Life Writing

ISSN: 1448-4528 (Print) 1751-2964 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rlwr20

An Intimate Disconnection: Sara Suleri and the

‘great machine at the heart of things: h-i-s-t-o-r-y’

Jenni Ramone

To cite this article: Jenni Ramone (2013) An Intimate Disconnection: Sara Suleri and
the ‘great machine at the heart of things: h-i-s-t-o-r-y’, Life Writing, 10:1, 61-76, DOI:
10.1080/14484528.2013.745225

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2013.745225

Published online: 04 Feb 2013.

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Life Writing, 2013
Vol. 10, No. 1, 61
76, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14484528.2013.745225

An Intimate Disconnection:
Sara Suleri and the ‘great
machine at the heart of
things: h-i-s-t-o-r-y’

Jenni Ramone

This paper considers Sara Suleri’s representation of her mother in Meatless Days,
a memoir that offers an antihistorical perspective. At the same time, the mother-
daughter relationship is grounded in postcolonial theory and Suleri’s self-
conscious mode of self-representation as a postcolonial academic.

Keywords Sara Suleri; partition; history; antihistory; Meatless Days;

self-representation; postcolonial; diaspora; Pakistan; South Asia

This paper will consider Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days as an example of diaspora
life-writing that does more than its subtitle, ‘A Memoir’, suggests. Like much
postcolonial life-writing by women, in demonstrating its political commitments it
straddles the categories of auto/biography and theory. Meatless Days is also an
unconventional history of post-independence Pakistan. Not just an alternative
postcolonial history of the region, the text questions the historical mode of
thinking. Meatless Days tells a story of the Partition of India and independent
Pakistan, through the lives of women, notably the lives of Suleri and her Welsh
mother, but also her grandmother, sisters, and a continent-hopping friend,
Muskatori. This paper will address the part that Suleri’s work plays in the field of
postcolonial diaspora life-writing by women; the way that, as a postcolonial
academic, Suleri’s response to her life story is always controlled through a
careful awareness of postcolonial theory; and the rejection of history, or at least
a mistrust of history as a reliable or reasonable method of accounting for past
events.
There has been much recent interest in conjunctions between biography and
autobiography (also sometimes defined by terms such as memoir, testimony, and

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

62 RAMONE

history) and the postcolonial and diaspora context. Though some of the key texts
are general*including Bart Moore-Gilbert’s Postcolonial Life-Writing (2009),
Gillian Whitlock’s Soft Weapons: Autobiography in Transit (2007), and David
Huddart’s Postcolonial Theory and Autobiography (2008)*there have also been a
number of texts that either focus specifically on women’s writing, such as Gillian
Whitlock’s The Intimate Empire: Reading Women’s Autobiography (2000), and
others that address women’s texts as a dominant part of the field, such as
Hornung and Ruhe’s (1998) edited volume Postcolonialism & Autobiography.
Defining postcolonial life-writing is complex: texts that might be categorised as
life-writing are sometimes labelled as academic works, such as Gloria Anzaldua’s
Borderlands/La Frontera, which is considered by many to be a theory of writing
and of identity concerned with many kinds of borders*psychological, sexual,
spiritual and physical-geographical. Anzaldua’s text is at the same time a literary
text and an autobiographical one. Anzaldua’s Borderlands is among many
(auto)biographical works also categorised as fiction*similarly, Kingston’s The
Woman Warrior is often read as literary fiction, even though its subtitle defines
the text as ‘memoir’. The third category into which life-writing is often placed is
political or historical writing, and in this case the text becomes representative of
a place, a time, or a culture. This is where women’s postcolonial life-writing,
composed from a diaspora location, makes a significant contribution to
postcolonial thinking. Conveying a historical moment through women’s life-
writing challenges not only a received version of events by presenting an
alternative version, but it also invites a reconsideration of postcolonial history
itself.

Suleri’s Antihistories

In Meatless Days, Suleri engages with the impact of Partition*a defining event in
postcolonial South Asia*and its aftershocks on her family life. From the outset,
though, Suleri’s presentation of historical events is unorthodox. Postcolonial
literature is, by definition, deeply concerned with histories*normally, with
retelling or reassessing the way an event in colonial or postcolonial history has
been presented in colonial or Western accounts. Postcolonial writing is
sympathetic to the condition of those subjected to colonial control, rather
than to colonialists, and its histories reinforce these commitments by uncovering
lost and ignored histories of subordinate groups, for example. In literary writing,
this intention can be seen at its most direct in retellings of canonical Western
literary texts: for example, in Jack Maggs (1997) Peter Carey reimagines colonial
Australia in order to correct what he saw as an unfair representation in Dickens’
Great Expectations (1998). In order to do this, Carey takes a typical position and
situates his novel at the same time as Dickens’ original story, but alters the
representations of both colonial-era London (emphasising its corruption by
focussing on criminals, and its lack of care*in contrast to the professed
parental duties of he colonial motherland over its territories*with the figure
 AN INTIMATE DISCONNECTION 63

