'Search for my Tongue' and 'Night of the Scorpion'

The first 200 words of this essay...

Compare the two poems 'Search for my Tongue' and 'Night of the Scorpion' in what ways do the poems emphasise the distinctiveness of their cultures?

In this essay I will be comparing the two poems 'Search for my Tongue' by Sujata Bhatt who grew up in Pakistan and 'Night of the scorpion' by Nissim Ezekiel who grew up in Africa.

'Search for my Tongue' is based on the author's experiences as she has moved from Pakistan to England. Bhatt is concerned about forgetting her own language Gujerati. In the poem Bhatt shows this concern by saying "if you had two tongues in your mouth, and lost the first one, the mother tongue, and could not really know the other." The way she uses commas splits up the phrases giving the impression of confusion and concern, because she does not want to loose her mother tongue.

Night of the scorpion is about a night when Ezekiel was younger, when his mother is stung by a scorpion. In this poem he shows a fight of good and evil by using religious imagery. Ezekiel shows evil by using lines like "diabolic tail" and "dark room". The word diabolic