Ravenous Restraint
Remembering Sara Suleri
Noor Asif
There’s something rapacious about Sara Suleri’s rhetorical style in Meatless Days. It’s elliptical and dense, and one has the sensation of being lovingly caught in a patch of quicksand. The essays read as acts of slow, savoring consumption, in which Suleri tries to devour the people she has lost, as if to take their destruction into her own hands. As if to say to the lost object: you are not gone, for you are mine; you are not gone, for I have ingested you; you are not gone, for you exist through me—in fact, you are the condition for my existence.
The book is slim and pink. The cover bears a striking photograph of a tall, thin Anglo-Indian woman wearing bridal clothes and holding the hand of a small child. We learn that the woman is wearing bridal clothes not because it’s her wedding day, but because her husband is returning home to Pakistan after having been detained as a prisoner of war in India, during the era of emergency following Dhaka’s fall. The woman is Suleri’s elder sister, Ifat, who was later killed in what is speculated to have been a politically charged hit-and-run, and whose death haunts the memoir, culminating in a chapter titled “The Immoderation of Ifat.” Suleri opens the chapter with a powerful passage about her sister’s influence on her life: “At first I thought she was the air I breathed, but Ifat was prior, prior. Before my mechanical bellows hit the air to take up their fanning habit, Ifat had preceded me, leaving her haunting aura in all my mother’s secret crevices: in the most constructive period of my life she lay around me like an umbilical fluid, yellow and persistent.” Suleri’s prose is viscous and nourishing, like amniotic fluid, congealing what would otherwise remain distinct. It reconfigures the bonds of family: the maternal is confused with, or slips into, the figure of the sister (a move that recalls Juliet Mitchell’s work on siblings).
News of Suleri’s death found me on March 28, 2022, amid other losses, in a message shared by two of my colleagues—let’s call them X and Y. We conversed over email, a medium whose professionalism heightened our analytic, restrained register as academics. In the subject line, X pasted a news headline in memory of Suleri’s career and her support for peace and civil mobility between India and Pakistan, gesturing toward Suleri’s ability to offer a language through which to grasp the violence of Partition and yet work toward solidarity. She ended the note with a few words about how she knew Y and I had just been speaking about how important Suleri was for us, weeks ago in a seminar. Before I could respond to X’s email, Y entered the thread with news of her grandmother’s death—small words that could not possibly contain the pain she was in. I replied to the two emails uncertainly, stumbling through words of comfort. I called it an “untimely convergence of loss.” I was trying to provide a container for our grief, but my words felt frail and inadequate, like a thread pulled so taut it was on the verge of breaking.
Restraint marked our email thread, an affective tenor that resonated with Suleri’s own method of composure in the face of loss. It was a mixture of evading and confronting the lost object. I think to myself, now, how fitting that news of Suleri’s death should be so interwoven with the losses of others. Even in death, Suleri, a scholar of British Romanticism and Victorianism who muddled the generic conventions of the memoir by writing about the lives of others rather than herself, found a way to embed herself into the lives and deaths of other remarkable women.
The visceral, emotional quality of our responses to Suleri’s death, palpable under the restraint with which we wrote to each other of more immediate losses, alludes to the ways in which Suleri’s legacy supersedes its origins within the postcolonial, feminist deconstructionist moment of the 1980s in which she first found fame. That Suleri’s death had such an effect on my colleagues and myself—academics at various career stages whose interests span postcolonial studies and gender and sexuality—speaks to her continuing influence in these fields as well as the ways in which she exceeds them. Suleri, too, was one such remarkable woman whose work continues to guide the nascent scholarly interests of younger scholars like myself and Y, and invites more established scholars like X to reflect on how their lives continue to converge at the intersection of the political, the national, and the personal in ways that defy resolution.
For many feminist scholars who strive to understand how colonialism and its ensuing era of nationalism continue to affect our scholarly and personal lives, Suleri is one of the reasons we write. She helps us see how colonialism and its effects have become entangled within our cores; have continued to breathe through, and often contaminate, our familial relations; have gone on to produce intergenerational trauma as well as care. She has given us a way to think and write through the ambivalence that sticks us like thorns and showers us with perfume when we find ourselves confronted by the otherwise sacred categories of the family, the maternal, and nationalist projects, too. Far from conciliatory and uncomplicatedly reverent, Suleri draws blood in her writing about the people and the places she loves most.
Suleri the memoirist is hidden beneath the limbs, airs, and faces of the women who’ve shaped her.
