Search for my Tongue.

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Poem from other Cultures

  27 September 2002

Search for my Tongue

Sujata Bhatt tells us about the difficulties that she has speaking with a new tongue when her old tongue starts to rot away in her mouth with her new tongue pushing it out of the way and trying to take over. ‘Your mother tongue would rot, rot and die in your mouth until you had to spit it out”. This means the author has stucked between two languages and the new language (English) is making her lose mother tongue (Gujarati). Having two tongues this poet feels that she is totally confused and makes her to forget her mother tongue while she speaks English. She also tried to think and dream both languages at the same time but she couldn’t. She has dreamt in Gujarati and transliterated into English. At the end of the poem her feelings changes a bit because she describes over the night her confidence grows back even stronger than before, but while she dreams it grows back, stump of a shoot grows longer, grows moist, grows strong veins, it tries the other tongue in knots. This means she highlights the difficulties being part of two cultures. The dominant culture is always the mother tongue (her Gujarati culture is always the influences of the American lifestyle).

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The shape of the poem has divided into three parts:

  • First part of the poem explains her conflict with loosing her

mother tongue and learning a new foreign tongue.

  • Second part of the poem is written in Gujarati (mother tongue) and explains her fear of loosing her identity.
  • Third part of the poem is translated in to English and focuses on her determination to retain her Gujarati culture. The poet includes the Gujarati as an indication of the strong link between language and culture. This shows us that she tries to use the both languages at the same time ...

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