Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences (PJSS)

Vol. 41, No. 2 (2021), pp. 317-326

Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days:

A Metaphor for Women’s Suppression in Pakistan
Shaista Andleeb
Ph. D Scholar, Department of English Literature,
The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Pakistan.
Email: andleebshaista@gmail.com

Muhammad Asif Khan

Assistant Professor, Department of English Literature,
The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Pakistan
Email: asifkhan04@yahoo.com

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.

Keywords: Ethnography, Feminine Picturesque, Gender, Imagism, Patriarchy

I. Introduction
Images imply pictures or other sense impressions conveyed in words. The main
function of an image is to concretize an abstract idea or an inner state of mind so that it
may be very clear to the reader. MeatlessDays by Sara Suleri (1999) is a fictional memoir
that reflects the political, cultural, and social structures of Pakistan. The present study
attempts to show critically that the system of significance is incorporated through the use
of metaphors that serve as the most evident literary feature of Meatless Days to represent
women‟s suppression in Pakistan. Further, this paper tries to show that the use of
picturesque in Suleri‟s memoir is a conscious artistic effort to sketch her family and
public history as an ethnographer to signify women‟s role in Pakistan.

Suleri in The Rhetoric of English India (1992) gives an analysis of a feministic

style of picturesque in the Anglo-Indian women writers‟ diaries. She tries to detect the
idiom of suppression in the Anglo-Indian women‟s diaries through the narrative structure
of image-sketching by them. Suleri propounds that the English women were the victims
318 Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences Vol. 41, No. 2

of colonial “illusion of permanence” (1992, p.76). Outside the confines of domesticity,

Anglo-Indian women had to work as “amateur ethnographers” to sketch their experiences
in India through picturesque (Suleri, 1992, p.75). Suleri suggests that this Anglo-Indian
women‟s cult for sketching is self-censorship for the psychic strain on the alien landscape
of India. Suleri has critically shown that Anglo-Indian women writers had to face alterity
within the colonial immunity to perform their domestic role of protectors. Their duty was
to protect their culture from natives and the white men from the brown women. She
analyzes that the Anglo-Indian women writers combine the sequestering capacity of the
picturesque with the act of autobiography. In the context of her reading of the Anglo-
Indian women‟s diaries, Suleri observes: “Representations of the picturesque are the
important document of female anxiety” (1992, p.77).

II. Literature Review

Ramone (2013) writes that Suleri‟s memoir offers an anti-historical perspective.
Whereas, Warley (2014) remarks that Suleri‟s memoir “negotiates between various
discourses of history, place, class, gender, and place”. However, the subject matter in the
memoir identifies a vista of individual, social and cultural disparities that result in family
disorders. The blurred view of the thematic expression in the memoir is somehow a
conscious literary effort by Suleri to represent an impersonal authorial tone. Suleri‟s use
of imagery is somehow directed to revisit the subtle cultural ideas of patriarchal
suppression that are viewed by Postcolonial Feminism today. Her aim is not so much to
beautify the language as to concretize some concept or un-told feeling. Scanlon (2008)
observes that “Suleri‟s MeatlessDays is a series of haunted reflections on her family and
friends”, and much on family women who died. Therefore, the images in MeatlessDays
are deliberate, conscious, and functional to expose the political and patriarchal
suppression.

