Between the Lines: South Asians and Postcoloniality

14. Style Is (Not) the Woman: Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days

---------------Style Is (Not) the Woman Sara Suleri's Meatless Days Samir Dayal There are no women in the third world. Then, when my father's back was turned, I found myself engaged in rapid theft-for the sake of Ifat and Shahid and Tillat and all of us, I stole away a portion of that body. It was a piece of her foot I found ... which I qUickly hid inside my mouth, under my tongue. Then I and the dream dissolved, into an extremity of tenderness. I've lived many years as an otherness machine, had more than my share of being other. Sara Suleri, Meatless Days In an interview, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has replaced an old question about female identity (particularly Third World female identity)namely "What is woman?"- with another question: "What is man that the itinerary of his desire creates such a text?" In rehabilitating the position of the questioning subject she intends to call attention to the context of phallocentrism . The question she posed originally was "Who am I as a woman?"-a question that was also about "man in terms of the text produced." But now, she says, she "thinks about the arena ofpractice in a somewhat broader way. It also seems to me, now, that the women who can in fact begin to engage in this particular 'winning back' of the position ofthe questioning subject, are in very privileged positions in thegeopolis today." 1 251 Style Is (Not) the Woman Sara Suleri, as a professor of English at Yale, is in such a privileged position. Her memoir's articulation of Third World subjectivity explores alternatives to both contemporary Western feminist and postcolonialist conceptualizations of the feminine subject. Suleri elaborates a phenomenological space that is a parergon , departing on the one side from metropolitan narrratives of feminine subjectivity and on the other hand f~om Third World narratives of that subjectivity . Her emphasis on the negativity of the subject conforms to what Naomi Schor describes as the contemporary ascendancy of the detail in the context of a "larger semantic network, bounded on the one side by the ornamental, with its traditional connotations ofeffeminacy and decadence, and on the other, by the everyday, whose 'prosiness' is rooted in the domestic sphere presided over by women."2 Suleri's archly elevated poetic rhetoric situates itself in the persistently prosaic detail ofthe everyday ofwomen's lives in Pakistan, although perhaps things are not quite as simple as this description suggests. Suleri's exploration of the problematics ofagency gains significance by contrast with various antiessentialist approaches to the theory of identity, not only French theory of (particularly feminine) subjectivity but also North American feminist theory, including the influential work of Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (who, although they work and live in the United States, would not identify themselves with mainstream American academic theory).3 Then again, there is a "positive" approach in perspectives such as Elizabeth Fox Genovese's: She argues that in capitalist contexts, the plenum of full individuality is the (ideal) telos of feminism.4 There are also Third World, particularly subcontinental , antiessentialist approaches to the problematic of identity. Among the most notable is the antiessentialism of the Subaltern Studies group, which, as Lisa Lowe points out, "suggests that it is possible to posit specific signifiers such as Indianness, for the purpose of disrupting discourses that exclude Indians as Other while simultaneously revealing the internal contradictions and slippages of 'Indianness' so as to ensure that the signifier Indianness will not be reappropriated by the very efforts to criticize its use."5 Of course, there are other approaches within Third World postcolonial theory , just as there are other varieties of French and North American theory. Kumkum ·Sangari writes of "different modes of de-essentialization which are socially and politically grounded and mediated by separate perspectives, goals, and strategies for change in other countries."6 One can say, at any rate, that Suleri 's book does not meaningfully answer to the description of "North American feminist," although she studied and now teaches and writes in the most privileged sector of the U.S. academic universe. Her perspective cannot be unproblematically assimilated to a neatly defined Third World woman's minority perspective, at least not without acknowledging the privileges accruing to 252 Samir Dayal such a diasporic intellectual. Her situation within the academy is a factor in Suleri 's self-articulation in the book, not to mention...