earticle

영어

This paper examines Sara Suleri’s Meatless Days focusing on the notion of a cross-cultural self in post-colonial Pakistan. This autobiographical novel shows two different kinds of people in a contemporary diaspora: those who are still obsessed with binarism, a colonial heritage, and an origin-oriented mind and the others who show border-crossing, a post-colonial trait, and feel at home in other countries. In the novel males usually belong to the first group: they limit their own lives by taking an attitude of ‘either/or’ toward life and the world. Pip, Sara’s father, is a typical example of this. On the other hand, females, including Sara herself, show the second type: they share a ‘both/and’ or a ‘neither here nor there’ value which widens their possibilities of self and life. Mair Jones, Sara’s mother, represents this diasporic new self: she, a Welsh married to a Pakistani, living in post-colonial Pakistan, shows disinterestedness in her origin, belonging, owning, and accepts differences and multifariousness, thus creating ethnic and cultural hybridity. She shows freedom and fluidity as a de-territorialized, cross-cultural, and post-national self, which the author portrays as a more proper way of living in the 21st diaspora, being healthier than a single-minded nationalistic way.