of Ma Britten, an abortionist and trainer of child thieves) and Magwitch/Maggs

who is, in Carey’s text, shown to be an intelligent individual who has been
exploited and rejected by his country and its representatives. Equally, novels like
Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981) tell the story of the impact of colonial
control and subsequent independence on a nation and its people. Midnight’s
Children is a correction to colonial literature of India and replaces the
homogeneity and emptiness presented in novels such as Forster’s A Passage to
India with a multiplicity of culture, language and experience. History in
Midnight’s Children is uncertain, filtered as it is through an unreliable narrator.
Still, though, key historical events are foregrounded; Saleem Sinai may consider
himself the perpetrator of those events, and he may record them inaccurately,
but they are still given precedence in the text, to the extent that many still read
the text as a historical novel. Rushdie’s work is, too, though far more complex
than Carey’s, a reinterpretation of colonial stories of Indian independence and
the events surrounding that historical event.
In contrast, Suleri’s text does not foreground history, even though readers may
be anticipating a representation of Partition and independent Pakistan, which is
the context of the memoir. Instead, the first mention of Partition is brief, and
sandwiched in the middle of a discussion of her grandmother’s children:

[B]y her latter decades [she] could never exactly recall how many children she
had borne. When India was partitioned, in August of 1947, she moved her thin
pure Urdu into the Punjab of Pakistan and waited for the return of her eldest son,
my father. (Suleri 2)

In this example, Suleri deals with the historical event in the manner of the
chronicler rather than the historical storyteller, as Hayden White discussed in
Metahistory: for White, an event that forms part of a history (such as the
Partition of India), ‘may be a beginning, an ending, or simply a transitional event
in three different stories’. However, in the chronicle, ‘this event is simply
‘‘there’’ as an element of a series; it does not ‘‘function’’ as a story element’
(Metahistory 7). This could account for Suleri’s method of representing historical
events: according to Hayden White’s theory of the historical, the historian
traditionally has an important role to play in deciding how history is represented.
The historian’s task is one of ‘explaining’ and ‘representing’; the historian must
‘mediate’ among historical records, accounts and the audience, in order to
organise the historical components into ‘a ‘‘spectacle’’ or process of happening’
(Metahistory, 2, 5). To take on this role is to adopt a position of some authority
and to assume to speak for a culture or community, something that postcolonial
studies is very uncomfortable with. By returning events that have previously been
reported with clarity as beginnings or endings or significant transitional events to
the state of chronicle, is to do away with the certainties of historical
representation in favour of a more open and fluid method of representing a
time and place. Lingering for a little longer on Partition later in her memoir,
Suleri issues a hasty retraction of any claim to historical involvement, claiming
64 RAMONE

that because she was born afterwards, the preparations made for Partition in the
preceding 12 months are not ‘the business of’ her generation (74). History in
Suleri’s work is something fictional and not really to be trusted, as well as
unpleasantly hard work: travelling back in time is an effort of ‘imagination’, not
recall, and an ‘enfeebling’ and ‘bone-wearying’ one, at that (76). The word
‘now’, Suleri suggests, is a ‘tricky’ one (110)*implying again the unfixity of
time, and the unreliability of history, which is reliant upon the certainty of days.
History is something feared as well as mistrusted, for Suleri, who says she has
‘always mourned in museums’ (79), noting that her usual behaviour in them is to
‘pat something inconsequential like a wall’ (79
80) rather than engaging with the
assembled objects.
Historical events are presented with an amount of whimsy; the statement that
Pakistan was ‘made in 1947’ (at Partition) could be taken in many ways, and as
Suleri herself has claimed, many Muslims were very happy to have been granted a
territory on largely religious grounds*for many, to state that Pakistan was made
in 1947 is to rejoice. Not so for Suleri; she reveals the impossibility of certainty
within such a claim by recollecting alongside it that the government’s insistence
upon ‘meatless days’, a measure put in place because of meat shortages, was
roundly flouted by all those in a financial position to do so. People wealthy
enough would buy sufficient meat on permitted days to ensure a supply on those
designated meatless (31). The certainty of those meatless days is revealed to be
a sham and an impossibility, and by presenting this sham directly alongside
Partition, the certainty of Pakistan’s historical beginning is also rendered
questionable. Using this somewhat whimsical tale as the title for her work again
indicates that her rendering of the period is not intended to be read as a serious
corrective to colonial histories.
In another unconventional response to historical representation, the 1971 war
between East and West Pakistan, eventually resulting in the splitting of Pakistan
to form Bangladesh, is designated ‘trying times’ (9), a phrase that most
commentators upon that event would agree doesn’t adequately reflect the
seriousness of the situation. The phrase ‘trying times’ is coined not by Suleri, but
by the somewhat laughable and melodramatic figure of General Yahya’s mistress,
whose ‘quaking bosom’ is covered with ‘overscented silk’ (9) when she coins this
phrase in Suleri’s family kitchen. Just as elsewhere in the text her mother’s
abstract concepts are permitted to describe history, this phrase goes largely
unchallenged as a representation of the 1971 war. Suleri is not eager to show
history to its best advantage, and at times it seems as though her distaste for
history has an almost personal, emotional trigger.
The personal unease surrounding history takes three main forms: an awareness
that her father is, unlike the women in her family, susceptible to history; an
unwillingness to designate her mother’s death to a fixed moment in time; and her
own diaspora condition once she leaves Pakistan to live in America. Taking these
one at a time, then, Suleri’s father seems to present something of a paradox: her
father was, she writes, ‘seduced by history’ (112). It, above all else, was the
‘romance’ of his life (119), yet it was also his downfall; as he ‘ate up his past’
 AN INTIMATE DISCONNECTION 65