Saher (2012) thinks that Suleri in her memoir “delineates the discomforts and
inadequacies of belonging” and tells metaphorically the “life living between two
cultures”. Suleri practices in her memoir, the rational paradigm of the family picturesque.
Her personal experiences and observations are modified through the artistic detachment
of images and conceits. This use of images and conceits allows the liberty to speak
otherwise. The metaphor of „MeatlessDays‟ represents an image that creates an irony of
the socio-political system in Pakistan. Suleri creates a wide range of images of people,
places, and things to describe her psychic strain of losing her family. Apeksha (2020)
writes that “Sara Suleri‟s memoir is about an Anglo-Pakistani who was raised and
educated with two legacies in the United States of America-American culture and the
Islamic Pakistani cohort”. The metaphor of „Meatless Days‟ signifies a strategic disparity
in the national, racial, and gender system of a Postcolonial country. Apeksha claims that
“Through the custom of the story MeatlessDays Sara Suleri tried to incorporate that
whole state of affairs”. Apeksha observes that Suleri, “…pens her autobiography as a
subaltern Pakistani woman who works around her customs and traditions in
incarceration”. Suleri‟s mother and sister were killed in Pakistan in the name of
nationalism and the wake of anti-racial and anti-colonial prejudice. Ghulam Murtaza et
al. (2020) remark “Sara, like most of the Pakistani writers of English, has an ambivalent
attitude towards Pakistani culture”. Suleri uses „Meatless Days‟ as a cultural metaphor for
Pakistan. No butcher is allowed to sell mutton and beef on Monday and Tuesday in
Pakistan to save the livestock from extinction. The killing of Suleri‟s mother and sister is
associated with the cultural metaphor of meat in Meatless Days. Ifat and Mama are killed
 319
through the hit-and-run accident respectively on Monday and Tuesday. Mama is a British
woman and so are her children. The presence of the white woman in Zia-ul-Haq‟s Islamic
regime was an avoidable and non-negotiable nationalistic fact. Suleri memorizes their
deaths through the use of certain images like meat, food, and body to record her protest
against the national/racial mania in Pakistan after the partition.

Meatless Days is a work of art. The thought of its writer is carefully folded into
the rich tapestry of external objects as Suleri herself points out “I knew it was easier to be
invaded by a body than by a notion” (1999, p.67). This allusion to “body” is the
alternative platform for Suleri‟s empathy for ethnic suppression. She chooses to utter the
objectifying item of the body to correlate her artistic sympathy with her emotional
experience of depravity. If Meatless Days is cherished on the level of imagery then it is a
valid account of retrospective voice empurpled beyond any sense impression. Suleri
conjures up the literary classics by invoking them in her narrative to signify her psychic
suppression at the gender and racial level.

Jain (1990) is of the view that in her memoir, Suleri gives her “fine perceptions”
which can “condense the troubled psyche of Pakistan into epigrammatic prose”. Lovesey
(1997) points out that MeatlessDays “is imbued with a sense of loss and absence”.
Sujatha (2017) mentions that Suleri‟s memoir is “a piece of expatriate writing, feminist
confessional writing” which has the mechanics of “fictionalized autobiography”.

III. Research Methodology

The present study focuses on the analysis of the use of imagery by Sara Suleri in
her memoir Meatless Days to discover the structure of women‟s suppression in Pakistan.
M.H. Abrams (1957) defines imagery as a literary tool, “to signify all the objects and
qualities of sense perception referred to in a poem or other work of literature”. The genre
of The Feminine Picturesque (1992) by Suleri is used as the guiding critical theory for
this work. Cuddon (1999) explains the term „picturesque‟ as a cult of landscaping and
gardening. He points out that the cult of the picturesque was related to romanticism and
also to the concept of the „sublime‟ during the 18 th century. Landon(2001) explains that
“The genre of what Suleri calls the "feminine picturesque" is a genre utilized by Anglo-
Indian women as a means of suppressing their fears regarding the alien land they came to
inhabit” (2001, p. 2). Landon points out that the genre of „The Feminine Picturesque‟ is
viewed by Suleri as a genre that, enables the Anglo-Indian women‟s “Indian experience
to be objectified and owned and is characterized by its tendency to be anecdotal rather
than historical” (2001, p. 2). Suleri proclaims that the “Picturesque assumes an
ideological urgency through which all substantial threats could be temporarily
domesticated into a less disturbing system of belonging” (1992, p.75). The genre of „The
Feminine Picturesque‟ is used by Suleri in her memoir MeatlessDays to domesticate her
psychic strain of the racial, cultural and social depression that results in the patriarchal
suppression in Pakistan.

Suleri‟s fictional memoir Meatless Days (1999) and her critical essay The
Feminine Picturesquein The Rhetoric of English India (1992) serve as the primary source
in this paper. Northrop Frye speculates in Anatomy of Criticism (1957) about the
principle of recurrence which seems to be fundamental to all works of art. Suleri‟s
Meatless Days is a work of recurrent images which timely appear to the level of satiety.
Northrop Frye‟s (1957) concept of images and archetypes is also used as the critical
320 Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences Vol. 41, No. 2

literary nexus for this study. For the present study, the qualitative research method is
used. The paper is based on the close reading of the selected text to identify the
significance behind the use of the picturesque by Suleri. The textual analysis in this study
follows the narrative technique of metaphor, and the symbolic use of conceit and imagery
to identify the system of socio-political differences in a quasi-religious society. Suleri‟s
work is associative and this study uses a framework of references from critical sources
like books, journals, and reviews as the secondary source.

