Private Parts of Pakistan: Food and Privacy in Sara Suleri's Meatless Days

Abstract

This essay considers Sara Suleri’s autobiography, Meatless Days (1989), in which food is the central metaphor for the complications of a childhood spent in Pakistan before partition. Suleri offers interwoven images of actual and metaphorical eating, cooking, and hunger in a compelling triangulation between food, body, and body politics, providing sharp contrasts between her private and public lives in a politically charged post-colonial Pakistan. Sara Suleri deliberately works with the ingredients available to her, while guessing who might be coming to dinner as her readers. She wants to combine autobiography’s most salient characteristic —the need to reveal and conceal— by writing a book which can begin to help her reconcile the complications of her most private self and her relationship to her public life. Now an English professor at Yale, Sara Suleri Goodyear seeks to create a recipe that will allow her to blend her life in the United States, her childhood spent in Pakistan and England, her Welsh-born mother, and the political turmoil and violence.