(110) in a willingness to be captured by history in the pages of the Pakistan Times

that he edited, it turned him ‘blind’ (123). Suleri’s mother’s death happened in
India while Suleri was in America, and as a consequence in her memory it never
sits on a fixed place in time: while her mother was dead in Lahore on March 9,
Suleri was informed about the death on the evening of March 8, in America, a
date on which, in Lahore time, she would have been still alive (43
4). The
unfixity of things due to both geographical datelines and daylight saving time is
an uncertainty that Suleri returns to repeatedly, but most notably, right at the
end of her memoir where she compares turning back the clocks in October with a
sense of disembodiment, a disembodiment as a result of the construction of
memoir*‘sentences galore’, their appearance on the black and white pages as
random as ‘starlings, vulgar congregations’ (186). History is the trigger for this
disembodiment, and, preferring to feel ‘whole’ (13), this ‘fractured’ (13) thing
called history is not to be trusted.
Her parents’ engagement with history is directly opposed: while her father
tried to control history while he created aesthetically pleasing front pages for the
Pakistan Times, her mother ‘let history seep’, she ‘held it rather as a distracted
manner sheathed about her face, a scarf’ (168). History, for women, then, is
shifting*it penetrates the surface but when handled by women, is not subject to
the same certainties that men impose. Suleri’s mother’s death and its situation
out of time cannot be separated from the final aspect of her unease with the
historical: her diaspora status. For it is in America that Suleri suddenly ‘became
historical’ (127), as a result of her need to construct an image of herself that was
true to the version of Pakistan that she felt compelled, as a postcolonial
academic, to convey.
The questioning of history is an ongoing issue within both postcolonial thinking
and auto/biography studies. Gillian Whitlock concluded The Intimate Empire
with an instruction that to read the autobiographical text of empire effectively,
it is important to read it for supplementation and complexity, not for completion
or closure (204). This strategy of reading for supplementation and complexity
influences the way that we must understand the historical events also conveyed
by the texts. If those events, as well as their storytellers, are understood as
supplementary and complex, then they challenge the more stable and fixed
versions of the historical events that are more commonly represented. And once
histories become multiple (because supplementary), the very notion of historical
thinking as representative of a time must be called into question. This notion of
challenging historical thought is clearly a contentious one*history is such a
fundamental aspect of the way we live*but the challenge to history has been
made previously (though quietly) in postcolonial thinking.

Antihistory?

In Meatless Days Sara Suleri actively questions the act of fixing a date of death
for her mother when she postpones its reality across time zones and in this way,
66 RAMONE

quietly opens up debates about historicity. Her mother’s death is deferred by its
uncertain date, just as her mother’s stories are repeatedly referred to but then
deferred in Meatless Days. As well as her mother’s stories, the historical itself is
frequently deferred in Suleri’s writing: historical discourse is employed to convey
mundane details of family life, before the historical events relevant to the period
are included as afterthoughts.
Hayden White has repeatedly analysed and questioned the nature of historical
consciousness, and notes that written history is far from reliable, suggesting that
‘history is indeed as much about forgetting as it is about remembering’, that
‘history has been written in order to cover over or hide or deflect attention from
‘‘what really happened’’ in the past, by creating an ‘‘official version’’ that
substitutes a part of the past for the whole’ (‘Guilty of History’ 323). In his 1995
article, ‘History’s Forgotten Doubles’, Ashis Nandy directly questions historicity
in the postcolonial context when he considers the events surrounding the Babri
Masjid mosque in Ayodhya, where both Muslims and Hindus claimed that the site
had been used for worship in their religion before it had been taken over by the
other religious group. Both groups presented historical evidence in support of
their claims, and suggested that their evidence preceded that put forward by the
rival community. Nandy asks why both sides were so intent on relying on the
historical mode to make their claims on the site, especially when it resulted in
stalemate, and a violent stalemate at that. Instead, he argues, why didn’t one
group claim that they were, in fact, temple-destroyers or defilers of mosques
(63)? Taking a position that did not rely upon historical evidence would have led
to a different resolution, and perhaps a quicker and more permanent one; to
stake one’s claim on the evidence of history alone always leaves the opponent
with the opportunity to present their own prior historical evidence, whether or
not that evidence is reliable.
Nandy’s proposal of alternative method of representation that does not rely on
the historical is, indeed, a provocative concept. Historical representation must
be rethought in order to produce an open, fluid and multiple space for dialogue in
postcolonial contexts, and women’s life-writing is actively working towards that
goal. There are a number of factors contributing towards the inadequacy of
historical representation in postcolonial contexts. In the context of postcolonial
South Asia, the focus of this paper, Partition raises numerous questions about
thinking historically, as I have explored at length elsewhere (Ramone, 46
75). In
brief, postcolonial responses to Partition (and, equally, to other moments of
change, of which many are recorded at a specific calendar date in a postcolonial
context) show that although a key event is recorded on a historical timeline, it is
very difficult to contain that moment to its designated time. Partition is recorded
as taking place at midnight on 14 August 1947, yet its immediate impact, the
population movements and subsequent laws and acts exercising control over
those individuals lasted far longer. In addition, historical responses to an event
are always partial, so must be seen in relation to other kinds of recordings, as
well as other histories; simply writing a new version of history from a postcolonial
perspective is as flawed as the reliance on a colonial version. And, as Urvashi
 AN INTIMATE DISCONNECTION 67

