Sara Suleri's hands seem to speak all on their own. They are full of character, delicate and weighed down with myriad stone-studded rings that are difficult to count because her hands keep moving, gracefully supplementing her slow, pause-ridden speech. Vestiges of Pakistan linger in the language of her hands, belying her British-tinged accent and elusive, multi-cultural appearance, courtesy of her Welsh mother and of having spent more than two decades in the US. But for an internationally recognised postcolonial theorist and English professor at Yale for nearly a quarter-century, she has not been particularly prolific. "I'm not really your standard academic," she said recently. "I love my students at Yale, but I hate committee work." Her unconventionality is borne out by Suleri's lack of publications, of which there have been only three. Furthermore, only one of these is a book of criticism; the other two are fun autobiographies. Her PhD dissertation on Wordsworth, Arnold and Yeats never saw a publishing house. "As soon as I got my degree, I looked at it and I tossed it," Suleri says. "And I felt 50 pounds lighter."
Meatless Days, her first and most well-known work, has a smooth and easy prose – natural, simple and, above all, supremely funny. It is the ordinary and quotidian that is amusing here, and these elements define the book's humour. Suleri says that this type of writing comes naturally to her. "I don't believe in labouring over work," she explains. But while this characteristic may have helped the flow of her composition, since it was published in 1991 Meatless Days has also elicited sharp criticism, with many suggesting that the book is little more than an autobiographical account, lacking academic rigour. "'Intensely personal'? Absolutely not," she retorts when asked about such criticism. "Nobody knows what I didn't say, because I don't believe in confession narratives."
In fact, a personal account of the Suleri family offers a plethora of postcolonial insights. The Suleris are, after all, a bilingual family that experienced Partition firsthand, and understands the consequences and reverberations of decolonisation. Here, the family is able to serve as a microcosm of the larger Pakistan. In documenting the experiences of Suleris, some of the many unconscious layers of postcolonialism are revealed. Similarly, her most recent book, Boys Will Be Boys: A daughter's elegy, published in 2003 (and written under her married name, Goodyear) is a comic ode to her father, Pip, a former Pakistan Times journalist. As with Meatless Days, at first glance this work too comes off as very personal. But if a reader peers closer, an incisive glimpse can be caught of Pakistani politics at play.
Sandwiched in between these two books was Suleri's sole academic work to date. The Rhetoric of English India probes not the anxiety of the 'natives' in the Subcontinent, but rather that of the British conquerors, who Suleri suggests suffered from a state of confusion and even guilt over imperialism. "Kipling is misread as an imperial propagandist," she says, "but what you see is imperial anxiety." Unlike many other postcolonial theorists, Suleri unveils unseen and unexpected aspects of empire in this book – not the oppressed's anxieties over and experiences of empire, but rather those of the oppressor. Her autobiographical accounts, in parallel, give us a picture of how empire has woven its way into both the societal and personal level. For Southasians, this rings familiar, as many continue to live with imperial legacies in some form.