Sara Suleri's Meatless Days

Sara Suleri's  Meatless Days

  

Sara Suleri's Meatless Days -- Novel or Autobiography?

Suleri herself does not term Meatless Days as an autobiography, but her publisher markets it as one.
Daniel Wolfe wrote in The Book Review that "the 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 to it 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."
Suleri does not need to make many if any revisions to her work; her first draft usually is her last.

 The Selective Autobiographer in Meatless Days

Sarah Suleri's Meatless Days tackles an ambitious number of topics, ranging from gender matters in Pakistan to the history and politics of the country, all within the framework of the author's personal vignettes of her own life. The book's scope is daunting, but Suleri lets us know throughout that she is not telling us the whole story. Unlike many travel writers who try to conceal their selectivity, Suleri is not afraid to alert the reader to the fact that many important events in her life have been intentionally left out of the book. For example, she informs us in parenthesis that she will not write about her sister's death: "For in this story, Ifat will not die before our eyes”(103-4).
Her circuitous (s r-ky -t s). writing style, her habit of following the tangents of her own thought associations rather than a clear narrative logic, make it evident that this is not a self-contained or conclusive story, but one that will leave many unanswered questions and hidden secrets. In the following passage, Suleri describes her own reluctance at times to reach into her past to retrieve information that might be germane to the topic at hand. By admitting to this conscious aversion to bring back certain memories, Suleri is distinctly outlining the terms of her writing, a writing that will produce a story both enormously selective, and necessarily incomplete.
But to travel back thus far is too enfeebling, too bone-wearying a business for my imagination. It is similar to my new reluctance to visit old Muslim tombs and contemplate again what I know I'll find, that inlay of marble on the walls with their curious flat-faced flowers, so dainty and scornful of their own decoration. And then the dead center of the grave can sit so heavily sometimes, surrounded as it is with tiny writing, words like capillaries to tighten in the head, as you read round and round with them all ninety-nine of Allah's appellations. O light, O clarity, O radiance, you read, until suddenly sequence becomes a vertiginous thing, and your brain is momentarily short of blood or breath. I used to enjoy the spaciousness of those places, the shoes-off of it, which put coolness at my feet. Now, I am not sure I would stop to consult those images, even by accident, in a passing book. [76]
In this passage, Suleri explicitly defines the limitations of her willingness to probe her own past.
Suleri often makes use of extended, detailed metaphors to explain abstract concepts, metaphors that often require a great deal of mental acrobatics to comprehend fully. In this passage, she compares bringing back old memories to walking among Muslim tombs and reading the minute engravings upon them.

The allusion to the writing on the Muslim tombs draws attention to the status of Suleri's own writing, especially when she claims that she would "not stop to consult those images, even by accident, in a passing book." this meant to be ironic that how does the act of reading the inscriptions on the tombs, described as "vertiginous," relate to our own reading of Suleri's book.

Post-Colonialism in Meatless Days

In Meatless Days, post-colonialism is used, like the English language itself, self-consciously. Post-colonialism and English have become not just historical links, but tools used by the authors to communicate their unique, non-Western visions of life. Discussion of post-colonialism in this novel illustrates the confrontations of two worlds, Western and colonized, but this conflict is not bemoaned or decried. In fact, post-colonial rhetoric, metaphors, and imagery have been appropriated in it, as it has the very use of English. Meatless Days deliver a forceful image of a unique culture that has collided with Western tradition in no uncertain way. Works such as this can illustrate the effect the fermenting residue of colonial power will ultimately have on nations confronting the dual identities of indigenous and imposed culture.
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, 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" (p. 57).
Post-colonial rhetoric aids her in discussing her mother's relation to Pakistan and herself.

 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 it’s?" (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." 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.

 "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, 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" (14). Her mind becomes a "metropolis" (74) "a legislated thing" (87).
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" (20), "Pakistan is a place where the concept of woman was not really part of an available vocabulary". By rooting her self in language, Suleri addresses her postcolonial identity. She deals with the "the unpronouncability of [her] life" (138) by becoming "engulfed by grammar" (155), by "living in plot" (154).
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, in discussing them, Suleri uses the same techniques as in discussing herself: she fuses somatic discourse with textual discourse. The sister who was once "a house I rented" (4) becomes after her death "the news" (68), and later, a "municipality" (104). Her mother, who "seemed to live increasingly outside the limits of her body" (156), becomes "the land [her father] had helped to make" (140) and later, "the past [Pakistan] sought to forget" (164). Her face is described as "wearing like the binding of a book" (151). Even her friend, Muskatori, is represented as such a convincing piece of "land" that, as Suleri declares, "they could build an airport on [her]" (70). Suleri refers to her own "schizoid trick" (personality disorder) of disconnecting the syntax of "life and body" (68) 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" (123). 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" (87), an "otherness machine" (105), and a "state" (127). In one particularscene, Suleri and Shahid swim together and get bitten by fireflies. Suleri interprets the bites as "tiny writing on [her] skin" (108). When Shahid attempts to apologize, Suleri tells him it doesn't matter: "It never had any plot to it anyway" (108). 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, or, colonized.
Throughout Meatless Days , food functions as a link between body and nation. 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 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" (34). 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.

 A Method to Her Madness: The Style of Sara Suleri

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 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 memories 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 unlike any other writer is credible, unfaltering and her personal ethos is strikingly well defined.
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. [120]
  
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" (101). 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 or 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)" (176). 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, yet she must make heed not to inject her writing with too much of her own opinion and judgments.
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. [116]
Suleri was wise in omitting 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 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:
In the closing words of the chapter, Suleri successfully uses the image of the wind whipping through an empty cave to portray her sadness. Further, her 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 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. [86]
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. 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.

Works Cited

Suleri, Sara. Meatless Days. The University of Chicago Press, 1991.
McPhee, John. The Crofter and the Laird. Farrar,Straus, and Giroux, 1998.
Didion, Joan.The White Album. Farrar,Straus, and Giroux, 1990.

Fitzerald, F.Scott.The Great Gatsby. Scribner Paperback Fiction, 1995.