South Asian Review

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Milk-Fed Discourse and Female Identity in Sara

Suleri's Meatless Days

Deirdre Fagan

To cite this article: Deirdre Fagan (2008) Milk-Fed Discourse and Female Identity in Sara Suleri's
Meatless Days, South Asian Review, 29:2, 182-198, DOI: 10.1080/02759527.2008.11932602

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2008.11932602

Published online: 08 Dec 2017.

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182

Milk-Fed Discourse and Female Identity in

Sara Suleri's Meatless Days
Deirdre Fagan
Quincy University

eatless Days, Sara Suleri's memoir 1 of life in postcoloniat2

M Pakistan, is, as the title suggests, very much a food-focused,
food-centered text. Pararna Roy and Anita Mannur have addressed the
gastropoetics and culinary nostalgia, respectively, of Suleri's work,
carefully demonstrating that "gastrophilic histories [ ... ] are tied to
conditions of diaspora and migration," but in Meatless Days, Suleri's
culinary delicacies are tied not only to her feelings of exile from her
motherland, but to her feelings of exile from women who mother (Roy
472). Suleri takes the notion of bodily sustenance and culinary
discourse to a new level by centrally locating the concept of food not
only in relation to the butchering of delectable animals, the bodily
pleasure and sensual quality of ingestion, and the bodily consumption
involved in digestion, but by centrally locating women's bodies amidst
such culirtary trafficking. "Culinary discourse," as Mannur explains, is
"ambivalently coded and complexly situated" because "[w]ithin the
tradition of immigrant literature, culinary discourse sets in motion an
extended discussion about the imbricated layers of food, nostalgia, and
national identity" (28). Nostalgia for one's motherland and probing
into one's nation of origin becomes further complicated in Suleri by the
introduction of feminine sexuality and motherhood as one of those
imbricated layers in South Asian culinary discourse. In her awareness
of female bodies as homes for the unborn, and of the consumption upon
birth of the mother through the infant's ingestion of the mother's milk,
Suleri draws attention throughout Meatless Days to not only the
relationship between women and food but to the concept of women as
food.
Like many poststructuralist feminists, such as Helene Cixous 3 and
Luce Irigaray'\ Suleri is concerned with language and the body.
South Asian Review, Vol. 29, No. 3, 2008
 Milk-Fed Discourse 183

Though she makes use of metaphor in disparate ways, her images of the
body in relation to breastfeeding, eating, and food in general, function
in Meatless Days as metaphors that both complicate and question the
construction of female identity in and through discourse. Just as
Cixous and Iragaray posit an ecriture feminine, or feminine writing,
Suleri posits her feminine struggle in and through language to create an
identity that is not defined or restricted by its otherness 5 . Sara6 (the
narrator of this text, as distinguished from Suleri, the author) is other as
woman, other as non-child-bearing, and other as one living in exile.
Female identit1 and sexuality may have been culturally prescribed
as phallogocentric , but Suleri and the women of whom she writes
resist their prescribed roles through both language and silence. Suleri
enters the post-colonial discourse of exile by demonstrating not only
her own struggles, but by scrutinizing each character's unique
resistance to such categories as South Asian, postcolonial, and third
world. At the opening of Meatless Days, she describes leaving
Pakistan, the country of her birth, as being ''tantamount to giving up the
company of women" and explains that her Pakistani friend Dale, who
lives in nearby Boston, would ''understand" (1). Living in exile in New
Haven, Connecticut, as a professor of English at Yale University, Suleri
describes herself as "quite happy with [her] life" but also as "grow[ing]
increasingly nostalgic for a world where the modulations of age are as
recognized and welcomed as the shift from season to season" ( 19). She
is culturally outside ofthe American culture ofNew Haven, and in an
ambiguous and ambivalent place in relation to Pakistan. In Pakistan,
the women who lacked an identity, or who were previously defmed as
"spouse," or "sibling," or "child" to another, were expected to find a
more defmitive identity in their role as "mother." Suleri resists such
categorical defmitions both in Pakistan and in New Haven. As such,
she not only stands outside of those cultures, but also outside of the
culture of the "feminine." She does not see femininity as physically
defined, and yet she is driven by culture to define and redefine
femininity in such terms 8 • Her relationship to food leads her back to
Pakistan and to meatless days 9, and this cultural longing leads her to the
connection between food and childhood, food and children, food and
women. A central element in this culinary connection is motherly
nourishment or breastfeeding.
The ftrst reference to breastfeeding appears in the opening
paragraph to Meatless Days, and the initial link between language and
the body is made explicit: Dale will write a book about the "secretive
life of breastfeeding" (l ). Sara's description of breastfeeding is
curious: it is presumably "secretive" because it is foreign to Sara, and
in some ways, the women, the mothers, who breastfeed are equally
foreign to her. Sara offers a description of those women in the second
184 Deirdre Fagan

