodies are the homes for women. Along different shapes of bodies, a curve of a shrimp, an empty sleeve, and a tilted hyphen, heaves different penmanship of nation and family. “In Meatless Days, home making acquires complex political significance since it represents the effort to engage history, creating accommodation in the face of loss and change; to that end, it becomes a task of infinite resource, courage, and imagination” (Koshy 55). The dwelling in bodies ensures Suleir women a linguistic space. Bodies are the site where different fashions of new symbolic are fermented. They are a promise for creation and also counter-discourses to the showering of the patriarchal Symbolic.

Sara Suleri's Meatless Days

At the conclusion of chapter 1 "Excellent Things in Women", Suleri sets up a theme that will arise throughout Meatless Days. Upon reflecting she says that her life in New Haven is happy, but she also misses the women -- along with other things I am sure -- which represent her "nativity". Does Suleri use the autobiography to justify her life in the west? Does she herself struggle with questions of her own "nativity". How does this tension play itself out in other reflective passages? [Brandon Brown]

Throughout Meatless Days Suleri invokes the idea of lost things -- audiences, people, culture, history, geography, words, and so on:

"My audience is lost, and angry to be lost, and both of us must find some token of exchange for this failed conversation." (2)

"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're lost." (19)

"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 trying to pretend that history or home is real and not located precisely where you are sitting." (19-20)

Discuss this motif. [Kate Cook]

Suleri has written Meatless Days almost entirely in the past tense, a style that somehow limits the reader's, especially a female reader's, "conversation" with this work; Suleri writes, by way of introduction to her stories (reminiscences), "My audience is lost, and angry to be lost, and both of us must find some token of exchange for this failed conversation [about the definition of women]." (2) Who, then, is Suleri's audience, and why are they angry? What kind of "tokens" are Suleri's stories? [Erica Dillon]

What is the link, in Meatless Days, between the politicization and desanctification of religion in Pakistan? [Jeremy Finer]

"I am too weak to be a tourist, and the mess of it pains me, to have someone else's scenes from Seville spilling their concertina over my lap, hurting my eyes with the backside and the front of each connected image. There is too much anatomy to names: let one in and a host of them are bound to follow, dancing round your room in evil capers and cornering your attention where it does not wish to stay" (78). What is the significance of names to Sara Suleri? Does the Western reader understand the implications of each name? [Laura Gelfman]

"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... Against all my own odds I know what I must say. Because, I'll answer slowly, there are no women in the third world" (20). So ends the first chapter of Meatless Days. What does Sulari mean by this statement? [Phoebe Koch]

How much of her work is autobiography and how much of it is fiction? How much can an author get away with in stretching the truth and still call it autobiography? Might a story about Suleri's life be not enough to express some political and social message that she intends, and so she turns to fiction to help her prove her point? [Jennifer Gin Lee]

The title of the first chapter of Meatless Days is "Excellent Things in Women." What qualities are ideal in women in Pakistani culture, according to this chapter? Discuss the contrast between these values and some of the western values which Sara is simultaneously exposed to? [Laura Otis]

The topic of history appears in many of the works which we have read. How does Suleri represent history? Is it as extensive as Swift's discussion? Does her own personal history provide only one aspect of postcolonial thought or can it be expanded to a more universal level. [Neel Parekh]

What is Sulieri's aim in writing a novel like Meatless Days? Is her experience representative and thus in the tradition of postcolonial ethnographistic literature? Why should the reader take an interest in the anecdotes about her family and friends? Are they themselves representative or allegorical in some sense? And is she truly comparable to Marcel Proust, as the cover claims, a claim designed to give her book status? [Elissa Popoff]

Considering the fact that both Rushdie and Achebe construct fictional settings that mirror actual places or conditions that they wish to discuss in their novels because, to some extent, it relieves them of the pressure of representative scrutiny, how do we read novels like Suleri's Meatless Days or Swift's Waterland which intertwine their narratives to their versions of actual histories, especially considering that Suleri admits "There's a lot of fiction in it. Some of the characters I invented, some of the incidents I invented" ("Sara Suleri, Salman Rushdie, and Post-Colonialism"). [Uzoma Ukomadu]

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" (interview, December 1990). 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, she says (interview, December 1990).