In her own lifetime, not only did Suleri write about her own interiority and lived experiences through her memories of women she loved, but she also relied on these relationships as sustenance. Though Suleri’s most famous book, Meatless Days, is often categorized as memoir, I think it would be better described as the confession of a grieving cannibal who sustains herself on the haunting memories and fleshly bodies of mothers, grandmothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, nieces, and school friends in order to come to terms with the ambivalence at the seat of her relationships with herself, others, and, of course, the colonial project and its own unlikely offspring, nationalism.
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Suleri was born in Karachi in 1953 to Z. A. Suleri, an Indian-turned-Pakistani political journalist and activist, and Mair Jones, an English professor from Wales. She grew up largely in Lahore, a city in Punjab that served at different times as the Mughal Kingdom’s and British Empire’s Indian capital. She received her BA at Kinnaird College, where her mother and eventually she also taught literature, and her MA from Punjab University, before leaving Pakistan to get her PhD at Indiana University. Suleri ultimately landed a teaching position at Yale, in the department of English. She wrote one book of literary criticism, The Rhetoric of English India (1992), and two memoirs, Meatless Days (1989) and Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter’s Elegy (2003).
In Suleri’s memoirs, psychoanalysis is like a high-frequency hum that delicately resonates in one’s ear but cannot be pinned down to a specific source. There are no explicit references to Lacan, Klein, Kristeva, or any of the other psychoanalytic thinkers whose presence, nevertheless, is undeniable in the twists and turns of her prose. Rather, it is precisely her insistence on representing the mutuality of love and hate at the core of her relationships, and her earnest attempts to do the work of mourning through the act of writing, that make her work so emblematic of psychoanalysis. In particular, Suleri’s Meatless Days is one of the key texts of feminist and deconstructionist engagements with psychoanalysis of the 1980s. It continues to stand out for how Suleri entangles her own private, interior life with the violent emergence of Pakistan and the nascent country’s tenuous relationships to India and, most devastatingly, Bangladesh.
Pakistan’s existence was conditioned by the bloody division of the subcontinent into two nation-states: India and Pakistan. Except, like a cell that keeps splitting into two smaller parts (or, like in Melanie Klein’s conception of the paranoid-schizoid position, the ego that keeps splitting and projecting some of its good, but mostly bad, parts into external objects), Pakistan itself was divided into East Pakistan and West Pakistan, its two distinct parts awkwardly straddling the vast swath of land known as India. And so, in addition to dealing with a deeply ingrained colonial hangover in the wake of British departure, Pakistanis had to contend with the fact that they belonged to a fragmented nation whose two halves had different desires, needs, languages, and cultural and ecological environments, until the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971 coincided with the Bangladeshi Liberation Front, effectively turning West Pakistan into Pakistan and East Pakistan into Bangladesh. Meatless Days is Suleri’s attempt to make sense of these fractures, which affected the psychical terrain as much as the geopolitical. She does so by writing about her family and its fractures and losses within the context of West Pakistan’s angsty adolescence and its wars with itself and its other half. The book continues to matter in a world in which divisions are continuously arising and leading us to perpetually reevaluate our bonds with the people we love the most.
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Meatless Days contains a notion of family that defies the normative Western set of relations between father, mother, and children. In Suleri’s accounts, family is an elastic, amoebic entity stretching to encompass relationships along lines of class and gender, and though she thoroughly sketches out each individual, she rarely presents them as coherent or self-contained. Rather, each person is presented as a set of contradictory fragments related to their mannerisms, their likes and dislikes, their fears, their passions. Ifat is both fierce and graceful, a protector and someone who requires protection. Suleri’s mother is both a representative of safety and a figure whose intentions remain unknowable. Suleri’s grandmother is both a force to contend with and a body of extreme fragility.
I am struck by Suleri’s strange attention to isolated body parts in her writing. We see this in relation to Ifat. “Of all the haunting aspects that return to me,” Suleri tells us, “I often am most pleased when I recollect [Ifat’s] wrist. Ifat imposed an order on her bones that gave her gestures of an unsuspected strength; her wrists were such a vessel. There was no jar, no bottle in the house which could resist that flick of wrist.” In a twist characteristic of Suleri’s writing, she recounts how Ifat’s ferocious tendency to grab the wrists of others made Suleri suddenly and painfully aware of her own self-annihilating desire for her sister: “Ifat would suddenly and wordlessly grasp my wrist, making my hand, like a dying moth or a creature not knowing what to do with suffocation, flutter out, ‘Don’t let go; don’t let go.’”