paragraph where she is both introductory and conclusive in laying open

the issues that will act as tropes throughout concerning women,
language, and the female body. Significantly, the word "discourse"
also first appears here. Sara's fascination with biology, and with
language and discourse, is encapsulated:
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. By this point admittedly I am damned by my
own discourse, and doubly damned when I add yes, once in a while,
we naturally thought of ourselves as women, but only in some
perfunctory biological way we happened on perchance. (I)
Several assertions are made in this brief quotation. The primary
assertion is that a distinctly female discourse, a vocabulary that allows
women to express themselves as women, did not exist in Sara's
Pakistan. Anu Hirsiaho clarifies that the "discourse [Sara or Suleri] is
particularly damned by, while trying to explain her relationship to the
important women in her life, is the Urdu gender discourse" (190). The
second is that, not unlike American women, the women in Pakistan
only saw themselves in relation to others, in relation to the parents,
siblings, and children that they "served." While there is no explicit
reference to breastfeeding here, the reference to and concern with
biology serves up an image of the maternal body, however perfunctory
it might seem. This initial biological characterization of women in
Pakistan is what prepares the reader for Sara to begin her own search
for a separate and individual identity that is not confined by her relation
to others or limited by her female biology. Further, the possibility of
happening perchance upon an identity through one's biology is
addressed again later when Sara says to herself: "Put back your body
where your life belongs" (67). Sara continually reminds herself to keep
hold of her body because it is her belief that if she does not, "life and
body go grazing off to their sweet pastures," which makes apparent that
one of Sara's main concerns with the female body is with pregnancy
and with mothering, those things to which one's body may
unintentionally go grazing (68).
Replete with food imagery, Meatless Days serves up breastfeeding
both as metaphor and as literal event. Breast milk is life-sustaining,
breast-feeding the initial link between mother and child. The
associations formed by way of such a linking are extraordinarily
complex. Breastfeeding not only transfers milk from mother to child,
but in Meatless Days it transfers the woman's identity from "woman"
to "mother" via the child. The complexity of breastfeeding obviously
multiplies when one introduces the additional dimension of female
sexuality, since as women, neither the narrator nor the author can be
 Milk-Fed Discourse 185

very far removed from their ability to procreate, to provide sustenance

to that which they do create, as Cixous has argued is the case in all
women's discourse and writing. Meatless Days is therefore written, to
borrow a phrase from Cixous, in "white ink," with a "little of that good
mother's milk" (279). Unlike men, who are described by Sara's
paternal grandmother, Dadi, as those who "live as though they were
unsuckled things," women are made conscious through their very
anatomy not only that they were suckled but that they can suckle others
(Suleri 7). Sara's womanhood (i.e., her ability to mother) is evident in
her discourse even though she is childless 10• It is the division between
the ability to rear children and Sara's lack of interest in so doing that
fuels Meatless Days and makes more vivid the images of breastfeeding
and eating embedded therein.
One of Sara's earliest associations between breastfeeding and
eating occurs while she is a child in Lahore. In this scene, the family
cook Qayuum purchases two water buffalo for the milk they will
produce. As the other children are called to ingest a "steaming jet of
milk" from the udders of the buffalo, young Sara flees as far as
possible, finding refuge in the same location where she had hidden
earlier in the week after being caught ingesting the "firm and crisp"
cauliflowers she had stolen from the vegetable garden (25). Sara's
flight from the fresh milk foreshadows her metaphorical flight in
aduhhood from the role of mother and the bodily presentation ofherself
as a producer of food through the maternal production of milk. That
she finds solace in the more tangible crunch of eating a cauliflower of
the earth rather than the liquid passivity of drinking the buffalo milk
also highlights an aspect ofher choice not to mother. Later, when she
refers to the text as her offspring, it becomes clear that the concrete for
her lies in language rather than the body11 • In a scene about lfat's
breasts and breastfeeding, Sara says, "expressing letters rather than
breasts was my normal ken" (35). Sara gives birth to words, not
children. Her language is her ken. Though Sara asserts her childless
position strongly, she is not without doubts concerning her decision not
to bear. Sara admits that she once asked, "[w]hat is it, after all,
between food and the body?'" and never received an answer (37). In
some sense it is this answer that she seeks throughout Meatless Days.
Earlier that same week in childhood, the week of Sara's recoiling
from the buffalo's milk, one of Sara's equally early "betray[als] by
food" occurs when she learns that kirrnee or kidneys, the food Qayuum
insisted she eat, "make pee" (Suleri 26). Upon making this discovery
through the taunting and "wonderful malice" of sister Ifat, Sara with
tear-filled eyes "ran out to the farthermost corner of the garden, where
[she] would later go to hide [her] shame of milking-time in a retch that
refused to materialize" (26). The discovery of the function of kidneys
186 Deirdre Fagan