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" (p. 34), 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.

Public and Private History in Sara Suleri's Meatless Days

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, December 1990). 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 itÉ?" (p. 134) 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" (Interview, December 1990).

Suleri, like Anglo-Pakistani author Salman Rushdie, weaves her own personal history into that of Pakistan because the two entities are, as she says, "inextricably connected to one another." Thus entwined, the food feeding her book Ñ Pakistan, her siblings, her parents, relatives and friends, the West and her professorship of English at Yale Ñ 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.

Water and Border-Crossing in Suleri: Deconstructing the Idea of Woman

In Meatless Days Suleri deconstructs the idea of a singular identity of woman. Mother and daughter are both border crossers, migrating across water and definition. Water can be read as the ultimate symbol of deconstruction, for it has a truly fluid identity. Suleri depicts her sister through the image of water to honor her as a complex "woman of addition." Of Ifat's death, Suleri says, "A curious end for such a moving body, one that, like water, moved most generously in light." Suleri continues, equating the labor of birthing with the pain of mourning.

Then commenced the labor. 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 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. (148)

The precision of water is that which stems from ambiguity. The water-like nature of both Ifat and Suleri's mother obfuscates a singular identity, and instead indicates the complexities of each of these women. They must be provided with the private space to contain their intricate extensions; as with an iceberg, what is presented is only a small portion of these women's mass.

In describing her mother, Suleri notes, "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 a 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. . . . And so today 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" (159-160). Salt, the singular remnant of an evaporated sea, represents the problematic crystallization of Mairi's fluidity.

As a child, Suleri idolizes her older sister, Ifat. She attempts to identify herself as Ifat's twin, then realizes, "it cannot be, for she was twinned before my time, her face already raising to the power of some other number, which danced about her shoulder like a spirit minuscule" (131). The description of Ifat as two parallels Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's insistence that there must be a positing of the female element to eradicate the negation of women in Derrida's theory. Spivak draws upon the writing of Luce Irigaray:

But the woman touches herself by and in herself without the necessity of a mediation, and before all possible decisions between activity and passivity. A woman "touches herself" all the time, without anyone being able to forbid her to do so, in fact, for her sex is composed of two lips which embrace continually. Thus, in herself, she is already two - but not divisible into ones -- who affect each other. (emphasis added).

Spivak evokes this description of the multiplicity of the female body to create an "awareness that even the strongest personal goodwill on Derrida's part cannot turn him quite free of the massive enclosure of the male appropriation of woman's voice, with a variety of excuses: this one being, it is not really woman." Spivak and Suleri both point out the diasporic identity of women as it is represented within a single woman.

The perfect embodiment of all of Suleri's analytic and symbolic tools is her friend Mustakori, whose complex geographical development eschewed even her own attempts at comprehension. Here is a woman who "changed names like clothes, getting up as Fancy and going to sleep as the Fonz" (63), migrating across names, identities, and countries. A name leaves room for the complexities of plot and thus identity through its lack of descriptive utility. As Deleuze and Guattari note, "the proper name does not designate an individual: it is on the contrary when the individual opens up to the multiplicities pervading him or her, at the outcome of the most severe operation of depersonalization, that he or she acquires his or her true proper name. The proper name is the instantaneous apprehension of a multiplicity. The proper name is the subject of a pure infinitive comprehended as such in a field of intensity." Mustakori, in her multiple fabrications, "broke the limits of [Suleri's] imagination" (58).

The peculiarities of cultural reformulations "render both self and other into immigrant configurations. Where empire takes, it also must lose, causing its migration to generate the culturally tautological idiom of English India. Unlike territory, stories cannot be so easily stolen: their guilt is too declarative of itself to be subsumed into easy categories of imperial binarism." The complexity of Suleri's writing in Meatless Days, her evocation of cultural migrancy, describing her characters by their "plot," comparing them to water, are all tools she uses to de-essentialize their identities, to formulate a closer approximation of reality, for realism is "too dangerous a term for an idiom that seeks to raise identity to the power of theory."