Meatless Days Sara Suleri Summary by Anna Chen

The Immoderation of Ifat (無法無天的Ifat)

The Remembrance of Ifat § Ifat is the air, aura, fluid and golden apples. § --At first I thought she was the air I breathed, … § --she lay around me like an umbilical fluid, … § --I was asleep inside her influence when I did not yet know how to sleep. § --For if Shahid was the apple of my eye when I was six, Ifat…was the golden apples of my soul. (p 131)

Features of Ifat § With strong wrists; multiple voices. § --I was asleep inside her influence when I did not yet know how to sleep. …since there was so much of her inside me. § --Was she twin, or is that merely my imagination? (p 131) § -- “There are two chords of voice inside my throat. ”… There always were, for instance, several voices in her single throat. (p 132) § --Ifat was always two. In Moments when her affection felt most fierce to her, she would send out two fingers to bracelet tightly the wrist of whoever was beside her and gave her joy… (p 133) § --Ifat imposed an order on her bones that gave her gestures of an unsuspected strength: her wrists were such a vessel…. and in arm wrestling once she dropped Shahid down, to cries of everyone’s amazement. (p 132 -33)

§ Good at game invention. § --For games were Ifat’s provenance: she made us feel as though we collaborated with her in the most significant work of our lives. When I woke in the morning, I would slowly think, I wonder what we will play today, …Itat would be upon me, shaking me to action: “You’re Belinda and Shahid’s Pepito and I’m Diana”; “You’re Gray Rabbit and Shahid is Mole and I’m the Crab”; “Today we’re going to play at Holmes. ” (p 136)

§ Coupled with insightful discourse. § -- “Come on, Sara, see what you must see!” I crumpled, seeing it, for Ifat’s devastating knowledge seemed designed to rob me of the pale of innocence, insisting that innocence was a lie, … § --She presented herself to the world as a pair in the whitest days of her girlhood, so that looking and listening leaked their knowledge into one another in a magic of multiplication. Her talk was like a creature next to her, … (p 137)

§ Bold and brave on protection. § -- “If anyone hurts you, Sara, ” Ifat said to me on the day I turned nineteen, “make sure you tell me who it is, so that I can kill them, slowly. ” For a moment she looked mournful with protection but then, at the execution of revenge, quite pleased. “I’ll do a Dadi, chop up their livers into little bits and feed them to the crows, ” she added, echoing my Dadi’s favorite curse. § -- “How dare you touch my sister? ” (p 138)

§ Fidelity and identity with Papa. § --My mother was always cautious, maintaining her exemplary trick of perpetual understatement in order to teach Itat something of the art of moderation…. for Ifat’s habit were my father’s. From him she learned her stance of wild inquiry, the arrogant angle at which she held her head. It was her gesture of devotion to him, really , the proud position she maintained when--to the complete devastation of domestic serenity--those two wills clashed. (p 139)

§ Immersion into Pakistan; becoming the land. § --I felt it sharply, when Ifat learned to love another man…. feared that it would be too expensive to her spirit to utter to my father such a complete goog-bye. (p 140) § --What did he signify to her? …Javed signified to Ifat a complete immersion into Pakistan. She was living here for good now, she must have thought, so why not do it well? And what greater gift could she give my father than literally to become the land he had helped to make? He, of course, could never see the touching loyalty of the decision, … (p 140 -41)

“a woman can’t come home. ”… “Why, Ifat? ” I finally asked. “Oh, home is where your mother is , one; it is when you are mother, two; and in between it’s almost as though your spirit must retract…” … “your spirit must become a tiny, concentrated little thing, so that your body feels like a spacious place in which to live. (p 147)

What Mamma Knew (母親知道的事)

The Literary Influence of Mamma § Mamma as an entrance and troubles for intellectual knowledge. § --Troubled and entranced, I was pleased to have my mother lead me through those shelves and see the pleasure it conferred on her when she told me, contemplatively, “Yes, now you’re old enough to read Jane Austen. ” (152)

§ Jane Austen as a symbol. § --My mother could not do without Jane Austen. (p 151) § --… “Yes, now you’re old enough to read Jane Austen. ” (p 152) § --“Oh, ” I realized, “so it’s not just Emma. Mamma’s daughters also bring her joy. ” (p 153)

§ Virginial Woolf as a symbol. § --“Mair was To the Lighthouse for me--she was Mrs. Ramsay. ” (p 153)

§ Afternoon reading time. § --My mother’s children would retire to their various beds with books: each afternoon the house was quiet with reading. (p 152)

