Meatless Days

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Meatless Days

• Sara Suleri
• Summary by Anna Chen

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The Immoderation of Ifat

• (?????Ifat)

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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, Ifatwas the golden apples of my soul.
  (p131)

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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?
  (p131)
• -- There are two chords of voice inside my
  throat. There always were, for instance,
  several voices in her single throat. (p132)
• --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 (p133)
• --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
  everyones amazement. (p132-33)

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• Good at game invention.
• --For games were Ifats 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 Youre Belinda and
  Shahids Pepito and Im Diana Youre Gray
  Rabbit and Shahid is Mole and Im the Crab
  Today were going to play at Holmes. (p136)

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• Coupled with insightful discourse.
• -- Come on, Sara, see what you must see! I
  crumpled, seeing it, for Ifats 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, (p137)

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• 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. Ill do a Dadi, chop up their livers
  into little bits and feed them to the crows, she
  added, echoing my Dadis favorite curse.
• -- How dare you touch my sister? (p138)

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• 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 Ifats habit were my fathers.
  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. (p139)

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• 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. (p140)
• --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, (p140-41)

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• a woman cant 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 its
  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. (p147)

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What Mamma Knew

• (??????)

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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 youre old enough
  to read Jane Austen. (152)

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• Jane Austen as a symbol.
• --My mother could not do without Jane Austen.
  (p151)
• -- Yes, now youre old enough to read Jane
  Austen. (p152)
• --Oh, I realized, so its not just Emma.
  Mammas daughters also bring her joy. (p153)

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• Virginial Woolf as a symbol.
• --Mair was To the Lighthouse for me--she was
  Mrs. Ramsay. (p153)

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• Afternoon reading time.
• --My mothers children would retire to their
  various beds with books each afternoon the house
  was quiet with reading. (p152)

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• Early educated by those titles and names.
• --I never had much difficulty with respecting the
  privacy of Tom Jones, Madame Bovary. (p151)
• --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)

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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.
  (p154)

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• Mamma as a life mentor.
• --Sometimes, when I feel burdenedand 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. (p154)
• You cant 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. (p154)
• -- Take disappointment, child, eat
  disappointment from me. (p169)

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• 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. (p156)
• --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,
  (p154-55)
• --It makes me realize something of my mothers
  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. (p155)

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• 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.
• --Papas 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
• Papas fearsome vs. mammas faithful in
  physiognomy. (p157)

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• --No wonder my mother sought to teach me, with
  oblique urgency, the necessity of what it means
  to live beyond affectionYou cant change
  people, Sara.
• --Why, she had tried to change my father, I
  realized she tried, until she could not try.
  (p159)
• --we were accustomed to assuming that my
  fathers 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
  (p168)

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What Mamma Is

• --Flavor of my infancy, my mother, still be food
  I want my hunger as it always was, neither flesh
  nor fowl! (p160)
• --away from us and into her own childhood, back
  to some Welsh moment that served to succor her
  when duty felt too great. (p161)
• --I think she is a saint. (from her student
  p166)

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• --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! (p166)
• --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 fathers
  domain, learning instead the way of walking with
  tact on other peoples land. (p164)

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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
  Hirs posture surely she would be familiar with
  that trick of mind with which Hir told the world
  that she had become someone elses name (p162)

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• Bearing a colonial burden through her body and
  name, and living a separate life on someone
  elses land, in someone elses history.
• --Mair Jones became Surraya Suleri! (p162)
• --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 rulesthe fact that even as my
  mother thought she was arriving, she actually had
  returned. (p163)

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• 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? (p169)