As Freud writes, the work of mourning consists of a process in which “the existence of the lost object is psychically prolonged. Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hyper-cathected, and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it.” The work of mourning is “carried out piecemeal,” resulting in a long process that requires a “great expense of time and cathectic energy” but which defies pathology and ultimately results in the ego’s freedom from suffocating thoughts of the lost object. But in Meatless Days, we don’t get this sense of freedom from suffocation. Instead, we get the opposite: a mired text unable to let go. Suleri’s “don’t let go; don’t let go” echoes and echoes like a deep refrain here, the semicolon like a link in a continuing chain, invisible yet persistent in its haunting. For instance, by memorializing Ifat as an object comprised of several forms and parts, from a pre-Oedipal presence in amniotic fluid to a wrist both terrifying and awe-inspiring in its poise, and later to a face so strikingly beautiful that it became cause for familial concern, Suleri gives her libidinal attachments free rein and gorges on Ifat’s distinct parts and units, so that she can ultimately alleviate the pain of the “haunting aspects” that linger in the wake of her sister’s death by hiding them within herself.
For Suleri, to chop up the bodies of the ones we love and isolate their various parts in the act of writing is to linger in the irresistible talons of melancholia. Yet, the layers in her writing suggest that she is disguising this self-degrading impulse beneath the more responsible facade of the work of mourning. This becomes more obvious when we reckon with the fact that Meatless Days is a memoir. For a memoir, there is little in the book that explicitly relates to Suleri’s own psyche or interiority. Instead, Suleri the memoirist is hidden beneath the limbs, airs, and faces of the women who’ve shaped her; she elevates them, or talks about herself through them, so that they hover over and obscure her more weak, helpless, irrelevant self. Or rather, we might say that Suleri the melancholic has ingested these women, the ones she’s lost and loved, reducing herself to naught to make up for the ambivalence she feels toward them. Writing, then, becomes a way to metabolize loss and degrade the self to keep the loved, lost object afloat.
With the exception of a chapter dedicated to her father, and other moments that focus on her relationship with her brother, the essays in Meatless Days center on women. The essay form becomes a way for Suleri to belatedly reciprocate care, admiration, and love for these women, as well as express envy, bitterness, perhaps even distrust—all belatedly, because most of these women died before she put pen to paper.
In another chapter, eponymously titled “Meatless Days,” Suleri writes about the grotesque relationship between her mother’s body and food, a congruence that has been impressed onto her mind since childhood and which also recalls Klein’s work on the relationship between the infant and the mother. While Suleri’s attention to Ifat is laden with fascination and protective love, her meditation on her mother is wrought by feelings of betrayal and suspicion as much as it is indicative of a hushed, majestic love, the kind that tries to bear witness to the wake of an impossible grace. The chapter begins with Suleri’s recent discovery that a certain snack her mother would often treat her to as a child was not what she had always thought it was. She recounts having a conversation with her sister Tillat, as adults after their mother’s death. “‘Sara,’” her sister asks,
“‘do you know what kapura are?’ . . . ‘Of course I do,’ I answered with some affront. ‘They’re sweetbreads, and they’re cooked with kidneys, and they’re very good.’ Natives should always be natives, exactly what they are, and I felt irked to be so probed around the issue of my own nativity. But Tillat’s face was kindly with superior knowledge. ‘Not sweetbread,’ she gently said. ‘They’re testicles, that’s what kapura really are.’”
Suleri plays it cool, she doesn’t let this new knowledge get to her in the moment. But the more it sinks in, the more it sends her spiraling, questioning not only her memory but her “nativity” in relation to Pakistan, the country of her birth, childhood, and adolescence.
The reality of kapura’s main ingredient suddenly shifts her identity, once solidly Pakistani, into precarity. And the object of her scorn and newfound insecurity becomes her mother. “It was my mother, after all, who had told me that sweetbreads were sweetbreads, and if she were wrong on that score, then how many other simple equations had I now to doubt?” This thought quickly slides into a more dooming one: “Maybe my mother knew that sweetbreads are testicles but had cunningly devised a ruse to make me consume as many parts of the world as she could before she set 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.” Suleri performs a growing awareness of her mother’s betrayals here, in a way that recalls Adam Phillips’s summary of Klein’s work as the “gothic melodrama of emotional development.” Yet I suspect that what she might actually be hiding underneath is a betrayal of her own self. The fear shifts from “my mother has tricked me” to “I’ve tricked myself about what has made me who I am.” This is an anxiety about false narratives, stemming from an unresolved refuge in a false self. How to shed this false self so strategically constructed as a shield against pain? In Suleri’s prose, it appears that the only way to attempt to resolve the pain of these impingements and its share in the construction of the false self is to find recourse through yet another layer of artifice—in this case, through writing.
