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 the time you still dream in your native tongue and it will never go away.
The poem ‘Half Cast’ also deals with the aspects of a different language but instead of writing in a different language and in English, Half-Caste is written in the way people from the Caribbean sound their words, e.g. yu instead of you and de instead of the.
This poems theme bases itself on not judging people at face value and not putting people into ‘boxes’.
This poem to me seems less formal than Search For My Tongue even though they are both written in the first person. The poem first starts in Common English and introduces its self by saying he’s a half-caste and he stands on one leg. This small phrase actually sends across quite an important message, so its saying ‘ if you call me half-caste, does that mean I am half a person or I stand on half of myself?’
The poem then changes into Caribbean English where it gives the reader ‘evidence’ for not calling people half-caste. This is done by using examples like;
‘…Wha yu mean
when yu say half-caste
yu mean when picasso
mix red an green
is a half-caste canvas’
Picasso would do this all the time but society wouldn’t call it a half-caste canvas, they’d call it a master piece. Another example of this is;
‘…Wha yu mean
when yu say half-caste
yu mean tchaikovsky
sit down at dah piano
an mix a black key
wid a white key
is a half-caste symphony’
When composers right music they use the whole range of the instrument available, but again we do not call these creations half-caste.
This way of explaining makes you understand why people from mixed race, like the writer John Agard, get frustrated and upset when people use the term half-cast.
He then goes on to say that he looks at everyone as equals, but other people don’t see him as one so he only ‘offers yu half-a-hand’.
At the end of the poem he says if you open your whole eye, ear & mind, he will then tell you the other half of his story.
In half caste the write fells very annoyed when he is called half-caste just because he is from mixed race and he states this point very aggressively and openly, whilst Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan seems to show less of the forwardness then in Half-Caste. Even though they are similar in one for example from being from two different cultured families, the points they are making are quite different. In Half-Caste the writer wants not be called names, and in Present from my Aunts in Pakistan the writer is annoyed with not being able to fit in with either side of their family. For example when her Aunts bring the Candy-striped glass bangles they snapped and made her wrists bleed, this is because people from Asia are very small boned, so because of her being mixed race she was not able to put then. Also it says that her school friends where not impressed by her Salwar kameez, they wanted to see weekend clothes and where not interested in the mirror work or the story how three of them sailed toto England.
I find all of these poems very interesting and thought provoking. My favourite out of these three is half-caste because it give such a strong point and all the examples make sense. Where we live there aren’t many people from different cultures, so we don’t face racism and people from mixed race that often. These poems make you see the points of view and traditions of other cultures.