Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter's Elegy
Jan 2013 · University of Chicago Press
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“A daughter’s nostalgic tribute to her father . . . an intimate account of the socio-cultural fabric of the postcolonial world of Pakistan.” —Dr. Jharna Malaviya, Research Journal of English Language and Literature
Sara Suleri Goodyear’s Meatless Days is a finely wrought memoir of her girlhood in Pakistan after the 1947 partition. In Boys Will Be Boys, she returns—with the same treasury of language, humor, and passion—to her childhood and early adulthood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z. A. Suleri (known as Pip, for his “patriotic and preposterous” disposition).
Taking its title from that jokingly chosen by her father for his unwritten autobiography, Boys Will Be Boys dips in and out of Suleri Goodyear’s upbringing in Pakistan and her life in the United States, moving between public and private history and addressing questions of loss and cultural displacement through a resolutely comic lens. In this rich portrait, Pip emerges as a prodigious figure: an ardent agitator against British rule in the 1930s and 1940s, a founder of the Times of Karachi and the Evening Times, on-and-off editor of the Pakistan Times, for a brief time director of the Pakistan military intelligence service, and a frequently jailed antagonist of successive Pakistani leaders. To the author, though, he was also “preposterous . . . counting himself king of infinite space,” a man who imposed outrageously on his children.
Suleri Goodyear invites the reader into an intimacy shaped equally by history and intensely personal detail, creating an elegant elegy for a man of force and contradiction. “On Judgment Day,” he told his daughter, “I will say to God, ‘Be merciful, for I have already been judged by my child.’”
Sara Suleri Goodyear’s Meatless Days is a finely wrought memoir of her girlhood in Pakistan after the 1947 partition. In Boys Will Be Boys, she returns—with the same treasury of language, humor, and passion—to her childhood and early adulthood to pay tribute to her father, the political journalist Z. A. Suleri (known as Pip, for his “patriotic and preposterous” disposition).
Taking its title from that jokingly chosen by her father for his unwritten autobiography, Boys Will Be Boys dips in and out of Suleri Goodyear’s upbringing in Pakistan and her life in the United States, moving between public and private history and addressing questions of loss and cultural displacement through a resolutely comic lens. In this rich portrait, Pip emerges as a prodigious figure: an ardent agitator against British rule in the 1930s and 1940s, a founder of the Times of Karachi and the Evening Times, on-and-off editor of the Pakistan Times, for a brief time director of the Pakistan military intelligence service, and a frequently jailed antagonist of successive Pakistani leaders. To the author, though, he was also “preposterous . . . counting himself king of infinite space,” a man who imposed outrageously on his children.
Suleri Goodyear invites the reader into an intimacy shaped equally by history and intensely personal detail, creating an elegant elegy for a man of force and contradiction. “On Judgment Day,” he told his daughter, “I will say to God, ‘Be merciful, for I have already been judged by my child.’”
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About the author
Sara Suleri Goodyear is a professor of English at Yale University. She is the author of Meatless Days and The Rhetoric of English India.
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