In Nothings changed, the poet returns to the wasteland that was once his home, and relives the anger he felt when the area was first destroyed. He sees a new restaurant: expensive, stylish, exclusive, with a guard at the gatepost. He thinks about the poverty around it, especially the working man's café nearby, where people eat without plates from a plastic tabletop. This makes him reflect that despite the changing political situation, there are still huge inequalities between blacks and whites. Even though South Africa is supposed to have changed, he knows the new restaurant is really 'whites-only'. He feels that nothing has really changed. The deep anger he feels makes him want to destroy the restaurant - to smash the glass with a stone, or a bomb. In Unrelated incidents, the poem seems to be spoken by a BBC newsreader.
He or she explains why the BBC thinks it is important to read the news in a BBC accent: no one will take the news seriously if it's read with a voice lik / wanna yoo / scruff. He or she speaks here in the accent of an ordinary speaker/viewer - just the kind of voice which the newsreader is rejecting. A newsreader would never really reveal his or her prejudices directly to the viewer in this way. So what the newsreader 'says' in this poem perhaps needs to be seen as the unspoken message of the way the news is presented. In Search for my tongue, the poet explains what it is like to speak and think in two languages. She wonders whether she might lose the language she began with. However, the mother tongue remains with her in her dreams. By the end, she is confident that it will always be part of who she is
In Nothings changed, on the page, the poem is set out in six stanzas (or verse paragraphs), each of eight fairly short lines. This kind of regularity in the lay-out creates a sense of control: the poet is very clear about what he is feeling - no sudden flying into a rage. But within that pattern the length of the sentences varies from a whole stanza to just two words. To explore the effect of the sentence structure in the poem, look at these examples: Stanza 1 consists of a single sentence in which almost each word is stressed. It follows the poet as he ventures onto the wasteland, step by step on the hard, unfriendly ground. In unrelated incidents, the poem is carefully written in a phonetic version of the Glasgow accent. If you pronounce it exactly as it's written, it should sound more or less like a Glaswegian voice. The lines of the poem are very short. The poet has played with language in a number of ways, apart from the phonetic spelling. There is almost no punctuation. There are lots of slang and colloquial words (scruff, belt up). The newsreader talks directly to the reader (or viewer). In Search for my tongue, the poem is written in three sections. The poet expresses how hard it is for her to know two languages but neglect the one that she feels most belongs to her. She explains these ideas in Gujarati. She then translates her thoughts for us into English (so lines 31-38 mean something similar to lines 17-30), showing that although her mother tongue dies during the day, it grows back in her dreams at night, becoming strong and producing blossoms.
In Nothings changed, the whole poem is written in the present tense. Although he is recalling a past experience, it is as if the poet is re-living the experience as he writes. This is one of the things that make this poem a vivid one to read, and to identify with. The viewpoint in the poem is carefully established. The first stanza, for example, puts us 'in the poet's shoes'. It is as if we are walking with the poet across the rough ground. As the poem develops, it is easy to imagine where we are walking or standing, and what we see: “I press my nose to the clear panes”. This also makes it more likely that we will see things from his 'point of view'. The images in the poem are of the wasteland itself, the expensive restaurant, and the working man's café. In search for my tongue, the tongue can be a part of the body - the part you speak with. It has also come to mean the language that you speak. The phrase lost my tongue (line 2) is used colloquially to mean that someone is tongue-tied and does not know what to say.
The tone in Nothings changed can be read out in a number of ways, we can read it out angrily as if to show the author’s anger that nothing has really changed in South Africa. We can also read it out in a sad and calm way to show the author’s real feelings towards this whole situation of nothing being changed. In unrelated incidents, he believes that the media see the viewers in Glasgow, or indeed the viewers in most other parts of Britain, as scruffs. In search for my tongue, the poem should be read out, mournfully, because she feels that she has lost her mother tongue? Angrily, because she feels forced to use her foreign tongue when she does not really want to? Triumphantly to show that she regains her beautiful mother tongue at night in her dreams?