is interestingly equated with milking-time, which draws a clear parallel

between fuod and the bodies which produce both food and waste. The
shame associated with milking time is also indicative of the discomfort
Sara feels in relation to the milk of mothers. It seems part of her
association is related to knowing, finding out about, or being made
aware ofthe sources of milk.
As an adult, Sara is disconcerted when she discovers through a
conversation with her sister Tillat that her mother lied to her about a
particular food. It is revealed that knpura are not really sweetbreads
but testicles. These profound betrayals by food are catalysts to Sara's
intentional search for the relation between food, language, and the
body. One of Sara's personal responses to her newfound information
about knpura is to question her mother's withholding:
My mother knew that sweetbreads are testicles but had cunningly
devised a rule to make me consume as many parts of the world as she
could before she let me loose in it. The thought appalled me. It was
almost as bad as attempting to imagine what the slippage was that
took me from nipple to bottle and away from the great letdown that
signifies lactation. What a falling om (23)
Sara feels betrayed not only by her mother's lies but also by the
disconnect forced when breastfeeding ends. She connects the "let
down" of milk, which indicates a lactating mother's breasts are full and
ready to nurse, to the let down she experienced when she discovered
her mother's language deceived. Sara furthers the connection between
breastfeeding and language when she says of her mother: "I think she
had given suck so many times and had engaged in so many umbilical
connections that eating had become syncopated in her head to that
miraculous shorthand" (35). The explicit connection made here is
similar to the one made earlier in relation to Dale.
Sara looks to her mother for answers not only about language but
about food. As the initial source of life, women are not only containers
for babies, but metaphorically can be said to "consume" them (Suleri
43). Through breastfeeding, mothers become identified as producers of
food and are, therefore, also consumed by babies. Later when Ifat
looks down at her pregnant body and says, "I've eaten too much, I've
eaten too much," this connection between the literal and metaphorical
is highlighted (43). Ifat's children perpetuate the ingestion imagery
believing that when she "eats a baby" they will soon have a brother or
sister (43). Sara resists eating babies. Unlike her sister Ifat who had
eaten many babies, she is not a "fme source of stories about the
peculiarities offood, particularly on the points of[ ... ] pregnancy" (36).
Sara is instead perplexed and alarmed by her mother's knpura betrayal
(and one might assume the other tood betrayals) and wonders "what
else have I eaten on her behalf?" (23).
 Milk-Fed Discourse 187

Babies are not something Sara will "eat" on anyone's behalf

Though Sara "naturally" thinks of herself as one who could mother,
even possibly as one who should mother-"You were born fit; you
rendered yourself unfit," Suleri writes-she resists what is considered a
natural desire by many in both the culture of Pakistan and America
(127). At the same time, she admits she is at times conflicted; she says
to her brother Shahid it is not easy to "walk away [ ... ] from
womankind" (105). In the same conversation with Shahid she refers to
herself as having "lived many years as an otherness machine" and as
having had "more than [her] fair share of being other" ( 105). It
therefore seems that she seeks to reestablish womankind, and herself, in
a different context than that of mother, which is, linguistically at least,
another form of other: m-other. But Sara cannot help but feel
conflicted in her decision to refrain from bearing children 12 • Sara's
emotions regarding her biological capabilities and her intellectual
interests cause her to assess the roles of each ofthe women around her.
One of the significant women Sara studies is Dadi. In the chapter
"Excellent Things in Women," which provides a portrait of Dadi,
Dadi's discourse is described as "impervious to penetration" (6). This
description is inherently sexual; the emphasis is placed on Dadi's
ability to resist the penetration of masculine language. But while Dadi
may be linguistically impenetrable, her body is also intended to be
impassable. The portrait ofDadi is of one sealed off, who exists within
herself, who is outside of the reality of the world around her. Dadi
speaks mainly to herself and begins to write letters to her son rather
than speaking to him; food moves her to "intensities" (3), and when
Dadi dies, she ceases being a "mentioned thing" ( 17).
Though Dadi's language resists penetration, her body is not
equally resilient. Her bodily vulnerability is demonstrated when she is
scalded with boiling water. Due to the severity of the damage to Dadi's
flesh, she is forced to undergo treatment and care. She resists such
care, and determines that she will only relent if Sara will be the one to
care for her. In her role as caregiver, Sara develops a "great intimacy
with the properties of flesh" ( 14). She is educated by Dadi in a unique
way; Sara internalizes Dadi's impermeability, her passivity which
becomes a kind of resistance, a kind of strength. Dadi's relationship to
food, her indiscriminate ingestion of any amount of food others place
on her plate, dramatizes her resistance to whatever exists outside
herself. She has created her own discourse: "her discourse [ ... ] was
impervious to penetration, so that when one or two of us remonstrated
with her a single hour, she never bothered to distinguish her replies"
(6). Dadi has her own space separate from her roles as mother and
grandmother. But her resistance is also exclusionary and forces her to
exist outside of the world she inhabits: "her bodily presence always
188 Deirdre Fagan