Butalia has argued, the violence of Partition was so extreme that it is surely
impossible to rationalise that violence by writing it into a history. Of course, the
same could be said about many very violent events of the past, but perhaps the
conclusion to that observation is to suggest that those examples equally
shouldn’t be neatly explained by history.
Tejaswini Niranjana suggests that for Derrida, history is rendered arbitrary by
the opposition of nature and culture (150
1). If history is constructed from
arbitrary relationships, then it does not represent cause and effect, and could
never be constructed scientifically, or rationally, in a way that would represent
the history of a formerly colonised region, or a postcolonial event, better than
previous colonial versions. Niranjana notes that ‘Derrida has often spoken of the
need to reinscribe the notion of history by revealing its discontinuous and
heterogeneous nature’ (161). In a more literary telling of history, a discontinuous
and heterogeneous nature may be conveyed by the form (or structure) of the
text, in the way that the literary text refuses linearity, by disrupting the sense of
an ending. Foucault writes that ‘it is a long time now since historians uncovered,
described, and analysed structures, without ever having occasion to wonder
whether they were not allowing the living, fragile, pulsating ‘‘history’’ to slip
through their fingers’. He refers to this as a ‘structure/development opposition’
(Archeology of Knowledge, 11). This living, fragile, pulsating history is perhaps
what women’s life-writing can put back into the historical recording of a time or
place.
Foucault questions the legitimacy, or possibility, of ordering and structuring a
history, saying that although

we may wish to draw a dividing-line; [. . .] any limit we set may perhaps be no

more than an arbitrary division made in a constantly mobile whole. We may wish
to mark off a period; but have we the right to establish symmetrical breaks at
two points in time to give an appearance of continuity and unity to the system we
place between them? (Archeology of Knowledge, 50)

This again evokes the concept of history as arbitrary, acknowledging that the
demarcations used to comprehend history are arbitrary, while it acknowledges
the limitations of historical representation in general. Indeed, the arbitrariness
of historical recording is made brutally clear in the aftermath of Partition: the
women who were abducted by those of the ‘other’ religion and had babies within
their new communities were the living, pulsating, and certainly at times, fragile,
representatives of that historical moment, and their bodies and the bodies of
their children were evidence that the moment of Partition was ongoing, and not
something that could be pinpointed on a historical timeline, especially once the
Abducted Persons Recovery Act, intended to reunite abducted women with their
original families, was set into motion. When the families would not accept the
women who had been ‘defiled’ by their contact with the ‘other’ religion, or
would not accept the children of mixed unions, those women were left in a
position of limbo. Urvashi Butalia has made an effort to represent some of those
women’s stories in her impressive The Other Side of Silence.1
68 RAMONE

Postcolonial Women’s Writing and Mothers’ Stories: What Is Significant

about Women Telling their Mother’s Story?

There is something particularly interesting about women retelling mothers’

stories, in comparison with other diaspora representations of self, including texts
written by men, or from diaspora perspectives which don’t come under the
context of postcolonial studies. The mother is a significant figure in postcolonial
theory as well as in women’s autobiography. The colonial imaginary positioned the
colonised land as feminine, as fertile, and a recurrent symbol of colonial
appropriation of land was sexual conquest or insemination of the land. Jane Miller
has commented, after Said’s figuring of the oriental as feminine, that ‘a prevailing
imagery of penetration, of stamina and of the eventual discovery of the strange
and the hidden at the end of a journey requiring courage and cunning serves to
merge the colonising adventure definitively with the sexual adventure’ (117). The
motherly body was important symbolically in decolonisation: The Partition of India
(the last act of the outgoing British Empire 24 hours before Independence), for
example, has been described as ‘the ‘‘birth pangs’’ of the ‘‘Nation’’’ (Tan and
Kudaisya 29) which implies that the colony is an ‘infant nation’, ‘born’ only after
colonial rule ended which reinforces Eurocentric notions that former colonies are
only given meaning by colonialism. Partition was understood as the violent division
of the motherly body of India, and the reaction to Partition by those forced to
select one side of the Partition or the other was a violent one. Hindu nationalist
discourse employed the motherly body, and manhood was proven by the ability to
protect the motherly body of the nation: as Urvashi Butalia claims in The Other
Side of Silence, a collective retelling of women’s stories of Partition:

