No henna for Suleri

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.

Away from aashiq and mashooq
Among other things, Suleri is ardently passionate about Ghalib, whom she argues is the greatest Urdu poet. Clad in a long brown woollen dress, she draws a cigarette from a red pack of Dunhills. Although usually blunt and outspoken, Suleri becomes almost mystical when she quotes the bard of Delhi:

Aashiqi sabr-o-talab o tammanna betab
Dil ka kya rang karoon khoon-e-jigar hone tak

Love demands patience, desire will not wait,
What hues should my heart reflect, till it bleeds to death? (Translation K C Kanda) 

Suleri's next book will be a translation of Ghalib's Diwan, a collection of his best Urdu ghazals, which she will co-author with her friend, the New York-based oncologist Azra Raza. Suleri describes her attempts at translating the virtually untranslatable poet: "I was trying to be more fanciful, but Azra would say, 'No, Sara, we've got to be exact.'" But Suleri says that she also recognises the formidable challenges that come with translating poetry. "Literal translation can do nothing for Ghalib, but tashrih [explanations] can."

The new work will be entitled Epistemologies of Elegance: Ghalib and postcolonial literatures, and will contain tashrihs of many of Ghalib's ghazals. But these will not be explanations of the sort that students of Urdu literature have long been subjected to, but rather explorations that reflect the "radical change Ghalib brought to the Urdu ghazals." "Is he talking about knowledge? Is he talking about desire?" Suleri asks, as her body language suggests that her mind has moved far away. "Sheer beauty – the way he packs his words together, and yet layers them. How much is syncopated into his verses." Suleri describes many past translations of Ghalib as having been "reductive", and notes that she and her co-author "wanted to steer away from the aashiq [lover], mashooq [beloved], nightingales, wine and sagar [goblet]. The Victorian imagery reduces Ghalib's rather stark modernity." (After a hard day of translating, she says they would "switch to Fran Pritchett for comic relief", referring to translations by the Columbia University-based scholar of Urdu poetry.)

Suleri has managed to offer her students at Yale a healthy dose of Urdu poetry, as well, though in "a somewhat devious way". One of her courses, 'Images of the Orient' – a title that needs to be understood as irony-laden – gives the impression that the class will largely focus on English literature and Byron's conspicuously inaccurate pictures of riches, silks and spices in the Orient. Instead, students are made to dive into Ghalib, Mir and Faiz. Another course, titled 'From Romanticism to Urdu Poetry' likewise misleadingly suggests that equal attention is allocated to Romanticism and Urdu poetry. Not so: "During the first couple of weeks we study Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, but then quickly switch to Urdu poetry."

How do people from different cultures respond to Urdu poetry in translation, in which much of the nuance must be lost, or at least rendered awkward? In response, Suleri recalls her students' emotional reactions to a recording of Faiz's readings played in class. Clearly, even without an understanding of the words, Urdu's subtle shades evoke emotions in these students just as they would in Urdu-speaking Southasians.

Mundane exotic
Suleri is hoping to strip Ghalib and others of the flowery exoticism that has marked past translations. Indeed, when it comes to how people receive literature from Southasia, one of the most important issues for a postcolonial theorist is that of 'exotica' – a trope to which many (even celebrated) Southasian writers eventually resort. "People talk about 'otherness', 'otherness' is everywhere," Suleri says. "But if it is a mysterious or romanticised otherness, I'm allergic to it. The young village girl in the vale does not speak of romance or mystery, but of simple hardship." Romanticising what is clearly unromantic, Suleri notes, leads to the creation of artificial images in the mind of the uninitiated reader, devoid of experiences that could otherwise be shared across borders.

The worry for Suleri and other postcolonial scholars is that, when something that could be an expression of a universal human condition instead becomes some sort of 'otherness', it ensures a disconnect from a Western audience while confirming preconceived notions about places such as Southasia as ostentatious, exotic, spiritual and static. Writers who show Southasia as the West would see it – laden with its hennaed hands, jasmine flowers in long hair, and innocent women – while not simultaneously showing the sometimes squalid truths of everyday realities, are involved in what Suleri dubs 'third-person consciousness'. "It's the anguished position of always seeing yourself as the other would see you," she says.

This is common ground for a certain coterie of writers, and Suleri cites Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Gauri Vishwanathan as important postcolonial theorists, adding that the latter has been denied due credit. She is also playful in her disparagement of Salman Rushdie, whom Suleri says "started well", though she found The Ground Beneath Her Feet, published in 2000, little more than "self-parody", and has now pledged not to read anything more by the author. Without giving names, Suleri observes that the new generation of Southasian writers are "full of talent, [but] they need a lot of discipline and hard work".

Some have suggested that it is easier for a writer, such as Suleri, to write about Pakistan while living in the US, thereby being allowed the freedom to keep her homeland at an arm's length. But Suleri is adamant that she does not see the US as having been any kind of sanctuary, allowing her to escape the confines of Pakistani society. "It certainly wasn't for me," she says, adding that she only stayed in the US after her schooling in order to continue with her first love, theatre. But what of the literature departments in Pakistani universities, often flavoured with unoriginal ideas, little creativity and much boredom – why should they be deprived of an eccentric academic such as Suleri? "I plan to spend half a year in Pakistan and teach here," she says, words that are sure to excite students of literature throughout Pakistan.