emanated a quality of being apart and absorbed" (6). Though Dadi

lives within the same house as her son, she seeks her own space,
literally within the house and figuratively within her body's walls-she
does not seem to exist separately, but apart.
Much attention is given to Dadi's breasts, and they too support the
impression of Dadi as an impenetrable being. Though they must have
given suckle at one time, the scalding renders her nipples vanished until
they finally begin to "congeal and convex their cavities into triumphant
little love knots" (14). The vanishing of Dadi's nipples seems to
signify her withdrawal into herself; the return of them as mere love
knots symbolize her transformation into something other, something
apart, something also not necessarily motherly. Since nipples are,
through breastfeeding, the source of a mother's nurturing milk, without
them, Dadi has lost some of her ability to nurture or mother, even
though she is well beyond child-bearing age.
A mammary conversation of a similar kind takes place over Sara's
friend Mustakor~ in the chapter "Mustakori, My Friend: A Study of
Perfect Ignorance." Mustakori has "no breasts at all" but a "dandy pair
of nipples" (56). Ifat tells Mustakori that her "lactating-looking
nipples" are like "palm trees to the Saharan plain" to the "endearing
concavities of her frame" (57). Ifat says that she tried to make
Mustakori take to camisoles, but this proved difficult because while
"you can lead a horse to water, you cannot saddle a cow" (57). This
analogy receives a nod from Ifat, Sara, and Mustakori. The
relationship to breastfeeding is evident in the analogy-Mustakori's
nipples are her teats. Ifat adds that Mustakori does not need to "cram
up her appearance with knick-knacks, as though those nipples were
somehow purloined from a milking mother" (57). Mustakori is also the
character who, at the age of eighteen, tries putting a nipple on a coke
bottle so that she does not have to sit up to drink while reading. Sara
says she "could dimly grapple with the concept of an eighteen-year-old
wanting to drink from a nippled bottle" but not the "flabbergasting
publicity" of it (58). The publicity of pregnancy may also be a factor in
her opposition to it: Mustakor~ like Sara, significantly remains
childless.
Ironically, this study of perfect ignorance ends with Suleri
transcribing the message of a birthday gift from Mustakori to Sara that
came on the "garbled white-on-pink of homely Pakistani cables":
"HAMLET COME HOME WRITE YOUR BOOK IT WASTES THE
YEARS YOU WANDER STOP LOVE HORATIO STOP" (72). It
seems Mustakori encouraged Suleri to write Meatless Days. Mustakori
therefore urged the creation of, or metaphorical "birth" of, Suleri's
textual child. Mustakori's role is as a foil for Sara within the confmes
of Meatless Days, much as Horatio was a foil for Hamlet. The
 Milk-Fed Discourse 189

introduction of Shakespeare's characters makes this explicit.

Mustakori as Horatio and Suleri as Hamlet underscore what Sara
considers her constraints. Mustakori appears free from the confines of
womanhood as the role has been thus far defined in the book, and it is
Mustakori's freedom that makes all the more clear to Sara what she
feels is her lack. Unlike Mustakori, many of the women of Meatless
Days are busy doing precisely what Sara does not want to do; they
struggle to place their separate selves into other contexts, including
Sara's own mother Mairi.
The portrait ofMairi, in the chapter titled, "What Mamma Knew,"
provides the clearest example in Meatless Days of a woman attempting
to maintain selfuood while responding to the needs of others. Mairi, a
university professor and Welsh woman living in Pakistan, lives for
others as well as for herself and is described as living "increasingly
outside the limits of her body until [Sara] felt [she] had no means of
holding her, lost instead to the reticence of touch" (156). Unlike Dadi,
who cannot remember the number of children she gave birth to, Sara's
mother does not recoil from her role as mother; instead, she carefully
divides her teaching or individual life from her family life. She reasons
that people cannot be changed, and warns Sara against trying. Sara
recalls how her mother would, "smile and shake her head, to see my
complete regression into a woman who does not care for character at all
and wants to change only the plot" (154). Mairi lives within the
constraints placed upon women, whereas Sara wants to undo those
constraints. The descriptions of Mairi are meant to highlight the
differences between Sara and her mother. As Suleri "struggle[s] with
the quaintness ofthe task [she has] set [her]self, the obsolescence ofthe
quirky little tales" of Meatless Days to which she is giving her own
birth, she "can feel her [mother's] spirit shake its head to tell [her],
'Daughter, unplot yourself; let be."' ( 156). Mairi sees no need to
change the plot of women's stories; her concern is not with plot but
with each woman redefining her own character on her own terms.
Mairi's own tale is determined by her character choice: she yields
to another, her husband, but she does so consciously. A political
journalist, her husband's "powerful discourse would surround her night
and day," but she would "liv[ e] through thirty years of the daily
production of that print, the daily necessity of sympathy," while Sara
would be "bone-tired after ten" (157). Suleri continues: ''To Papa's
mode of fearsome inquiry we married Mamma's expression of secret
thought, making us-if nothing else-faithful in physiognomy" ( 157).
When asked what is the greatest thing she has done in her life, Mairi
refers to "enduring" her "impossible" husband, but then to ''protect
him, she add[s], 'Oh, my children, I would say'" (158). Her choice, to
marry and bear children, carries a penalty: it quiets her tongue, limits
190 Deirdre Fagan