IV. Discussion and Analysis

Talaat & Ghani (2004) proclaim that “the figurative treatment of literal events is a
familiar device in English literature”. They point out that Suleri as a postmodernist writer
has gathered all traditions in her memoir. In this respect, Ritz (2016) explains that
“Suleri‟s use of language recreates the Pakistani history and her family life by invoking
the tales of her mother, sisters and friends”. Suleri can evoke these national and personal
histories “by her unique play of language”. The selection of images from the traditional
platform contributes to the complex scheme of the narrative of Meatless Days which
carries multiple themes at a symbolic level. There are commonplace images of food,
talk, milk, water, theater, meat, buildings, roads, houses, machines, deserts, sea, seasons,
animals, streets, cities, etc. The ordinary images are dealt with by Suleri in a double-
handed way: both at the level of comparison and association. Thus most of her images are
repeatedly used to create an effect of unanimity and coherence. The image of people is
mainly encapsulated into Suleri's family and friends. This image is segmented into nine
tales with alternate semblance.

Images of Dadi, Papa, Mamma, Ifat, Sara, Shahid, Tillat, Irfan, and Nuzzi
constitute a paradigmatic structure of the memoir. Images of Tom, Dale, Mustakori,
Richard X, Tariq Khan, Perin Cooper, Jamie, and David circle around the aesthetics of
the narrative. Dadi‟s image is a traditional image of a grandmother in the Postcolonial
fiction writing of the subcontinent. Bapsi Sidhwa in Ice- Candy-Man (1989), Salman
Rushdie in Midnight’s Children (1980), and Kamila Shamsie in Salt and Saffron (2002)
have dealt with this image. „Dadi‟ is considered a powerful and superlative image in the
subcontinent household due to her riper age and experience. She is the reservoir of family
tradition and culture. Her character is as influential as of a senior wife in Africa. Chinua
Achebe (1959) in Things Fall Apart (1959) and Buchi Emecheta in The Joys of
Motherhood (1979) have elaborated the necessary domestic and social role of a senior
wife in an African clan.

Dadi‟s sketch in MeatlessDays occupies the same important place among her
family members. She „had her will‟ (Suleri, 1999, p.4) to which nobody can challenge.
Her arrogant and indifferent behavior with her son and his family brings her before us as
an unfriendly person: “Dadi loved the accidental jostle with things belligerent” (Suleri,
1999, p.07). However, Suleri seems to balance Dadi‟s image in her tale, „Excellent
Things in Women‟ which begins with the collective image of womanhood in Pakistan.
Dadi‟s image is developed through her psychic trauma after Partition. In the middle of
her image, Suleri illustrates the natural behavior of a peeved Eastern mother whose son
has been abducted by the immoral fascination of the West.

Dadi shows her annoyance towards her son who has married a white lady after
divorcing his Pakistani cousin. She chooses the cultural parameters to show her resistance
 321
for satisfying her prejudice against her son and the British daughter-in-law. She adopts
those cultural practices to which nobody in Pakistan can suspect Dadi‟s act of resistance.
She chooses food, festivals, and religious-cultural practices to reinforce her nativity. The
incident of Dadi‟s act of obtaining her walking stick by cutting off “a newly planted
eucalyptus” (1999, p.3), drives her son into tears of rage, proves that “She pined for
choppable things”, (1999, p.4). At the end of her tale, Dadi‟s image turns turtle when,
“After her immolation, Dadi‟s diet underwent some curious changes. She had forgotten
prayer” (1999, p.15).

The change in Dadi‟s character here is described by Suleri as a process of

suppression. The image of immoderation is the critical space where Suleri portrays the
system of suppression. Papa‟s immoderation is reflected through the paranoiac image of
patriarchy. His life is outlined by the writer as „water table‟s constant” (1999, p.111).
Lovesey (1997) points out to Suleri‟s MeatlessDays as the “tension between her account
of patriarchal national history” and her family memoir”. Papa is the representative image
of the tradition and patriarchy in Pakistan. His image is mixed with the archetype of
manhood in Pakistan in his dealings with his British and Pakistani wives, children,
mother, and in his career as a journalist, and a diplomat.