There’s a good deal of irony embedded in this usage of artifice as the means through which to cancel out an earlier, pre-Oedipal artifice. Suleri’s prose suggests that irony, because of its instability of meaning, might be an exemplary mode through which one can begin to come to terms with maternal betrayal. For to betray is to convince another that something is absolutely not what it seems to be. In fact, that something might turn out to be the opposite, or the unlikeliest option, of what it sets out to be. As Suleri shows, this maternal betrayal quickly slides into national betrayal. The mother merges into the motherland, just as quickly as the national subject begins to question her identity.
Suleri deftly translates these feelings of betrayal toward her mother onto a national scale when she writes about “Pakistan’s erratic emotional market.” In the years following the nation’s creation, items and goods were constantly fluctuating in quantity on the market or entirely disappearing in response to the unstable geopolitical climate, so that Pakistanis “lived in the expectation of threatening surprise,” never knowing if “a crow had drowned in the water tank on the roof” or horrifically realizing that “those were not pistachios, at all, in a tub of Hico’s green ice cream.” In her reflections on the maternal and sustenance, Suleri’s motherland becomes just as unreliable as her mother may have been. As she tells us, “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.” Pakistan is figured as a Kleinian bad mother, the kind who withholds sustenance from the infant, just as Suleri imagines her mother to have withheld the truth about certain things.
And yet, Meatless Days is as much an homage to her loved ones, even if they may have hurt her, as it is a fraught love letter to the country she willingly left behind for a new life in America. While the eponymous chapter is a repository of Suleri’s growing unease with the reality of kapura and other myths she may have unknowingly believed, it is also a site for her to come to terms with the half-truths, unpleasant surprises, and withholding of nourishment so integral to one’s experience as a daughter as well as a Pakistani. Above all, this particular chapter is a place in which Suleri trudges through the harsh yet pleasurable terrain of melancholia, under the guise of setting out to do the awfully painful work of mourning both mother and motherland.
In perhaps my favorite moment in the entire memoir, Suleri ends the chapter titled “Meatless Days” with a cannibalistic dream. The dream takes place in London: A blue van approaches Suleri, and she quickly understands that it is a refrigerated car. Her father is inside and he tells her that they must remove her mother from the refrigerator in order to give her a proper burial.
“What I found were hunks of meat wrapped in cellophane, and each of them felt like Mamma, in some odd way. It was my task to carry those flanks across the street and to fit them into the coffin at the other side of the road, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle … Then, when my father’s back was turned, I found myself engaged in rapid theft—for the sake of Ifat and Shahid and Tillat and all of us, I stole a portion of that body. It was a piece of her foot I found, a small bone like a knuckle, which I quickly hid inside my mouth, under my tongue. Then I and the dream dissolved, into an extremity of tenderness.”
Suleri’s insistence on ingesting a portion of her mother’s dead body recalls the melancholic’s pathological inability to let go of the lost object. In the dream, Suleri’s father prompts her to begin the work of mourning by putting her mother’s fragmented body back together so that she can, in the process, let it go and move on with her life, but Suleri would rather keep a part of her mother with her.
There’s something seamless about this act of eating the mother that seems to be more conducive to Suleri’s psychic health than to simply fit her body parts together and bury them into the earth. That Suleri experiences a dissolution “into an extremity of tenderness” hints at the occurrence of a psychic cleansing, a purging of the stasis that melancholia puts us at risk of being mired in. But this purging is deceptive. For Suleri, the act of eating the mother is far from functioning as a way to resolve the ambivalent mixture of love and hate that marks one’s relationship with one’s mother, the primary love object. One might think that to eat the mother and then be dissolved into a tenderness that can only be an immaterial extension of her body is to overcome this central antagonism at the root of our relationship to ourselves and to others. Yet I think what Suleri is suggesting is that any such resolution is wishful thinking. This dream of eating her mother and experiencing an “extremity of tenderness” is nothing but the fulfillment of her wish to feel cleansed of her anguish toward her mother’s death. In her waking hours, Suleri is perpetually tortured by the complicated feelings of betrayal and love she feels for her mother. Her devastation, like the one she feels for Ifat, bleeds through the boundaries of the chapters that appear to neatly contain her mother in one, her sister in another. The chapters cannot contain these women or Suleri’s efforts to resolve them neatly in death. Until the very last page of the book, Suleri continues to spin elegiac prose in an attempt to reconcile uncomfortably opposing emotions triggered by these deaths, but she never succeeds. The melancholic never lets go.