her discourse. Sara says that she is interested in seeing "how far any
tale can sustain the name of 'mother,' or whether such a name will have
to signifY the severance of story" (164). Sara appears concerned with
her mother's discourse, not only because of the way in which her
father's 13 discourse surrounded her mother night and day, but also with
how her mother "worked at all hours to keep her connection with her
children at low tide-still a powerfully magnetic thing, but at an ebbing
tide, so that there was always a ghostly stretch of neither here nor there
between her sea and our shore" (159). Because of the distance she
creates between her children and herself, like Dad~ Mairi "live[ s]
increasingly outside the limits of her body" (156). Mairi has lived
quietly and with acceptance. Mairi was a "guest in her own name,
living in a resistant culture that would not tell her its rules: she knew
there must be many rules and in compensation, developed the slightly
distracted manner of someone who did not wish to be breaking rules of
which she was ignorant" (163). For this, Sara remains dissatisfied with
Mairi as mother and as woman. She asks of her, "[i]s it fair, Mama, is
it fair that you have reached a point where you no longer bother to
differentiate between what the world imagines you must be and what
you are?" (169). Her mother is thankful that she is able to divide her
life in the way she does, between being a wife, a mother, and a teacher;
she exclaims: "It is good of you to let me live-in my own way-
among you" (165). Sara is not as grateful either for her mother's sake
or her own as her daughter. Sara's concern with how far one can
sustain the name of mother before severing the story is illuminated: it is
not only her mother's concern, but it becomes her own.
Food images are not abundant in the chapter on Sara's mother,
"What Mama Knew," though there are images of "fed bodies" and of
eating and not eating (155). The importance of food imagery, not only
concerning Sara's mother, but in relation to the book, is summed up,
however, in a passage at the end of the chapter which includes both
food and breastfeeding images within a discussion of discourse. Here,
Sara takes on the voice of her mother in her role as teacher, in a
classroom setting:
'Take disappointment from me, child, eat disappointment from me.'
I saw us shift, uneasy to be furniture to such a discourse. 'Since [
must make you taste, let me put gravel on your tongues, those rasping
surfaces that years ago I watered! [f you cannot, will not live--as I
insist--outside historical affection, then [ must be for you the living
lesson of the costs ofhistory. (169, emphasis added)
Something of an explanation is given by Sara for the choices that her
mother has made. Mairi bore and reared her own children and the
children of her classroom and "watered" them either literally or
figuratively with breast milk; now she asks that they "eat" her
 Milk-Fed Discourse 191

disappointment, attempting to live outside historical affection. But

even as Sara seems to understand her mother's choices, she remains
unaccepting. She also longs, as Mara Scanlon explains, for her mother:
''Pushing beyond mere sight and sound, she asks her mother for actual
nourishment, for relief from Meatless Days: 'Flavor of my infancy, my
mother, still be food"' (160). Sara is left desiring a more powerful
physical embrace from her mother than the one she received, just the
sort of embrace that breastfeeding is meant, beyond the literal
nourishment of milk, to provide, but that Sara believes needs to be
provided well beyond babyhood.
Suleri explicitly expresses this desire for motherly nourishment at
the end of the second chapter. Sara tells of a dream she has after her
mother's death in which she fmds "hunks of meat wrapped in
cellophane, and each of them fe[els] like Mama" (44). Here Sara does
seem to "eat" her mother's disappointment as well as her own: she
steals a "portion of that body" and then she hides it inside her mouth,
under her tongue. In the dream it seems that Sara is, in her grief, trying
to "savor" her mother, and trying to ingest her-make her mother part
of her-to embody something of her (44 ). She will later explain that
she "intensified her [mother's] vanished ways into some expensive
salt" ( 160). Hirsiaho conveys that "[ i]n Urdu, many emotions are eaten
or drunk instead of merely 'feeling' them" and that ''the metaphor
stretches to the level of more concrete embodiment. Grief is a constant
presence in the body-it has to be swallowed and digested intimately"
(201). Sara will savor her mother, taste her on her tongue, no matter
how ethereal and ghostly a mother she appears to have been. Grieving,
she will bury her in her body.
The first and last lines of the opening chapter of Meatless Days,
entitled "Excellent Things in Women," are paradoxical: "Leaving
Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of
women," (I) and "there are no women in the third world" (20). The
eight chapters that follow these broadly contradictory remarks present
successive portrayals of women-as well as men-in Sara's world, in
addition to those addressed here, women who indeed do exist in the
third world. In stating that no women exist in the third world, Suleri
seeks to focus the reader's attention on those women who do and make
them visible, and to somehow allow Sara to come to terms with who
she is and still longs to be. When Suleri refers to women and says they
do not exist, she is both indulging, though somewhat facetiously, and
criticizing the western image of third world women as those who exist
as referent Others. Shazia Rahman notes, "Suleri is able to destabilize
absolute positions of all kinds and complicate the ways in which we
define selves" (356). Suleri, in her essay "Woman Skin Deep:
Feminism and the Postcolonial Condition" writes:
192 Deirdre Fagan

