Meatless Days

Synopsis

Reviews

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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. 
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)

    and NOTES  for
    "Papa and Pakistan"

    IV. the issue of Third World Woman

    and NOTES for

    "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;

    • V.  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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