It became important to establish the purity of Mother India, the motherland

which gave birth to the Hindu race and which was home to the Hindu religion. The
country [. . .] was imagined in feminine terms, as the mother, and Partition was
seen as a violation of its body. (147)

After Independence and Partition, there was therefore a sense of ‘shame’ or

‘inadequacy’ that India had allowed a part of itself, its body, to be lost to the
other nation*the new Pakistan. Partition represented ‘an actual violation of this
mother, a violation of her (female) body’ (Butalia 149
50). Gillian Whitlock has
also claimed more broadly that reproductive bodies are of particular importance
to Empire (43). In addition, the act of the diaspora woman writing her mother’s
story is interesting because of both its frequent recurrence, and its predomi-
nance in autobiography studies and in postcolonial life-writing.
Autobiography is a particularly unstable category once it is told by women, as
Leigh Gilmore has proposed in Autobiographics (1994). Suleri’s text is an example
of autobiographical praxis that gives new emphasis to notions of a decentred
subject, which is particularly visible in postcolonial writing and in writing by
women. Emphasising the incoherence of the category of autobiography, Gilmore
demonstrates the ways in which identity is not fixed, but is more accurately
 AN INTIMATE DISCONNECTION 69

located within ‘networks of identification’ (13). These networks are intimate

networks, as Sara Suleri has pointed out and as Gillian Whitlock has suggested in
The Intimate Empire (2000), her study of women’s autobiography and its
connections with empire. Colonialism, for Whitlock, has a clear impact on the
textual representation of self, as the self is scripted through its relationships with
others: ‘through adjacencies and intimacies, [. . .] associations and dissociations
that are complex and ongoing’ (43). The most noticeable feature of postcolonial
autobiographical writing by both men and women is the decentred subject. Bart
Moore-Gilbert observes that while men’s autobiographical writing in the post-
colonial context tends to be decentred through the narrative subject’s diffusion
of self into society, women’s postcolonial autobiography conveys a subject
decentred because of a more intimate relationship between the narrative subject
and their mother. However, it could be proposed instead that writing by women is
equally decentred by making connections between self and society, but that this
is achieved differently: the use of textual forms and structures, and the
peripheral reference to political contexts engage with postcolonial society in a
transformative way in women’s postcolonial life-writing. In particular, in Suleri’s
text, society (which might be represented in key historical events like the
separation of Pakistan and the formation of Bangladesh in 1971) is forced to make
way for self in a text that questions the historical mode of organising history, in
fact, questions what history really is.
I am using (auto)biographical (with the ‘auto’ in parenthesis) to designate the
field for two main reasons. The first reason for my use of the term
(auto)biography is to privilege somewhat the biography, because in this paper I
am especially interested in the ways that diaspora women writers tell their
mothers’ stories*supposedly writing biographies*yet at the same time tell
their own life stories, at differing states of peripheral representation. An
alternative typographical presentation favoured by Bart Moore-Gilbert and others
is auto/biography which suggests instead that the two forms of life-writing are
more equivalent, a position which is suited to his broad introduction to the field,
which encompasses a much wider range of narratives. Addressing the whole
range of auto/biographical texts in his study, Moore-Gilbert discusses how
autobiography is difficult to place within generic rules, particularly in relation
to women’s writing. Surveying a range of commentators’ ideas regarding
women’s autobiography, he suggests that women’s autobiography is often
presented as fragmented units of prose, which better reflects women’s social
position as multiplex. And he explains, making reference to Liz Stanley’s work,
that in more general terms, women’s autobiography is far more likely to cross
boundaries of form and genre, including the boundary between fiction and non-
fiction (Moore-Gilbert 69
70). At the same time, Moore-Gilbert considers how
even very conventional texts in terms of form and genre may still, because of
their postcolonial context, have potentially significant political impact in
response to postcolonial realities (110
1).
Suleri’s Meatless Days is an example of an (auto)biographical text telling the
story of the writer’s mother, where the diaspora woman writing her mother’s
70 RAMONE