To privilege the racial body in the absence of historical context is

indeed to generate an idiom that tends to waver with impressionistic
haste between the abstractions of postcoloniality and the anecdotal
literalism of what it means to articulate an 'identity' for a woman
writer of color. Despite its proclaimed location within contemporary
theoretical--not to mention post-theoretical-discourse, such an
idiom poignantly illustrates the hidden and unnecessary desire to
resuscitate the 'self.' (249)
Suleri iterates in the above quote that any notion that the postcolonial
"self' needs resuscitation suggests that there were historically "no
women in the third world," which is precisely the misconception
Suleri's Meatless Days, through profound and probing inquiry into
Sara's own experiences, and those of the Pakistani women around her,
undoes. One way in which Suleri does so is by destabilizing the notion
of women as "meatless" and making them become, quite literally, food.
As Samir Dayal points out, in Meatless Days '"woman' is
(dis)articulated as 'meatless.' It is the phenomenology of this
meatlessness, this silence or absence, that the novel teases out [ ... ]"
(252). There is no one Suleri wants to make "meat" more than Sara
herself. Her meatlessness is derived not only from her status as
woman, generally, but more specifically from her status as a Pakistani
woman. As Geetha Ganapathy-Dor explains, "[t]he rawness connoted
by the term 'meat' is intended to convey the depth of Sara Suleri's
objection to the superficial way in which feminism is treated in
postcolonial studies. Her desire 'to strip the female body to the bone'
reflects her wish to liberate it from the facile critical concepts that
purport to contain it." (36). In Meatless Days this liberation leads her
to the conclusion that no women, as previously defined, exist in the
third world-<mly those that have been redefined through her narrative.
Suleri offers highly crafted portraits of the characters in her story,
and perhaps the most significant portrait which emerges from her
introspective role as narrator is that of herself. Sara, Scanlon notes,
"characterizes herself by childlessness" and "(a]s her siblings have
children, [Sara] seems content to have 'felt favored at this vicarious
taste of motherhood" (419). In her search for a female identity separate
from the traditional one of mother, in what has been described as the
"highly gendered" culture of Pakistan, Sara questions her relationship
to the women and men around her and the relationship of all of them to
defining language (Scanlon 413). The distinction between the sexes
becomes clear: "Men live in homes, and women live in bodies" (Suleri
143). It is from these bodies, these meaty containers, that Pakistani
women emerge, and yet Sara has to fmd a way to emerge not through
childbearing or her Pakistani heritage, but through her dismissal of the
former and her return to the latter.
 Milk-Fed Discourse 193

Dayal notes Suleri's appropriation of the term "third world

woman" is problematic, since she herself "teaches and writes in the
most privileged sector of the U.S. academic universe," Yale University,
and therefore "her perspective cannot be unproblematically assimilated
to a neatly defmed third world woman's minority perspective" (251).
And Rahman writes we cannot "talk about women in the first world
and women in the third world as if the category of women remains the
same in each of these contexts" (352). But it is precisely the shift in
perspective that her straddling of two cultures provides that Sara boldly
confronts, and makes possible the lens she applies to both. As Rahman
notes: "Just as Sara cannot be known except in relation to her loved
ones, categories such as women cannot be known except in relation to
other categories" (348). Sara cannot know herself without discovering
who she is in relation to these other women. And the portraits that
Suleri provides do not have to be categorical in order for them to be
effective because, while Suleri does not neatly fit the minority
perspective, it is precisely because she appears to have "assimilated"
that Sara's conflicted character emerges. While Suleri's perspective
cannot be unproblematically assimilated to a third world woman's,
Sara's also cannot be unproblematically assimilated to a childless
Americanized woman's. Readers are given a clear understanding of
Sara's conflict and the difficulty of achieving any kind of "neat
assimilation." As Scanlon 14 states, when Sara "opts for her American
life rather than for the duties of Pakistan" she demonstrates how "her
choice for childlessness signals a disruption of the tie to her land of
origin, to a mother(ing) land" (419). It is this disruption which becomes
central to the text and is illuminated primarily through Sara's milk-fed
discourse.
By the end of Meatless Days, it seems "there are no women in the
third world" should read: [t]here are no women left in the third world."
The birth of Meatless Days is intended to sexually revolutionize those
women who could not revolutionize themselves, and who did not live
to see how Suleri would revolutionize them-Dadi, Mairi, Ifat ....
Their lives can no longer be so easily dismissed. As Ganapathy-Dor
makes clear, Suleri does not only write for herself, she writes "for her
siblings who have shared her predicament and for those strangers, men
and women, who know what "khala (a maternal aunt's love) means in a
Pakistani family" (33). Suleri challenges western conceptions of
Pakistani women, and Sara's resistance to marriage and motherhood as
evident in and through her discourse additionally challenges the
conception of a "passive" third world woman. She is determined, as
Ganapathy-Dor states, to "transform the patriarchal articulation of
authorship into a matriarchal one" (35). Sara's strength is in her
resistance; her offspring are the words with which she waters her
194 Deirdre Fagan