The patriarchal luxury of imperative position makes Papa‟s image more affected
than other characters of the novel. For he is “torn between the literary and the political,
uncertain on which to land" (1999, p.112). His indecisiveness is itself an image of his
weak and suppressed identity. His concentration now attaches him with the spirit of
attainment which detaches him from the same by ignoring his never: “Papa was always a
wonderful consumer of context” (1999, p.110). He marries in Pakistan according to his
parent‟s selection and remarries in London after his own choice by divorcing the previous
wife.

Suleri explains, “I would hardly have thought that sufficient for him to pick up
ten years of his life with Baji and just put it in his pocket” (1999, p.116). His image
provokes irony through the paradox of his saying and doing. He, “found himself seduced
by history but to give up Urdu or Hindi in the service of English, which was history‟s
language then” (1999, p.112).After the partition of 1947, he was the first who was, “fired
by one of the several enthusiasms made available by the proliferating talk of
independence” (1999, p.2).

He starts modifying English as an oppressor, both at a literal and symbolic level

to prove his loyalty as a Pakistani “There are always a few words that his flamboyant
English insisted he mispronounce” (1999, p.109). Like language, he performs the same
act of modification with his English wife by renaming her. His picture is that of a person
of indignant nature with all his impertinent practices. Thus the image of manhood either
reflected through a Pakistani father or an American civilized son Tom meets with the
same ironic implication of “blurring of vision” (1999, p.76). Shahid was too innocent to
comprehend the humiliation by his Islamic teacher who calls him a “...scabble of a fish”
(1999, p.92).Although the implication behind this image is that Shahid is the son of a
Welsh mother who is not accepted in a rigid Islamic country during Zia‟s regime.

Sara Suleri‟s imagism is based on open choice. She frankly picks up images from
her life experiences to sustain the tangibility of her abstract ideas. She makes her
322 Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences Vol. 41, No. 2

observation an intimate image. In this respect, she honestly follows the imagist tradition
like that of Emily Dickenson‟s and T.S Eliot‟s. Beyond developing traditional and
denotative images she produces images that are quite personal, untouched, and
connotative in their unique style and utterance which suits their creator‟s intellect. There
is an echo of Prufrock‟s mental condition in the following image by Suleri: “I have lived
my years as an otherness machine” (1999, p.105). She uses certain images to affiliate her
emotions and sentiments with a practical situation and to give voice to her otherwise
unvoiced thoughts of being suppressed.

The above image relates Sara‟s psychic world to her present condition of living
as the Other in her own house and her own country. Suleri‟s style is suggestive because
she materializes grief by the strange images like „flaming advertisement of life‟ and „by
patching one‟s self together. Another image exposes the intensity of Sara‟s strain after
Ifat‟s accidental death which seems more like her deliberate attempt to intensify her pain,
“We picked up our idea of her as though it were an infant, slippery in our hands with
birthing fluids” (1999, p.148). Pakistani women‟s condition as the Other is expressed in
the image when Suleri proposes: “Let us wash the word of murder from her limbs” (1999,
p.148).

V. Imagery: An Endless Construction of Psychic Strain

Suleri‟s greatest strength in Meatless Days is her flair for description and her
ability to create striking images. Her creative refinement instigates the process of her
linguistic credibility. She thoroughly uses figurative language to shape and reshape her
potent sensibility. This is a demanding and continuous task to which Suleri meets
consolingly. Her aura of images answers affirmatively to its creator and produces a cycle
of regular sketches to signify women‟s suppression.

A. Metaphysical Images
Suleri uses metaphysical images along with material ones to expose her strain as
a woman. Suleri seems to be greatly influenced by John Donne„s technique of the
metaphysical. For her, his techniques had energy, variety, and wit. From him, she has
adopted the conversational tone, ironical conceits, surprising images, rapid connection of
ideas, irregular prose, brilliant wit, and shocking juxtaposition. There are several conceits
in the novel even the very title Meatless Days is an abstract image. Such conceits take the
form of symbol images which suggest a lot more than what is described. For example,
“cooking” is compared with the masculine ability to think and decide politically, “My
mother was a nervous cook---probably because her mother had been a stern woman about
such decorum” (1999, p.35). Fagan (2017) explains that Suleri‟s memoir is about “life in
postcolonial Pakistan with a food-focused” narrative relish.