story clearly can’t fit into such straightforward positions as ‘autobiographical

author’ or ‘biographer’. Examples of these include Maxine Hong Kingston’s The
Woman Warrior (1977), and Hanan Al-Shaykh’s The Locust and the Bird (2009). Of
these, Hanan Al-Shaykh’s The Locust and the Bird is apparently the most
conventional biography, but, as is discussed in the interview-article with Hanan
Al-Shaykh in the ‘Reflections’ section of this issue, its authorial intrusions are
both surprisingly pronounced, and explicitly critiqued by both Al-Shaykh and her
mother. Meatless Days includes long sections on her mother alongside chapters
more concerned with Suleri’s other female relatives. Through this strategy,
Suleri’s memoir disturbs the sense of a fixed, singular, coherent selfhood.
Leigh Gilmore suggests that female self-representation has been limited by an
expectation on the self as necessarily occupying part of (the daughter’s part of) a
mother-daughter plot: ‘The ‘‘self’’ that women represent [. . .] has been
conscripted as a player in th[is] mother-daughter plot’ (Autobiographics xiii)*
thus she is an unwilling performer, but the mother-daughter relationship is the
fundamental one. Spivak has also tended towards the representation of the
mother in her engagement with postcolonial life-writing. In 1998 Hornung and
Ruhe edited a double collection of essays, one volume in English and one in
French, titled Postcolonialism and Autobiography, and the English collection
included a foreword by Gayatri Spivak. Although the collections (and the
conference on which the essays were based) considered both men’s and women’s
postcolonial life-writing of all types and on all themes, Spivak wrote on three
women’s texts and ‘Circumfessions’, Derrida’s essay about, and concept of, the
woman’s death, or the mother’s death.
Many question the use of Derrida or poststructural thought in response to
postcolonial contexts, and as a result might find the position taken by Gayatri
Spivak in her essay in Hornung and Ruhe’s collection, which was written in
response to the work of Assia Djebar and others, problematic. Poststructural
thinking, reliant on the Western academy and striking many as abstract, is
sometimes not considered sufficiently activist or grounded. However, its
relevance for this paper rests on Suleri’s very academic expression. One of the
things that really stands out about Suleri’s memoir is the academic tone and
position, and the academic and formal relationship that she and her mother
share. Suleri’s Welsh mother wouldn’t ordinarily be considered as having a
diaspora status from the perspective of postcolonial studies. Perhaps this is the
reason that Suleri can’t contain or really comprehend her mother on the pages of
her narrative, because her own definition of diaspora is firmly rooted within
postcolonial discourse, a register that always lingers at the margins of her
expression, no matter how intimate the subject under consideration.

Life via Theory

Leigh Gilmore in 1994 pointed out that an analysis of women’s self-representation

revealed autobiography to be a ‘contradictory code whose interruptive effects
 AN INTIMATE DISCONNECTION 71

can be located in other genres’ (ix)*literary fiction, history, and theory. In this
way, life-writing can be seen as making a significant contribution towards
the commitments of postcolonial thinking. Since Paul de Man’s seminal essay
‘Autobiography as De-Facement’ (1979), the auto/biographical text has been
recognised as potentially disunified, and uncertain. Gillian Whitlock reads the
disunified or decentred (auto)biography as a strategy in which the subject
negotiates a place to speak and manoeuvres in place and time (2). The
autobiography, making the self through complex manoeuvres, negotiations and
displays has a material resonance when the writer writes from the diaspora, and
manoeuvres through specific places and times that have to do with postcolonial
subject status. Much contemporary postcolonial writing deals with the condition
of diaspora, of being a migrant and adopting a new language, culture, and
location. As postcolonial subject, Suleri is, at different points of her memoir,
both the migrant, and the citizen of a formerly colonised location. When writing,
though, she is always a specific kind of postcolonial diaspora subject: a
postcolonial academic working in the United States. This particular kind of
diaspora experience causes a rift in Suleri’s representation of the condition of
diaspora: at once alert to postcolonial commitments and aware of her own
subjectivity, the narrative is both personal and analytical.
The diaspora is a borderland space marked by the kind of intimacy that Gloria
Anzaldua has described, where the space between two individuals shrinks with
intimacy. Whitlock notes that ‘To read for processes of multiple identification,
for the making and unravelling of identities in autobiographical writing, [. . .] is an
important gesture to decolonization’ (5). Colonialism, for Whitlock, has a
pronounced impact on the textual representation of self: although not unique
to colonial contexts, the self is scripted through its relationships with others:
‘through adjacencies and intimacies, through associations and dissociations that
are complex and ongoing’ (43). Spivak is also wary of the use of autobiography for
the native*or, for the subaltern. She relates an anecdote about the testimony of
a woman from rural Bangladesh, Halima Begum, which was, because of the
subaltern’s inability to testify (or speak) reduced to a soundbite, her testimony
lost. Halima Begum had travelled to a conference in Cairo yet, because no proper
translator had been provided, the only message received was that people in rural
Bangladesh require international aid (which was gleaned from her inability to
speak when untranslated) (Spivak 9).
Meatless Days is unconventional in many ways, not least in the way that the
mother-daughter relationship is conveyed. Not unloving, the relationship is
unemotional and literary; her mother (Mair Jones, renamed Surraya Suleri when
she married) liked to ‘speak precisely’ (163), to the extent that she ‘seemed to
speak in written sentences’ (184). Suleri’s mother was a lecturer and taught her
daughter at university: it was ‘hard’, Suleri wrote, ‘to know so much about a
teacher’ (169)*harder, perhaps, that the only distinction made between her and
the other students was her mother’s response of ‘yes?’ to Sara’s raised hand, a
marker of familiarity that Suleri grasps on to, noting that her mother would name
all of the other students. This barely tangible closeness persists throughout
72 RAMONE

