Moniza Alvi marvels at how pretty her clothes are from Pakistan by describing them vibrantly with colours such as ‘peacock blue’ and ‘apple-green.’ The reader gets the impression that the girl is not comfortable with her home in England but she thinks that she won’t be comfortable living in Pakistan either. We know this as she says she has ‘no fixed nationality.’ We can easily see that she doesn’t know where she belongs.
The bright colours of the salwar kameez suggest the familiar idea of exotic clothes worn by Asian women, but the glass bangle which snaps and draws blood is almost a representation of how her tradition harms the poet. The poet often uses foods to describe the presents: ‘like an orange split open ’, ‘candy-striped bangle’ and ‘apple-green sari’. This gives rich, exotic and sensual images of the Asian clothes.
The poet suggests that the clothes showed her lack of beauty: I could never be as lovely as those clothes.” Moniza Alvi gives the impression that the clothes are on fire: “I was aflame, I couldn't rise up out of its fire.” This shows us her uneasiness about wearing the clothes in another country “who longed for denim and corduroy”
The sense of being between two cultures is shown when the “school friend” asks to see Moniza Alvi's “weekend clothes” and is not impressed. The school friend’s reaction suggests that she has little idea of what Alvi is and isn’t allowed to do at weekends, despite living in Britain.
The next poem I am going to talk about is Search for My Tongue by Sujata Bhatt. Sujata Bhatt was born on 6th May 1956 in Ahmedabad, India. Her Mother Tongue was Gujarati. She lived in the United States for many years but now she lives in Germany.
In this poem the poet tells us 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. At the end of the poem, she is confident that it will always be part of who she is.
The poem is written in 3 sections: English, Gujarati and then English again. The poet tells us how difficult it is for her to know two languages; she explains these ideas in Gujarati. She then translates her thoughts for us into English, showing that although her 'mother tongue' dies during the day and it 'grows back' in her dreams at night, becoming strong and producing 'blossoms'.
Bhatt uses the word tongue in two different ways. They are: to refer to both the tongue we use for speaking, and the language we speak with our tongues.
The speaker in this poem is clearly Sujata Bhatt, but she speaks for many who fear they may have lost their ability to speak for themselves and their culture.
Bhatt explains that your mother tongue and a second tongue can not be used together. She suggests that if you live in a place where you must “speak a foreign tongue” then the mother tongue will “rot and die in your mouth”. As if to express how this works, Sujata Bhatt rewrites lines 15 and 16 in Gujarati.
Bhatt compares the tongue to a plant:
- 'would rot, rot and die',
- 'it grows back',
- 'grows strong veins'
The plant is like a tongue because plants die in the wrong environment and she says the tongue rots and dies.
The final section of the poem is the poet's dream - in which her mother tongue grows back and “pushes the other tongue aside”. She ends delightedly emphasizing that “Everytime I think I've forgotten, I think I've lost the mother tongue, it blossoms out of my mouth.”
