How does the poet express the difficulties of being in a minority

Towards the middle of the poem she uses Gujarati to show us her ‘mother tongue’ and emphasise its great difference from English. In the last part of the poem Bhatt uses metaphorical language, which is more poetic than previously in the poem and very different to the conversational language at the start for example, she uses the metaphor of her mother tongue growing back as a flower.

        The structure of the poem is quite unusual due to it not being broken down into regular and conventional stanzas. The form of the poem reminds the reader of how your language develops and grows over time. The first part of the poem explains the problem Bhatt has of being fluent in two languages. She repeats ‘tongue’ and uses the image of having ‘two tongues in your mouth’ to try to convey the difficulty of it to the reader. The next part of the poem explains how when she is asleep she dreams in her mother tongue, it is the middle of the poem and the centre of the conflict she is experiencing as she feels she is not content with either language and worries she may lose her Indian Identity by taking on the second language as she is stuck between cultures. In line 12 the ‘mother tongue’ seems to take on physical characteristics of something organic. The voice moves to first person ‘I thought I spit it out’ and the verbs move into the present tense suddenly making it feel personal and immediate. However when the reader first sees the poem there eyes are immediately drawn straight to the centre of the poem where the Gujarati is written in phonetic transcript. This is a visual reinforcement that our ‘mother language’ is at the centre of our identity and alerts the reader to the difficulty of the language as most of the readers ‘mother tongues’ will be English and will not understand the foreign language Gujarati. The last part of the poem describes how her ‘mother tongue’ grows back. When she most expects it to be forgotten it has grown stronger and ‘pushes the other tongue aside’.

        The vocabulary used in the poem helps Bhatt to express the difficulty of how it feels to be in a minority. The metaphor ‘dream’ represents both a dream overnight and something she wants to happen. Bhatt wants more people to realise the difficulty she experiences every day of her life and what she dreams about happening. They are her deepest desires. Flower imagery is used for example ‘bud’ and ‘stump’. When she talks about the ‘bud’ blossoming out of her mouth it is a metaphor for tongue. She is overjoyed when she realises her ‘mother tongue’ will always be a part of her! The repetition of the word ‘tongue’ is a motif that has been woven into the poem. It creates the effect that language is an active participant in a personal drama, rather than simply an idea being explored. Although it is used just as a metaphor for language at the beginning of the play, later on it seems to take on a life of it’s own as ‘it grows back’. The language allows the reader to visualise some idea of the enormity of problems faced by speakers of other languages when they attempt to take on a ‘foreign tongue’. The concluding passage is rich in associations of fertility and re-growth, like spring following a barren winter e.g. ‘shoots’ and ‘moist’ etc. This contrasts with the conditionals at the beginning of the poem e.g. ‘should’ and ‘if’ etc, are a contrast to the more positive present tense verbs used at the end for example ‘grows’ and ‘opens’.

        In conclusion, Bhatt conveys the difficulty of taking on a ‘foreign language’ whilst being in a minority through every possible aspect of the poem e.g. vocabulary, tone, structure etc. She presents a contrast between the argument of practical use of language and the emotional pull of language in a person’s personal and cultural identity.