Suleri’s account of their relationship. It applies to all Mair Jones’s children: she
found it difficult to interact with her children, so would start conversations by
showing them a flower or a pebble, and would need her daughters’ persuasion to
stay and talk (146). This was in part a result of her preference of keeping ‘her
connection with her children at low tide’ (159). Yet her daughters were ‘ravished
by her’ (146), like some exotic object of beauty and wonder. Sara Suleri’s only
recourse to this is to respond to her mother’s distance with a wordy
remonstrance: ‘you are too retrograde, you have no right to recede so far’
(159). Their conversations, on the infrequent occasions they are reported in the
text, always take academic and formal tones: on her father, Suleri asks her
mother: ‘If affection’s conduit, then what’s history?’*her mother’s vague
response is: ‘bearing . . . posture’ (165). This is one of the many instances in
Meatless Days where history is addressed directly, yet in seemingly abstract
ways. This statement begs the question: in what way could history be thought of
as ‘bearing’ or ‘posture’? The statement is permitted to linger by Suleri without
challenge or further explication. Suleri’s intention could be to indicate her
mother’s inscrutability: certainly in the rest of the text, Mair Jones is an aloof
figure. In general, though, her mother’s inscrutable statements or actions are
taken to task, with a frustrated humour: because of her vagueness and her
distance, Mair Jones becomes a haunting figure who evades description and
whose presence and meaning is constantly deferred. Suleri’s mother’s deferred
status is for Suleri, explained by her Welshness. According to Suleri, the condition
of diaspora separated her mother from her children racially (Suleri insists that
her mother always beheld her ‘brown children’ with wonder, and loved to look at
them ‘in race’ [160
1]). For Suleri, her mother’s Welshness is impenetrable*
when her ‘Welshness’ appears, her mother ‘disappears’ (59). Her mother’s
identity is vague and it almost seems as if this vagueness is something Suleri
actively maintains: her mother’s retreat from her becomes a retreat into ‘some
Welsh moment’ (161), something unfathomable. Even her language*her
English*is perceived as odd and obscure; her mother’s Welsh regional English-
language vocabulary, when she uses phrases like ‘don’t fret’, is presented as
‘curious archaism’ (35). On this occasion, though, it seems as if her statement
about history is intended to be taken seriously, perhaps as a question that Suleri
herself can’t answer, and so she leaves it open for further examination. If this is
the case, she invites the reader to consider in what ways history can be equated
with ‘bearing’ and ‘posture’. Both terms are conventionally masculine; bearing is
frequently used in reference to family or breeding, especially among the class of
people who would have held the roles of power in colonial India. Posture is an
interesting choice of words, too, as it implies a level of falseness: posturing is
often a term used to describe a (mostly masculine) aggressive insistence on a
point or a right, taken in order to defeat a challenge from an opponent or other.
This other, if history is posturing to insist on its superior position, could refer to
the subordinated postcolonial other’s story, or, particularly in reference to
Meatless Days, the woman’s version. If this woman’s version of events challenges
history by rejecting (rather than squaring up to) history’s posturing, then it offers
 AN INTIMATE DISCONNECTION 73

