Comparing poems from different cultures.

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Comparing poems from different cultures.

By Claire Barnett-Jones

Many poems deal with the theme of cultural identity. I have chosen three to compare, they are:

Search For My Tongue, by Sujata Bhatt

Half-Caste, by John Agard and

Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan, by Moniza Alvi.

I chose these three poems because I feel that they all deal with different aspects of cultural identity. For example Search for my tongue covers the aspect of losing your native tongue and using a ‘foreign’ language, Half-Caste addresses the point of racism and stereotyping, whilst Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan highlights the issues of alienation and not being able to fit in with either side of your family.

Search For My Tongue is quite unusual as instead of the text being in one language all the way through it starts in English and then changes into Arabic part of the way through. This leaves the reader with a feeling of disorientation and that the reader, unless bilingual in those two languages, can not read or make sense of the foreign language.

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This poem also relays to you the fact that even if you’ve forgotten your mother tongue and don’t speak it for some time it will always come back and blossom if it is used enough. The poet also puts the point across by repeating the word tongue over and over again. The foreign tongue can never take the place of the mother tongue, because it is part of your own identity. The passage  

‘….but over night while I dream it grows back..’

gives the impression that although you may speak in the foreign language most of ...

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