1. the role of the father; and mother's response e.g. p. 15-16 Father's Islamic craze; does not attend Dadi's funeral 17;
2. no women--missing women

no women--because 1. no such concept as woman, impossible to define, 2. her leaving Pakistan; 3. the third world only appear in discourse of convenience; 4. few women writing

Pakistani women--khala love (9) as distraction--being abstracted and absorbed (Dadi-p. 6, Mother -p. 10)--aware of something (p. 10)--aware of their part of violence in history=sense of loss--

Mother's communication with her daughters 16

Mother associated with Jane Austin and Mrs. Ramsay 151-53

the mother with "impossible edges"; with stories that fall short;  as a writer that cares about the characters
vs. Sara --as one that wants to change plot, mix people (154)

the mother's lesson: unplot yourself, let be p. 156; "Take disappointment" 169

mother outside of her body 156; will not grip 159; be herself in every available manner, p. 168, while we are "a moment in her successive transformation."

father-mother p. 157, mother gravely listening; the "greatest thing" in her life 158

father-mother's different uses of language--front page vs. scarf 168

both sweet and cold 166

Sara--the writer can not lay hands on "the body of her water" 159;

Being "meatless" and Writing

--image of flesh/meat: the goat (5), Dadi's 14; Ifat and Mamma's bodies 19

--ideas about writing and identity: reading titles and mother's face 151; "how can syntax hold around a name?" (155) Please read last chapter

--p. 173  "For whom are you writing, David asked me..."  --the idea of "hollow" names,

--p.177-178  last paragraph "Living in language is tentamount to living with oother people.  Both are postures . . " --the idea of bailing out signicance and peeling it; turning habitation into habit, & p. 186 last paragraph --the idea of breaking bodies, hiding the Adam's rib and having a re-birth

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Sara Suleri's Meatless Days -- Novel or Autobiography?  Yishane Lee '91 (English 137, 1990)

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, December 1990). 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 "Éthe 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, December 1990).

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.

The Chapter "Meatless Days" in Meatless Days       Yishane Lee '91 (English 137, 1990)

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      Yishane Lee Ô91 (English 137, 1990)

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.

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