Compare and Contrast "Presents From My Aunts In Pakistan" by Moniza Alvi and "Search for my Tongue" by Sujata Bhatt

The first 200 words of this essay...

Compare and contrast the ways in which two poets present the themes of cultural displacement and being torn between two cultures in "Presents From My Aunts In Pakistan" by Moniza Alvi and "Search For My Tongue" by Sujata Bhatt.

In this essay I will be comparing two poems about cultural displacement and being torn between two cultures and how it has affected its writers. These two poems, Sujata Bhatt's "Search For My Tongue" and Moniza Alvi's "Presents From My Aunts In Pakistan", are both about the feelings the poet experiences living in one culture whilst originally from another. Sujata Bhatt includes Gujarati in her poem along English for greater effect, as this shows her entrapment between the two cultures. Similarly, in "Presents from My Aunt in Pakistan", Moniza Alvi shows her entrapment by giving vivid descriptions of traditional clothing against English clothes. These techniques help to give the reader a more in depth feeling of what each poet was feeling while living away from their original culture and also they show the difficulties involved in doing so.

Moniza Alvi's first stanza of the poem describes the clothes sent to her by her aunts; she