Jennifer Green
10VSG
English
Examine how two poets and explore the sense of suffering their cultures cause them.
This essay will explore how the poets Sujata Bhatt who wrote ‘Search for my tongue’ and Moniza Alvi who wrote ‘Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan’ describe the sense of suffering that the person in the poem’s culture causes them. To explore the sense of suffering, the reader can look at the language, the structure, the tone, the attitude of the poem and other features in the poem.
In the two poems, ‘Search for my tongue’ and ‘Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan’ you can see that there is a sense of suffering. In ‘Search for my tongue’ you can see the suffering when the poets says ‘Your mother tongue would rot, Rot and die in your mouth until you had to spit it out’ (Lines 12-14) and in ‘Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan’ when the poet says ‘My costume clung to me and I was aflame’ (Lines 22-23). These sentences show suffering, in ‘Search for my tongue’ the suffering is when the person in the poem can’t decide what tongue, or language she should be using and she is suffering as she is trapped between two different choices and does not know which one to choose. In ‘Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan’ the girl in the poem feels as if the costume that she is wearing from her original culture is setting her on fire as she is not used to it and does not feel comfortable in it.