B. Mythical Images
The use of mythical images by Suleri is her conscious attempt to manipulate the
continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity. The success of her effort is
constructed around this contrast of past and present cult of power. The festival of the
second Eid in Suleri‟s life is constituted through the religious myth of “Abraham‟s story”
(1999, p. 4) which gives the loss of her pet; a goat. Childhood is also taken up by Suleri
as a family myth because she has her justification of womanhood when she claims, “The
children helped because we needed distraction” (1999, p. 9).
 323
The religious event of „Shab-e-Miraj‟; “The night when Muhammad did a speedy
Dante, climbed up with Gabriel….body was not missed” (1999, p.184), associates Suleri
with her sister Ifat more closely than with the contents of the religious story. The image
of motherhood is delineated within the paradigms of eastern myth-making. Nawaz (2019)
points out women in Pakistan are the “bearer of meaning not the maker of meanings”.
Women are considered “other”.

Whereas Suleri‟s duty as a literary critic to constantly put energy into the
skeleton of Pakistani motherhood in particular and in Pakistani womanhood in general,
“My reference is to a place where the concept of the woman was not part of an available
vocabulary: we were too busy for that, just living” (1999, p.1).Dadi, Mamma, Ifat, and
Tillat are the notions of motherhood along with their other identities as wives, daughters,
and sisters.

C. AnimalImagery
Animal imagery is a conventional literary style that is used by Suleri to attain her
thematic purpose. She chooses animals that oblige the textual meaning of her memoir e.g.
meat is the central metaphor of the memoir which is further divided into four categories
of big meat, small meat, fowl, and women and children which belong to neither flesh nor
fowl. “It was an evil day that led her father Qayuum to buy two water buffalo” (1999,
p.24). Accordingly, the animals in the memoir are cows, goats, doves, and chickens.
However, monkeys, fish, and squirrels belong to the fourth category which signifies
Suleri women and children in the memoir. Big meat is somehow a symbol of the male
authority in Pakistan: “The institution of meatless days rapidly came to signify the
imperatives behind the acquisition of all things fleshly” (1999, p.32). In this way, the
animal imagery is exploited to attain the significance of women‟s position in Pakistan.
Even certain characters are affiliated with different animals as Swift did in Gulliver’s
Travels, e.g. monkey is related to Mustakori and Papa for their habit to mimic everything
they find new and influential: “Mustakori prefers to be monkey” (1999, p.71). Irfan is
compared with dove, Mamma is, neither flesh nor fowl but a fish, and “the vixen‟, Shahid
is a „dog‟ and, “scabble of a fish” (MD, p.92). Papa has a “lion‟s head looking up like a
beast in pain” (1999, p.174).

D. Dark Images
The metaphor of Meatless Days is consistently drawn around the image of pathos
and grief. This conscious effort on the part of the writer creates a world of dark images in
the novel. Death, pain, misery, night, burning, mourning, murder, blindness, war, blood,
graves, and slaughter are the representatives of pain. This conscious effort exemplifies
Suleri‟s purpose of maintaining thematic gravity in the pessimistic world of the memoir
to represent women‟s status. Her vast range of demonic vocabulary sets her close to
Emily Dickinson (1981) because Dickinson uses those particular dark images which have
been selected by Suleri, e.g. death, funeral, and pain. “I felt a Funeral in my Brain, And
Mourners to and fro” (Dickinson, 1981).

The powerful image of Papa becomes meaningless in the unavoidable presence of

suppressed Mamma “Papa‟s powerful discourse would surround her night and day”
(1999, p.157). Suleri explains that their difference is a matter of „rhetoric‟. Suleri conceits
the image of their children as the singers who happily sing “epithalamiums for the way
that history weds silence” (1999, p.158). Nawaz (2019) remarks that Suleri‟s memoir
324 Pakistan Journal of Social Sciences Vol. 41, No. 2

“...is a tale of Suleri‟s British mother who is exploited by her father” and a newly born
Pakistani nationalistic society. The description makes the image of a subtle relationship
between Papa and Mamma along with the image of difference. But Suleri beautifies both
opponent images of that unlikely pair into the image of forbearance and dignity. Suleri
fuses two entirely different motifs into the ongoing process of imagism. She tries to make
an event suspicious and questionable by her mixing of political with personal allusions.
This effort makes her context very dramatic which exposes her psychic strain: “By this
time Bhutto was in prison and awaiting trial, and General Zulu was presiding over the
Islamisation of Pakistan. “But we had no time to notice. My mother was buried” (1999,
p.17).