readers. In the closing lines of the book Sara concludes "although [she
did] not know it then-to fall asleep on lfat's bed was milk enough,"
her sister provided her the sustenance that she had hoped to gain from
her mother (186). Sara reveals Ifat's ''water laps around [her] almost in
reproach: 'You were distracted when I requested your attention. You
were not looking. I was milk"' (l86). In her mourning of these
significant women, she discovers that the maternal for her does not lie
in herself, but in those women who mothered her, however
insufficiently in the case ofMairi and Dadi, and however unknowingly,
in the case ofifat.
The real meat of Meatless Days is Sara's hard-won choice not to
bear children, bringing fullness for herself and the "other" women full X
and bodily out of metaphorical meatlessness. Despite the Biblical 5
challenge of "disembodiment" 16 imposed on women as the ribs of
Adam, Suleri makes women not fleshless bones but meat. Women
produce children; as Sara puts it, her mother wrote her children (184).
Giving birth became its own discourse. But Sara chooses to "hold the
Adam in me, the one who had attempted to break loose" (Suleri 186).
As Oliver Lovesey notes, "the self in Meatless Days is constructed in
language" (37). Suleri writes Meatless Days-her writing is "pregnant
with rich images that nourish" (Ganapathy-Dor 39). One concludes
that in Meatless Days, both literal and figurative children are nurtured
with a little of that good mother's milk. Food is substance, sustenance,
nurturing. It is statement, symbo~ consumption, reproduction. It is
woman. It is mother. As metaphor, Suleri puts it all to good use, but
Sara will not become just another link in that particular food chain.
She will become meat, but she will resist both masculine and feminine
digestion.
Suleri's Meatless Days are anything but meatless. Her culinary
discourse is saturated with food imagery, but also with images of child-
bearing and child-rearing, and the mothering of not only one's children,
but one's tongue. Her nostalgia is for origins-national, physical, and
emotional. Her vehicles for accessing those origins are food, women,
the food women produce, and the language she uses to articulate all
three. Suleri embraces otherness, but it is the kind of otherness she
seeks, the kind she herself has defmed, not one that has been defined
and ascribed to her-it is the other that is not mother. She has digested
Pakistan and the women who surrounded her, and as an other in exile,
she finds what she has buried in her own body and in language: a new
home.
Notes
1
It should be noted that the book jacket refers to Meatless Days as a
memoir, but there has been some question among critics as to what an apt genre
 Milk-Fed Discourse 195

description might be. Sangeeta Ray interestingly identifies the book as a

bildungsrornan (39). Parama Roy and Anu Hirsiaho describe it as an
autobiographical text. Hirsiaho goes on to explain, Meatless Days "is easier to
read as a novel, a piece of fiction, than as an actual autobiography" (190).
Susan Koshy describes the book as a "collection of autobiographical tales of
hybrid genre-memoir, essay, meditation and novel" (46). And Oliver
Lovesey refers to the "ambivalent relationship [in Meatless Days] between
personal story and national narrative, autobiography and history" (35).
2
The back cover of Meatless Days describes the book as a "finely wrought
memoir of life in postcolonial Pakistan." For a detailed discussion from shortly
after the publication of Suleri's memoir regarding the difficulties associated
with the use of the term "postcolonial," see Ray, who urges the word to be used
"carefully, selectively" (38).
3
Helime Cixous is interested in women's ability to revolutionize existing
patriarchal structures through language. Cixous begins her essay, "The Laugh
of the Medusa," by urging women to return to their bodies by returning to
themselves: "Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring
women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from
their bodies" (276). Suleri contrasts with Cixous in that she believes there is a
"price a mind must pay when it lives in a beautiful body" but she appears to
equally aim, through the language of Meatless Days, to similarly revolutionize
not only the role of women, but more specifically the role of third world
women in relation to the patriarchal structure of the Urdu language and of
Pakistani society (Suleri 132).
4
Luce Iragaray is interested in the bodily contact that the child has with
the mother as a source of experience and knowledge. Iragaray writes: "Woman
always remains several, but she is kept from dispersion because the other is
already within her and is autoerotically familiar to her" (31 ). For Suleri, the
child's habitation of the mother's womb is problematic since it both absorbs
and confmes women.
5
Jacques Lacan speaks of woman as the referent other when he writes that
the other can only be "the Other sex" (39). In Meatless Days Sara questions
her own identity as a referent "other" both in terms of being a woman and in
terms of being a third world woman; Sara's struggles become magnified in
Pakistani and American culture by her withdrawal from motherhood.
6
In order to differentiate between Sara Suleri and the narrator, I refer to
the author as Suleri and the narrator as Sara.
7
Phallogocentrism is a term coined by Jacques Derrida in On
Grammatology,which refers to the privileging of the signified (man) over the
signifier (woman).
8
Suleri's cultural criticism reflects the moves that she is making in
Meatless Days. She writes in The Rhetoric ofEnglish India:
If the materiality of cultural criticism must now locate its idiom in the
productive absence of alterity, it must similarly realign its relation to
the figure of gender. The figurative status of gender poses a
somewhat unprocessed question to such critical terrain: can gender
serve to elucidate a critical discourse reliant on metaphors of
196 Deirdre Fagan

