Compare the Ways that Culture & Identity are Presented in from 'Search for my Tongue' and from 'Unrelated Incidents'.

Both poems are very different on the content and what it is about. Unrelated Incidents is very much about if it was read in Standard English that wouldn’t be taken seriously “Lik wanna yoo scruff”. Also it is putting across that this is just what the BBC newsreaders are rejecting today. If it was re-written in Standard English it wouldn’t carry the same “Trooth” because it would be just someone talking normally on the news. Search For My Tongue is about the poet herself-Sujata Bhatt, explaining what it’s like to have to speak two languages, she feels that she has two tongues in her mouth, one is the foreign tongue and the other is the mother tongue which she feels has been “lost” from disuse. But this isn’t the case as it returns to her in her dreams, this is the section of the poem where she writes in Gujerati. I think then from line 30 to the end is a translate of line 17-29, this is because line 16 says “but over night I dream” then goes into Gujerati. It feels like she has gone into the dream and is telling me what’s happening in it in her language then she translates it so that I get a feel of what she has to go through everyday. By the end she is confident that her mother tongue will always be a part of who she is.

Each poem has some colloquial words in, more so in Unrelated Incidents like “Scruff” and “Belt up”. But in Search For My Tongue lines like “Lost my tongue” to mean that someone is tongue tied and don’t know what to say.

Search for My Tongue uses an extended metaphor, being compared to a plant; “The bud opens”, “Rot and die”, “It grows strong veins”. But the poem also discreetly shows that Sujata Bhatts mother tongue is like a plant that if it is in the wrong environment it dies, in her case not being in her home country her natural language is likely to fade out and die. This poem is more appealing to a wider range of foreigners whereas Unrelated Incidents isn’t. This is because it’s more his view on that people with his accent aren’t getting jobs simply because of how they speak. But he is also believes that media see the viewers in Glasgow and indeed most other parts of Britain other than Standard English speakers as “scruffs”. I can see this because he has reversed the fact that newsreaders speak in Standard English in real life hence making everyone else who don’t talk like that seem like the different ones.