Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days: A Metaphor for Women’s Suppression in Pakistan

Abstract

In Meatless Days, Sara Suleri deals with the concepts of ethnography, race, and patriarchy to identify the stereotypical standards of gender and to discover the structure of power politics in Pakistan. She offers a confounded picturesque of family and politics, private and public history to exonerate herself from the charge of being a bold Pakistani woman. This paper highlights those critical issues that are artistically raised by Suleri in the quasi-religious memoir Meatless Days. The study shows that the use of images and conceits in the memoir becomes Suleri’s writing experience as a Pakistani woman to hide and at the same time to reveal the social status of women under patriarchy. The study shows that the critical theory of the Feminine Picturesque by the Anglo-Indian women writers is a political narrative technique that allows image building to the Postcolonial women writers to portray their strain significantly. Suleri uses this technique as a literary genre to signify the system of patriarchal suppression in Pakistan.