Meatless Days
Women and Postcoloniality Stripped to the Bone in Meatless Days; discuss the statement.
December 4, 2010
Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days rejects any ideological ease in cataloguing otherness. Forcing both postcolonial and feminist theory to circumnavigate the bounded yet contested terrain of identity and discursive formations, she embarks on her poetic voyage with the confident declaration that “leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women”.
Suleri then proceeds to map her discourse by telling her reader, “my reference is to a place where the concept of woman was not really part of an available vocabulary: we were too busy for that, just living, and conducting precise negotiations with what it meant to be a sister or a child or a wife or a mother or a servant”. Following this assertion, the reader can envisage how Suleri¹s deliberate prose aims to reconstruct this absent community of women.
Suleri’s listed roles that fill the displaced category of women — sister, child, wife, mother, servant — name without apology only the predicated female to the male subject. Of course, a woman’s business depends a great deal on her socio-economic standing. The servant, for example, will locate her negotiated gender position in significant variance with Suleri. In an effort to explain her denial that women in Pakistan live in the “concept of woman” to an otherwise lost audience, Suleri introduces her grandmother Dadi who exists outside of any possible Western feminist terminology.
Closing the text’s first chapter with a studied irony similar to its inception, Suleri arrives in a classroom at Yale University where she currently teaches English. Shuttling the reader from Pakistan to New Haven, Suleri shares a classroom anecdote that captures and guides her literary project:
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. . . And then
December 4, 2010
Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days rejects any ideological ease in cataloguing otherness. Forcing both postcolonial and feminist theory to circumnavigate the bounded yet contested terrain of identity and discursive formations, she embarks on her poetic voyage with the confident declaration that “leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women”.
Suleri then proceeds to map her discourse by telling her reader, “my reference is to a place where the concept of woman was not really part of an available vocabulary: we were too busy for that, just living, and conducting precise negotiations with what it meant to be a sister or a child or a wife or a mother or a servant”. Following this assertion, the reader can envisage how Suleri¹s deliberate prose aims to reconstruct this absent community of women.
Suleri’s listed roles that fill the displaced category of women — sister, child, wife, mother, servant — name without apology only the predicated female to the male subject. Of course, a woman’s business depends a great deal on her socio-economic standing. The servant, for example, will locate her negotiated gender position in significant variance with Suleri. In an effort to explain her denial that women in Pakistan live in the “concept of woman” to an otherwise lost audience, Suleri introduces her grandmother Dadi who exists outside of any possible Western feminist terminology.
Closing the text’s first chapter with a studied irony similar to its inception, Suleri arrives in a classroom at Yale University where she currently teaches English. Shuttling the reader from Pakistan to New Haven, Suleri shares a classroom anecdote that captures and guides her literary project:
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. . . And then