sexuality, or does it merely reify the sorry biologism that dictate

traditional decodings of the colonial encounter?" ( 15)
Suleri further argues, "[t]he taut ambivalence of colonial complicity [ ... ]
demands a more nuanced reading of how equally ambivalently gender
functions in the tropologies of both colonial and postcolonial narratives" (15).
This essay strives to provide a nuanced reading of Meatless Days precisely in
an attempt to tease out the complexities of gender in relation to Sara's
discourse instead of reducing it to a result of her female biology. It is stressed
that while Sara has difficulty positioning herself in relation to the Pakistani
women whose portraits she provides, her cultural positioning is not only
constrained by her South Asian origins, but is made equally ambiguous by the
American culture in which she resides.
9
Meatless days are explained by Suleri: "The country was made in 1947,
and shortly thereafter the government decided that two days out of each week
would be designated as meatless days, in order to conserve the national supply
of goats and cattle. Every Tuesday and Wednesday the butchers' shops would
stay fLITttly closed, without a single carcass dangling from the huge metal hooks
[ ... ]" (31).
10
The role of "mother" is one that Sara explicitly resists. Iragaray argues
that women, as women, are always mothers, and it is confronting just that
assertion or theory that complicates and propels Sara's journey for a self.
11
Julia Kristeva explains in "Women's Time" that "it is in the aspiration
towards artistic and, in particular, literary creation that woman's desire for
affumation now manifests itself' rather than in the maternal (206). She
explains:
[t]his identification also bears witness to women's desire to lift the
weight of what is sacrificial in the social contract from their
shoulders, to nourish our societies with a more flexible and free
discourse, one able to name what has thus far never been an object of
circulation in the community: the enigmas of the body, the dreams,
secret joys, shames, hatreds of the second sex. (207)
Suleri seeks through the writing of Meatless Days, and Sara through her
discourse and the various discourses of the women around her, to resist cultural
disapgrobation for her choice not to mother.
2
As Kristeva shows, the strain on women to mother is born of the social
need to "maintain a constancy of standardized household" ("Stabat Mater"
183). For Sara, as for all women, according to Kristeva, "Silence weighs
heavily none the less on the corporeal and psychological suffering of childbirth
and especially the self-sacrifice involved in becoming anonymous in order to
pass on the social norm" ("Stabat Mater" 183). The silence which Sara's Dadi
has had to endure, and the limitations on discourse which her mother will be
shown to endure, both later in this paper, are a sacrifice that weighs on Sara but
which she is not willing to impart. She will not become anonymous because
she is fully aware that the "doubtless weights first on the maternal body" and "a
woman as mother would be[ ... ] a strange fold that changes culture into nature,
the speaking into biology" ("Stabat Mater" 182).
13
· In "The Newly Born Woman" Cixous writes:
 Milk-Fed Discourse 197

Intention, desire, authority examine them and you are led right
back ... to the father. It is even possible not to notice that there
is no place whatsoever for woman in the calculations.
Ultimately the world of 'being' can function while precluding
the mother. No need for a mother, as long as there is some
motherliness: and it is the father, then, who acts the part, who is
the mother. Either woman is passive or she does not exist.
What is left of her is unthinkable, unthought. Which certainly
means that she is not thought, that she does not enter into the
oppositions, that she does not make a couple with the father
(who makes a couple with the son). (39)
Suleri introduces a mother who is constrained by her husband, and posits Sara
as being led back to the mother, instead of the father, thereby recreating the
tension that Cixous describes as being circumvented.
14
Scanlon writes about Suleri's choice here, but I am appropriating the
description for Sara since I am making a distinction between the two.
15
Mannur points out that on page 34 of Meatless Days Suleri uses
Biblical language to describe the line of cooks that passed
through the Suleri household in an attempt to replace the
national(ist) hegemonic narrative with a consciously feminist
script: Suleri's own tenuous connection with the past refuses to
be circumscribed by a patriarchal nationalist logic; rather, she
strategically remembers and commemorates the past on her own
terms, rendering the official face of Pakistan tangential to her
own personal history (20).
Likewise, Sara's body refuses to be circumscribed by the patriarchal traditions
and expectations of motherhood.
16
Shazia Rahman and I had the chance to meet and converse when I
presented a version of this paper at the Illinois Philological Association
conference in 2007. I thank her for her insights and encouragement during our
conversation, and in particular for her comments in relation to the word
"[d]isembodiment," the last word of Meatless Days.

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