Meatless Days

    

Word Count: 263 words

Another coming of age story but this time about a Pakistan woman, troubled trying to determine who she is as a woman when she takes up many different roles in her life. She has an identity crisis as she lives in a third world country but says there are no women in third world countries. Meatless Days, the title of this story, refers to the time around 1947 where the government decided that two days out of each week would be "meatless days" where no meat was consumed to preserve the amount of cattle and goats in Pakistan. I read this and think that this is a great idea to preserve the cattle and goats, not allowing them to go extinct in Pakistan.

Suleri realizes things that Pakistan is missing, for example, history, culture geography, etc. She realizes there is a lot more to the world that she is not exposed to.  A quote I found interesting is, "A face, puzzzled and attentive and belonging to my gender, raises its intelligence to question why, since I am teaching third world writing, I haven't given equal space to women writers on my syllabus. I look up, the horse's mouth, a foolish thing to be" (20). Suleri, when teaching at Yale, realizes she hasn't exposed her students enough to women writers, especially those of the third world. We don't hear from woman of the third world often and she realizes she hasn't created a space for her students to learn and appreciate where she is from and a place that could use reform and attention.