“My costume clung to me and I was aflame, I couldn’t rise out of this fire, half English, unlike Aunt Jamila.” The clothes she is wearing are no doubt brightly coloured, perhaps like the orange ones from before. They seem like flames to her, and to others she presumes. They are too exotic, too foreign, and they draw too much attention. She cannot rise out of their flames; she cannot be seen through them. When people look at her wearing those, they will see the clothes, not a person. The clothes identify her as Pakistani, not English. That would be alright if she was sure of her own background, but she is not. By wearing those clothes her balance of ethnicity is thrown wildly askew. She cannot rise from the flames like a new born phoenix, to new life in one culture or between.
“I wanted my parents’ camel skin lamp-switching it on in my bedroom, to consider the cruelty and the transformation from camel to shade.” This rather long excerpt shows Alvi considering her two cultures. One of tough reality and one of comfortable digression. Too her parents, the shade made of a camel’s skin are nothing but a shade. To her and her bastardised English way of thinking is to consider the cruelty of the shade. An ornament made with the skin of an animal is cruel and frowned upon. She is picking on the differences in her cultures deliberately to illustrate her complete indecision.
Her mother had jewellery from Pakistan which she cherished, before it was stolen from the family car. Yet her mother is English, yet can accept the jewellery, even love it. This obviously confuses the young Alvi, how can someone from one culture love something from another. Yet we can take into consideration that she lived in Pakistan than Alvi, being more at ease with the culture. This something Alvi cannot grasp, but desperately wants to. Her aunts ask for Marks & Spencer cardigans, a small joke parodying the feel at the time. They send these great exotically coloured clothes, which are normal to them, they request cardigan from the bastion of Englishness, Marks & Spencer.
The second page starts to introduce other feelings towards her ethnicity. Her school friend didn’t like the clothes, didn’t appreciate them when she was shown. This no doubt troubled Alvi, her school friend not liking her clothes that she wasn’t one hundred per cent on anyway. This could not have boosted her morale over the issue of ethnicity. Yet it goes on to mention that she does try the clothes on, looking in the mirror at herself. Presumably this was done alone and out of eye of her parents and friends.
Now she talks of photographs;
“…in miniature glass circles, recall the story how three of us sailed to England.” Her memories of the Pakistan and the journey to England are non existent; she was too young to remember. She gets her memories and perceptions of that time from photographs and stories her parents have told her. Stories of how she screamed all the way to England due to prickly heat and playing with a tin boat in her English grandmother’s dining-room.
She then shifts to picturing her birth place, as she puts it, not her home. She gets her ground plan from fifties’ pictures, black and whites from before she was born.
Then she grows up, accounting the troubles that come to the region of her origin;
“When I was older there was conflict, a fractured land throbbing through the newsprint” conflicts like the Kashmiri War in 1965 and the antagonism over East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. She sees this through newsprint, on the TV. She has no first hand knowledge of her ‘home’, no real sense of belonging therefore. Her people are arguing and fighting, and she cannot relate or sympathise. Her connection to them is her father and the presents from her aunt. She pictures her aunts in the only pose she has any feeling towards, wrapping present for her, in tissue.
She sees beggar children and sweeping girls, and testimony to her forgotten home. And there she is, stuck in the middle;
“…of no fixed nationality” looking thought to her supposed world, at the Shalimar Gardens. Probably itself on a photograph.
Alvi’s difficulties stem from her lack of knowledge or conviction over her nationality. We can but presume that her parents have not fully discussed the subject with her, or she would be better informed, better able to make decisions over her nationality and come to a comfortable and firm conclusion.
The second poem I am choosing is “from Search for My Tongue” by Sujata Bhatt. Bhatt was born Gujarat in 1956. Her birth language is Gujarati. When she was older she moved to America then to Germany. What she has over Alvi is that she grows up in India enough to remember it. She then moved to America and to Germany, every move reaffirming or nationality, an Indian outside India. Alvi never has that connection to Pakistan, but then she is also of mixed race, whereas Bhatt is not.
Bhatt plays with the word tongue in the poem. In English it has two meanings. One is the physical muscle in our mouth; the other is used to illustrate language. When reading the poem you must have both in mind to understand her meanings;
“…if you had two tongues in your mouth, and lost the first one, the mother tongue, and could not really know the other, the foreign tongue.” Bhatt is talking about language, notably Gujarati and English. To her the mother tongue is Gujarati and English is the foreign one. Imagine having both, being fluent in both, having both tongues in your mouth, is what she’s saying. If you don’t, the poem becomes confusing, which is what she is trying to show us, her confusion. She goes on to illustrate living in a place where the foreign tongue is used more often than the mother one. Would the unused one just disappear?
“…speak a foreign tongue, your mother tongue would rot, rot and die in your mouth, until you had to spit it out.” Her anxiety stems from her not using her mother language, Gujarati, so would it become rusty and unfamiliar, would it leave your knowledge? What galls her is, would she forget it? Being an Indian outside Indian, she would be anxious to maintain that so has to keep her nationality. But she is in a situation where she uses the other language, English, more often.
Whilst still in this anxiety, she apparently dreams. She dreams in Gujarati, her mother tongue;
“…but overnight I dream,” and the text shows Gujarati text with phonetic English beneath. What she says is basically what she says in English above, voicing her concern over the loss of her first language. Yet she dreams it in that language, bringing it back to life;
“…it grows back, a stump of a shoot, grows longer, grows moist, grows strong veins,” the language comes back to her consciousness. She uses the imagery of a plant, one that can die and become useless, and one that can grow and take root. The mother tongue does grow back, knocking the other aside, making its presence felt. This is a very triumphant poem as the last stanza illustrates;
“Everytime I think I’ve forgotten, I think I’ve lost the mother tongue, it blossoms out of my mouth.” When she is in the lowest moment, the most uncertain time, a time where she doubts her nationality, it comes flying out, reassuring her.
The difficulties she faces are internal, no one is putting pressure on her, and there is no question nationality. She is more upset than concerned over the ‘losses of her native language. Alvi has no fixed language, no fixed home. She is caught between the two cultures, Bhatt is caught between tongues. Her second tongue is one of convenience. She thinks she has lost the first, but she hasn’t. Alvi doesn’t even go near that level of contentment.
