MEATLESS DAYS

1
MEATLESS DAYS

• Women, Nation and Diaspora

2
Outline

• Diaspora aesthetic 1) associational 2) images
  of fluidity (fluid among different semantic
  levels) and loss
• Women and Nation
• (1) Excellent Things in Women (Dadi, resilient
  but gradually forgotten)
• (2) Meatless Days food a) its excess, b) its
  transmogrification
• (3) Papa and Pakistan
• (4) Mother
• (5) Ifat
• Diasporic Construction of Home thru Writing

3
Narrative Logic

• Pay attention to the associational logic of
  Meatless Days.  
• e.g. p. 9  from Dadi --mother --we the children
  (Shahid, Tellat, Nuzhat, Ifatt, Sera, Irfan).
  e.g. p. 14 Dadis recovery juxtaposed with
  the others stories -- MammaIrfan Tillat and
  Sara (a summary)
• I. the personal and the national Are her stories
  allegorical?  Or in what sense are they?

4
Images of Fluidity, Loss and Mending

• The fluid words (4)
• Dadi patched herself together (15)
•  semantic level    "My audience is lost, and
  angry to be lost, and both of us must find some
  token of exchange for this failed conversation."
  (2)
•  diaspora--    "Our congregation in Lahore was
  brief, and then we swiftly returned to a more
  geographic reality. "We are lost, Sara," Shahid
  said to me on the phone from England. "Yes,
  Shahid," I firmly said, "We're lost." (19)
•  third world vs. Home--    "When I teach topics
  in third world literature, much time is lost in
  trying to explain that the third world is
  locatable only as a discourse of convenience.
  Trying to find it is like trying to pretend that
  history or home is real and not located precisely
  where you are sitting." (19-20)

5
"Excellent Things in Women"

• A. National History directly influences women
  (e.g. Dadis being burned and forgotten),
  parallels what happens in their lives on the
  literal level and metaphoric level (e.g. being
  meatless)
• "the middle years" pp. 7-8--1947-1971
• "the trying times"--civil war (Yahya Khan
  --Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto  )around and after 1971,
  when East Pakistan became an independent nation
• General Zia Islamization (16-17) the summer of
  trials by fire

6
Nation and Women (1) Dadi

• A. Dadi's burning and dying experience
• her words "The world takes on a single face"
  (7) "Keep on living" (8)
• her strong personality
• -- her religion (Satan and God pp. 2-3)
• -- her use of "food"(3)
• -- the combination of religion and food (the goat
  episode 3-5)
• -- her loneliness and secrets (6)
• -- her "feminism" (7)
• -- her fight with her son (7-)
• -- her death her views of death 19

7
Dadi, the Family and National History

• Middle Years -- her isolation--stop talking to
  her son smell death (8) being carried
• Trying Times (civil war) -- family problems (9)
  Dadi oblivious of the proliferation of her
  grandchildren quickening of time 
• Trial by Fire -- Irfan (11-12), mother's going
  back to Wales, the daughters part
  (powerlessness, violence, lack of innocent love)
  in history (14)  Dadi's being burned in April
  (10-11 14)--stopped praying
• General Zia Islamization (16-17) -- children
  left,  mother buried, Dadi died in the same week
  when Bhutto was hanged (17-18) Ifat died (18)

8
Meatless Daysparable of extravagance and
transmogrification

• Food
• Trickery (contamination) of food and feeding
  the list of gastronomic wrongs pp. 21-26 ?
  already knew it 27 ? emotional trickeries in
  Pakistan 28-29
• Foodconnected with life and death excrement
  (kidney) and burial (fresh chicken) 33
• its restraint and excess pp. 30-32
• Foods parable 34
• Food birthing (breastfeeding)
• Death and being meatless 42, 44

9
"Papa and Pakistan"