a challenge not just to a masculine version of history but also to the historical
mode of thinking itself. Reduced to ‘posture’, history suddenly appears
very flimsy*this is, perhaps, Suleri’s point. History is thus revealed as a
surface, a veneer to present a time rather than the ultimate word on that time
or event.
The question of history is a repeated one in Suleri’s memoir. History takes a
more masculine form in Suleri’s memoir whereas maternity is separate from
history: children are a respite from the ‘great machine at the heart of things’:
‘h-i-s-t-o-r-y’ (118). Femaleness and motherhood is repeatable and deferrable*
Suleri’s mother’s motherliness, deferred from her own textual rendering, shows
up instead in her daughter Ifat’s excessively beautiful body (132, 134). ‘I was
milk’ (186), Ifat chastises her sister in a dream. Her sister Ifat offered the
motherly comfort and security that her aloof mother could not: ‘to fall asleep on
Ifat’s bed was milk enough, to sleep in crumbling rest beside her body’ (186).
Motherliness, she implies, is as uncertain and unfixed as history.
Suleri’s mother’s life*her job, her presence, her identity*and her death, are
deferred in the text and become antihistorical. This frequently happens because
Suleri avoids describing her mother, or indirectly describes an event. But her
death is wilfully and explicitly deferred: because it happened when Suleri was in
a different time zone, it was ‘eight hours deferred’ across the dateline (43
4).
Deferral*especially in the way that Suleri actively questions the act of fixing a
date of death for her mother when she postpones its reality across time zones*
can be read as a way to open up debates about historicity. Contemplating the
death of his own mother in ‘Circumfessions’, Derrida’s constant preoccupation
with deferral (as best explicated by his concept of differance) takes on a new
significance: Spivak says of the essay that his engagement with the question of
what it is for a woman*a mother*to die, is an effort to grasp the mother as the
‘living dead’ (7). This image has particular resonance with Suleri’s representation
of her mother’s death, which is likewise perceived only through its deferral and
uncertainty.
As well as her mother’s stories, the historical itself is frequently deferred in
Suleri’s writing: historical discourse is employed to convey mundane details of
family life, before the historical events relevant to the period are included as
afterthoughts: the ‘overthrow of a regime’ that she refers to is not the
overthrow of a political regime, but her melodramatic friend Muskatori’s
wardrobe change as she developed a new taste for camisoles. Muskatori’s
clothing and her coca-cola drinking habits (from a baby’s bottle, to enable
drinking while reading in bed*another example of a deferred reference to the
maternal) take precedence in the memoir over the more conventional markers
of time, which come only afterwards: ‘This was during the Bhutto era’ (58),
Suleri adds later, before swiftly moving on to discuss her close brush with an
arranged marriage.
As a young woman, Sara is instructed to meet with a man who has proposed his
son as a potential partner for their arranged marriage. The idea of an arranged
marriage does not receive any resistance from her mother, although marriage is
74 RAMONE

something that Sara has carefully avoided. Suleri interprets her mother’s
‘ravishingly absentminded smile’ and her silence on the subject as a symptom,
specifically, of her ‘Welshness’ (59). Suleri’s mother is distinctly separate, and
removes herself from this pivotal moment in her daughter’s future, ‘as though’,
Suleri writes, ‘she had stumbled upon some hidden cultural ritual that she was
too polite to disturb’ (59). Her language here reflects her consciousness of her
own postcolonial status: she disarms the Western gaze with her use of the term
‘some hidden cultural ritual’ just as elsewhere she uses the term ‘motherland’ to
refer to Pakistan in the context of an adamant diaspora condition. The new
Pakistani nationals she refers to as ‘expatriates’ (22), invoking terms more
frequently associated with a British colonial experience but reclaiming them for
her context. Likewise, she invokes the idea of the native informant and its
unreliability*perhaps in oblique reference to her own position in the text*by
reflecting on her own status as a ‘native’, called into question when she suddenly
found a dish she had enjoyed in childhood, sweetbreads, less appetising, on being
told that they were actually testicles. Her sister, who provided this disturbing
information, she calls an ‘unreliable informant’ (22)*but her own idea of
sweetbreads came from her mother, so, she ponders, either her mother was
wrong about sweetbreads and so, may have told her many other inaccurate
things, or, her ‘mother knew that sweetbreads were testicles but had cunningly
devised a ruse to make me consume’ them (23). While she calls into question her
own authenticity, she blames her mother in a rare example of a bodily and
maternal metaphor in the text:

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 off! How much I must have suffered when so handed over to the
shoddy metaphors of Ostermilk and Babyflo. (23)

Again, this maternal lack is explicitly a Welsh lack: ‘to think that my mother
could do that to me’, Suleri writes, ‘For of course she must have known, in her
Welsh way, that sweetbreads could never be simply sweetbreads in Pakistan’
(23, emphasis added).

Conclusion: The Antihistorical and Postcolonial Self-Representation

As Bart Moore-Gilbert suggests, the postcolonial auto/biography has ‘potentially

powerful political resonances’ (128). When the text is antihistorical, though, it
may be more difficult to achieve the aim of postcolonial writing more generally
and speak truth to power ‘in the name of a better, more just world’ (Moore-
Gilbert, 129). Just as some of my own students have found Suleri’s Meatless Days
dissatisfying because of the obscurity of its prose and its somewhat indirect
engagement with the postcolonial diaspora condition, so too are its political
commitments less clearly on display. This is the result of postcolonial
 AN INTIMATE DISCONNECTION 75

self-reflexivity itself, perhaps. Ultimately concerned with rights of representa-

tion, the postcolonial academic is uneasy with concrete representation whether
that relates to her country, her time, her family, or even herself.
The postcolonial diaspora condition exerts a significant power over the way
that the diaspora woman writer can tell her own story, and her mother’s story.
Suleri’s story conveys a maternal relationship that remains dissatisfying because
of the lasting disconnection between the two women. But it is the Welsh diaspora
woman who is dispossessed and dislocated, and her Pakistani daughter is unable
to re-place her. There is no intimate connection in the text; instead, perhaps
there’s an intimate disconnection. Mair Jones remains deferred and outside
history, in a narrative that is resistant to the historical.

Note

[1] I have discussed Urvashi Butalia’s work and the impact of Partition on women’s
bodies at greater length in Postcolonial Theories (2011).

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