VI. Imagism: An objective Correlative

T. S. Eliot (1992) presented the critical notion of objective correlative in his
essay, Hamlet and His Problems. According to Eliot, “the only way of expressing
emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative”. This objective is
reiterated in a literary work when emotions are generated through external objects or a
chain of events. Suleri appears anti-romantic by finding an objective correlative for
emotions in her memoir. She considers that a lasting piece of fiction cannot be the result
of pouring out personal emotions. The only way to express sentiments in art is to find a
set of objects, words, a situation, or a chain of events that, when given, would
immediately evoke that emotion. This concept invites a lot of significance. The use of
imagery outlines Suleri‟s task of managing her personal feelings of loss. She moves
forward to embrace an image with symbolic reverence. In this way, imagism is a
meaningful device in her hands. Her text has multiple layers of interpretations. She does
not limit the canvas of imagery for a specific thought e.g. she views womanhood through
the images of the body, reticence, and patience. Manhood is judged through the images of
home, roads, voice, change, and forgetfulness.

Fagan (2017) illustrates that Suleri in her memoir “draws attention to the
relationship between women and food” and most probably the imagist connection where
women are taken as food. Fagan points out here that Suleri is “concerned with language
and the body”. Repeatedly Suleri takes an image individually to express the system of
suppression in Pakistani culture and social behavior towards women. Dadi‟s image is
taken to create a direct contrast to the image of Mamma: “Mamma and Dadi remained the
only women in the house, the one untalking, and the other unpraying” (1999, p.16). Dadi
is the representative of the East and Mamma belongs to the West and Mamma‟s
“repudiation of the race gave her a disembodied Englishness” (1999, p163).Ifat is a pure
version of Mamma‟s image because she also suffers from the same consequences as her
mother does. Like her, she chooses to marry in an entirely different social set up: “With
perverse aplomb, she chooses to enter into the heart of Pakistan in the most un-Pakistani
way possible: she ran away from Kinnaird” (1999, p.141).

This phrase “un-Pakistani way” reveals the gravity of Ifat‟s image on one hand
and the traditional and single-minded social setup of Pakistan on the other. This
traditional setup of Pakistan does not allow a girl to marry after her own will. Suleri uses
images at a literal and symbolic level. Sara and Mamma are teachers. However, Mamma
as a teacher plays a double role for Sara. She is Sara‟s teacher in the Punjab University
and at the same time, a typical Pakistani mother at home who teaches Sara about the
domestic rules of leading life in the world as a woman: “For her preferences were there in
 325
every room, putting words into my mouth before my taste buds had acquired a means to
cope with their suggestion” (1999, p.151).Imagism in Meatless Days helps to transform
Pakistani women's silence into the metaphoric reconstruction of voice. Suleri could have
directly talked about the plotted murders of her mother and sister and the political
circumstances involved in the accidents. Whereas, she creates an indirect way of
constructing pictures to reveal her grief through the pattern of metaphors to avoid the
stigma of an untraditional woman. The image of love is used as an antonym by Suleri to
discover its intensity in hatred as in her parent‟s case.

VII. Conclusion
In the end, this paper concludes that MeatlessDays is a conscious feminine
picturesque of Suleri women‟s grief and loss. The memoir is a literary effort by Suleri to
attain her thematic purpose to expose women‟s suppression in the national and political
history of Pakistan. The use of the Feminine Picturesque as a literary genre in
MeatlessDays fulfills Suleri‟s purpose to write a quasi-religious family history to allow
the readers to peep into the socio-political and cultural disparities in Pakistan. Suleri
raises questions on the nationalistic cult in Pakistan that is creating gender issues. Her
artistic act of making continuous images in the memoir seems a determined effort by
Suleri to unfold the mysteries behind Pakistani tradition and culture that work
systematically to exploit women and children. Suleri uses the metaphor of meatless days
to signify the system of Otherness in Pakistan.

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