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."