•  How is the daughter, Sara, related to her father
  in her attempts to know his history?
• Sara as his audience 110
• his idealism 112-13
• his focus on newspaper 118
• General Ayubs decade 119
• Ifats death 124-25 ? fathers getting another
  daughter
• Hands twitching at night
• How is the daughter related to Pakistan's
  history? 
• her description of partition on p. 116,
• how the daughters' spirits broke in the war of
  1971. 122

10
the mother as a migrant Mother vs. Father

• Her taciturnity 35, 41 Honestly I see
  (159)
• Mother silenced untalking, Dadi unpraying (16)
• Mother vs. father
• Reading her husbands frontpage writing -- 158
  sympathy as the daily necessity of sympathy
• Gives up changing him 159
• mothers values and voice
• the "greatest thing" in her life 158 her
  children
• Defy Pakistani stereotypes both sweet and cold
  166
• Her successive transformation (history seep,
  language around her as a scarf) 168

11
Women (2) the mother as a migrant

• Language (Mair Jones--Surraya Suleri) the
  mother's experience of displacement (9-) cannot
  tell stories in Urdu ? can sometimes speak
  idiomatic Urdu 41
• Homeland As a migrant p. 12 (gives up on
  familiarity with Wales)
• Diffuse influence her views of race and skin
  colors 160-161
• Fluid Position not fit into the two womens
  positions 166
• Retreat -- away into her Welsh childhood 161
• relocate herself thru several new syllables,
  allows her body colonized? 162-63
• a Pakistani with a disembodied Englishness 163
  learning to live apart 164 ? child, I will not
  grip
• Sara -- can not lay hands on "the body of her
  water" 159

12
the mother detached, reserved and her influence
on Sara

• Her detachment leaves interstices around her
  (154)
• Silent concentration 155 apparently
  absent-minded 156
• Mother and Daughter
• Mother as a literature lover/teacher
• Loves Jane Austen (151) ? Saras sensitivity to
  language and her identity thru name (151-52)
• Word ? Sentence ? plot Mother (unplot yourself
  156 Mamma, marmalade, squirrel 169)vs. Sara
  154-55
• Mother and the other children 167 (a missing
  child?)

13
Ifat a womans immersion into Pakistan

• After Ifats death, Sara thinks of her as a
  house she once rented but which is presently
  inhabited by people she does not know. (42)
• Active twoness (137 145) , multiplicity(132
  139)
• Her wrist 133
• Takes after the father (139)Mothers response to
  her gay excess 134
• Her entering Pakistan, becoming the land 140-42
• ? the war in Bangladesh and deaths 143-44
• ? Sara unpronounceability of her life 138

14
Ifat home and body

• A woman lives in bodies 143
• A woman cant come home 147 a tiny spirit in the
  body
• Always with the sisters 150

15
Diasporic Construction of Home thru Writing

• Saving Daylight
• (1) time relative, can be moved forward or
  background 170
• (2) seasonal changes summer us stripped to
  the bone 171
• (3) unclear boundaries between daylight and night
  (darkness a hiding place 175) ? living between
  two languages 177 ? living in language
  (reconstructed memories)
• mourning (prolonged astonishment) vs. memory (as
  a catalog) 171? The remembered pains (173)

16
Diasporic Construction of Home thru Writing (2)
emptiness? invention

• image of flesh/meat the goat (5), Dadi's 14 
  Ifat and Mamma's bodies 19
• ideas about writing (name, syntax and plot) and
  identity reading titles and mother's face 151
  "how can syntax hold around a name?" (155)
• p. 173  "For whom are you writing, David asked
  me..."  --the idea of "hollow" names, p.177-178
• To write as invention, to write not in a
  structure of a secret 175 -

17
Writing collective

• The grace of habit in a theatre 178-
• In a mode of distraction like the mother 179
• With a sense of place ? Ifat as her geography 182
  
• Mothers writing thru her children
• Saras co-writing with Ifat
• Adams bone "Living in language is tantamount to
  living with other people.  Both are postures . .
  " --the idea of bailing out significance and
  peeling it turning habitation into habit,
• the idea of breaking bodies, hiding the Adam's
  rib and having a re-birth