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Meatless Days
作者Author  /  Sara  Suleri  莎拉•蘇勒律

Meatless Days

 
 Synopsis

 Excellent Things in Women

 Papa and Pakistan

 What Mama Knew

 Reviews

 Criticism

 For Further Studies

 
 Synopsis
  A remarkable writer offers a remarkable look at the violent history of Pakistan's independence with the author's most intimate memories--of her Welsh mother, an English teacher of spare, abstracted eloquence; of her Pakistani father, a prominent and frequently jailed political journalist; of her tenacious grandmother; and of the friends who accompany her own passage to the West. A profoundly moving literary work. 

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 Excellent Things in Women
 
  • Historical background
    "the middle years" p. 8--1947-1971
    "the trying times"--around and after 1971, when East Pakistan became an independent nation
  • Pay attention to the associational logic of Meatless Days.   How is it different from that in Midnight's Children?
    e.g. p. 9  from Dadi --mother --we the children (Shahid, Tellat, Nuzhat, Ifatt, Sera, Irfan).
    I. the personal and the national
    Are her stories allegorical?  Or in what sense are they?
    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 leading questions from Brown U.]
    A. Dadi's  "dying" experience & the mother's death
    her words: "The world takes on a single face" (7); "Keep on living" (8)
    her personality: her religion (Satan and God pp. 2-3), her use of "food"(3), the combination of religion and food (the goat episode; 3-5), her loneliness and secrets (6), her "feminism" (7); her fight with her son (7-); her death & her views of death 19
her life marked by, and parallel to, public events:
Independence (2) Middle Years (5-7)--and the end (7) the trying time (winter, 1971)civil war time (Yahya Khan --Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto  ) the summer of trials by fire:  General Zia; Islamization (16-17)
move into Punjab her isolation--stop talking to her son; smell death (8); being carried family problems (9); Dadi oblivious of the proliferation of her grandchildren; quickening of time  Irfan (11-12), mother's going back to Wales, our part (powerlessness, violence, lack of innocent love) in history (14); 
Dadi's being burned in April (10-11; 14)--stopped praying
children left, 
mother buried, Dadi died in the same week when Bhutto was hanged (17-18); Ifat died (18)

 
II. the national and the religious--politicization and de-santification of religion

III. Body, the idea of being "meatless" and Writing
A. the death and departure of the family members
B. other experience of loss (quotations given by leading questions offered by Sara Suleri site at Browns U.)

  • (Mair Jones--Surraya Suleri) the mother's experience of displacement (9-); 12; her views of race and skin colors 160-161; away into her childhood 161; relocate herself; a Pakistani with a disembodied Englishness 163; learning to live apart; 165
  • Sara's p. 18
  • 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)

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     Papa and Pakistan
     
    • For historical dates, please go to India and Pakistan page.
      Historical figures:

        Jinnah --the leader of Muslim league;
        General Ayah, in power from 1958-1969, imposing martial law in 1958;
        Yahya Khan in power from 1969  to 1973, when Bhutto won the election.
        The war in 1971--civil war, which lead to the establishment of East Pakistan as an independent nation called  Bangladesh (March 26).
        General Zia -- removed Bhutto from power in 1977, had Bhutto hanged, and imposed martial law
        Martial law was lifted in 1985; Zia killed in 1988.
         

    •  How is the daughter, Sara, related to her father in her attempts to know his history?
    • How is the daughter related to Pakistan's history?  Pay special attention to her description of partition on p. 116, and how the daughters' spirits broke in the war of 1971.

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     What Mama Knew
      "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.  Why are there no women in the third world?  How is the mother treated in the chapter "What Mamma Knew"?
    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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     Review
       In this finely wrought memoir of life in postcolonial Pakistan, Suleri intertwines the violent history of Pakistan's  independence with her own most intimate memories - of her Welsh mother; of her Pakistani father, prominent political journalist Z. A. Suleri; of her tenacious grandmother Dadi and  five siblings; and of her own passage to the West.   -- University of Chicago Press
    "Dazzling.... Suleri is a postcolonial Proust to Rushdie's phantasmagorical Pynchon." - Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune from Sara Suleri Goodyear

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     Criticism
       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 (interview, December 1990; Yishane Lee Sara Suleri, Salman Rushdie, and Post-Colonialism).

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     For Further Studies
     

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

    original site: http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/post/suleri/ssgenre.html

    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)

    original site: http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/post/suleri/ssmd2.html

    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)

    original site at Brown U: http://www.stg.brown.edu/projects/hypertext/landow/post/suleri/sspublic.html

    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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