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“Leaving Pakistan was, of course, tantamount to giving up the company of women.” This is how Suleri opens Meatless Days. One could say that Suleri, or my reading of Suleri, is at risk of essentializing cis-hetero women and fixing them into a metaphor for the nation. In this sense, Suleri is very much an intellectual product of her time. But what remains so powerful about Suleri’s work, for me, is the way she populates her memories of a country overwrought by patriarchal structures with women who exceed neat configurations of wife, mother, sister, grandmother. The patriarchal structures that dominate Pakistan—as they do in Western countries, a fact becoming increasingly apparent with the overturning of Roe v. Wade—made it so that “the concept of woman was not really part of an available vocabulary: we were too busy for that, just living.” Meatless Days, then, is Suleri’s attempt to allow the women from her past to breathe beyond the bounds of themselves and their imposed positionalities.
Part of this is certainly due to her privileged stance as a wealthy and half-British daughter of elite intellectuals. Yet Suleri’s father’s notoriety as a journalist, and the privilege that came with his position as an intellectual, also put Suleri and her family in the heart of the nation’s violence. We see this quite clearly when we consider the fact that Ifat was murdered, and that her brother-in-law was imprisoned during one of the wars. But regardless of this national and civil violence toward Suleri’s family, Suleri was known for staunchly calling herself Pakistani, devoid of any hyphenation, when she moved to America.
To this Pakistani-ness that she so proudly calls her own, Suleri also weds her seemingly oppositional British roots, which recall the long shadow of colonialism and its crimes in South Asia. The fraught truth is that without the colonization of India, Suleri would have never been born. The person who embodies this difficult history is her mother—both a savior and the one who must be saved, both an emblem of the afterlife of empire and its scapegoat. Reflecting on her newlywed mother, Suleri writes, “Did she really think that she could assume the burden of empire, that if she let my father colonize her body and her name she would perform some slight reparation for the race from which she came? Could she not see that his desire for her was quickened with empire’s ghosts, that his need to possess was a clear index of how he was still possessed?” And when her mother arrives in Pakistan, Suleri muses, that “there were centuries’ worth of mistrust of Englishwomen in [the Pakistani’s] eyes when they looked at her who chose to come after the English should have been gone: what did she mean by saying, ‘I wish to be part of you?’” Here, her mother, that unknowable betrayer whose decades-old secret about sweetmeats causes Suleri to doubt her own national identity as a full-blown adult, is folded into a betrayal of a much larger scale: that of the British Empire’s infantilization and deception of the Indians. But Suleri also resists this analogy by situating her mother as a victim of her father’s misdirected—and, strangely, colonizing—lust for Britishness, for cultural capital to make him stand out amidst the colonized masses. And she also depicts her mother as keenly aware of her outsiderness, as much as she desired to become one with the people her ancestors had formerly subjugated.
There is nothing easy about Meatless Days. Suleri’s writing is full of unlikely images that build upon one another in the manner of free association, leaving plenty to be up for interpretation, as well as impermeable to it. This inability to interpret lends itself to a rejection of closure, which, one could argue, is a form of closure itself. I think again of the email exchange between my colleagues and me, and the terseness with which we wrote to each other. Implicit in the restraint in our emails was an almost innate understanding of the sinews holding Y’s grandmother and Sara Suleri together, under the framework of X’s gesture toward the traumatic fracture of the subcontinent and its potential for repair. Of the fact that to bring her into the fold of these other, in some ways more real losses, somehow made more poignant and more possible our ability to grieve each other’s losses, even though none of us had any attachment to the others’ lost objects. One might say that this gets to the meat of Suleri’s book. That grief is opened up into a collection of entanglements with the personal and the political, the individual and the collective, offering momentary respite from the isolation of experiencing personal loss. But the book’s title alludes to the lack of meat, to the lack of a resolute core or meaning that one can sink one’s teeth into.
The seeming open-endedness with which Suleri writes becomes a melancholic labyrinth, with many ways in but no way out. The chapters close in on her and the reader, shuddering like the dense foliage of a garden maze. In language as in mourning, Suleri has tenderly restrained herself.