§ Early educated by those titles and names. § --I never had much difficulty with respecting the privacy of Tom Jones, Madame Bovary. (p 151) § --The titles that eluded context were the ones that troubled me: Persuasion, I would read--a whole book about a single word!--or Beyond the Pleasure Principle--what did it mean, to write a book beyond what it was about? (151 -52)

Mamma vs. Sara § Mamma as the capacity of space; capacity of views of teaching. § --…my mother was more invisible, more difficult to discern. § --For she moved in observation to a degree that caught my breath, …During the years of her existence, I did not altogether understand this gravity, this weightlessness, she carried with her. But then, I did not teach. Now that I do, I know the great sobriety of tone betokens the bearing of a stately teacher whose step is always measuring out what she sees as the edges of this great impossibility, of what it means to teach. (p 154)

§ Mamma as a life mentor. § --Sometimes, when I feel burdened…and tyrannized by the structure of a simple sentence, it does me good to recollect how quietly my mother measured out her dealings with impossible edges. (p 154) § “You can’t change people, Sara, ” …How she 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. (p 154) § -- “Take disappointment, child, eat disappointment from me. ” (p 169)

§ Grammatical structure as life structure; learning as eating; teaching as feeding. § “Leave it, let it go away, the grammatical construction of what it is to like and be liked!” § “Daughter, unplot yourself; let be. ” (p 156) § --I would not like to be responsible for the way so many people choose to eat and not to eat, for even when I teach I sometimes think I fall into a lazy way of talking as though there were simply a bunch of equally fed bodies in front of me, … (p 154 -55) § --It makes me realize something of my mother’s concentration in her home, of her perpetual attention to the assembly of our stories, which let her learn the limits of our private tastes, what each of us could and could not eat. (p 155)

§ Two different worlds: Mamma vs. Papa. § --How can I bring them together in a room? My plot feels most dangerous to me when I think of bringing them together. § --that most reticent woman and that most demanding man. § --Papa’s powerful discourse would surround her night and day-- when I see her in his room, she is always looking down, gravely listening! They were rhetorically so different, the two of them, always startling each other with the difference of their speech… § Papa’s fearsome vs. mamma’s faithful in physiognomy. (p 157)

§ --No wonder my mother sought to teach me, with oblique urgency, the necessity of what it means to live beyond affection…“You can’t change people, Sara. ” § --Why, she had tried to change my father, I realized; she tried, until she could not try. (p 159) § --…we were accustomed to assuming that my father’s historical posture prevailed heavily on our home, but this could be our slight error. . “Mamma was more political…” I essayed the idea to Tillat. “She did not have to put it into print--it was the sheet in which she slept…” (p 168)

What Mamma Is… § --Flavor of my infancy, my mother, still be food: I want my hunger as it always was, neither flesh nor fowl! (p 160) § --away from us and into her own childhood, back to some Welsh moment that served to succor her when duty felt too great. (p 161) § --“I think she is a saint. ” (from her student; p 166)

§ --Her logic was indeed a secret. “The only trouble with being female in Pakistan, ”Ifat complained, years later, “is that it allows for two possible modes of behavior- either you can be sweet and simple, or you can be cold and proud. ” “No wonder they found Mamma difficult to decipher, then, ” I agreed, “whose coldness was so sweet…” “As tactful as ice in water, ” Ifat added passionately, “and as sweet!” (p 166) § --She learned to live apart, then--apart even from herself-growing into that curiously powerful disinterest in owning, in belonging, which years later would make her so clearly tell her children, “Child, I will not grip. ” She let commitment and belonging become my father’s domain, learning instead the way of walking with tact on other people’s land. (p 164)

The Colonial Burden § The old Punjabi poem --Hir Ranjha; a resemblance to Mamma. § --”No one can call me Hir; I have named Ranjha so many times that I have become his name; I have become him by myself; you cannot call me Hir. ” (the story of Hir) § --…in my mind she is linked to the gravity of Hir’s posture: surely she would be familiar with that trick of mind with which Hir told the world that she had become someone else’s name… (p 162)

§ Bearing a colonial burden through her body and name, and living a separate life on someone else’s land, in someone else’s history. § --Mair Jones became Surraya Suleri! (p 162) § --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? § --My mother was a guest, then, a guest in her own name, living in a resistant culture that would not tell her its rules…the fact that even as my mother thought she was arriving, she actually had returned. (p 163)

Is it fair, Mamma, 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? Is that it, what you are saying? (p 169)