Culinary Discourse, Diaspora and Motherhood in Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days

Abstract

The literal meaning of its title notwithstanding, Sara Suleri’s days as portrayed in her memoir are far from meatless. In fact, Meatless Days (1989) is very much food-focused, with images of meat, and of food in general, figuring either literally — as part of religious traditions — or symbolically — in association with the nurturing maternal body. This article explores Suleri’s recourse to the culinary trope as questioning and destabilising taken-for-granted issues of gendered national subjectivity (i.e., the identification of women with their social role as food purveyors), nativeness (i.e., the tie between migrants and their homeland) and postcolonial legacies (i.e., the idea of food as a repository of the national past). Food functions in the text not just as a mediator to an extended recollection of the author’s pre-emigration culinary memories, but also and especially as a shifting signifier for deconstructing binary oppositions, here specifically between the coloniser and the colonised, the native and the non-native, the mother and the barren woman.