In search for my tongue, the writer explains imagery by using the image of two tongues - a mother tongue, her first language, and a second tongue the language of the place where she lives. She argues that you cannot use both together. The writer 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”.
To show this, the writer rewrites lines 15 and 16 in Gujarati, followed by more Gujarati lines, which are given in English as the final bit of the poem. For the people who do not know the Gujarati writing, there is also a phonetic transcript using rough English spelling to indicate the sounds.
The final bit of the poem is the writer's dream, in which her mother tongue grows back and “pushes the other tongue aside”. She ends happily by saying that “Every time I think I've forgotten, I think I've lost the mother tongue, it blossoms out of my mouth.”
Clearly this poem is about personal and cultural identity. The familiar metaphor of the tongue is used in a way to show that losing your language and culture is like losing part of your body. The poet's dream might be something she has really dreamt “overnight” but is clearly also a “dream” in the sense of something she wants to happen - in dreams, if not in reality, it is possible for the body to regenerate. For this reason the poem's ending is uncertain, it is only in her dream that the poet can find her “mother tongue”. On the other hand, she may be arguing that even when she thinks she has lost it, it can be found again. At the end of the poem there is a metaphor in which the regenerating tongue is likened to a plant cut back to a stump, which grows and eventually buds, to become the flower which “blossoms out of” the poet's mouth. It is as if her mother tongue is exotic, spectacular or fragrant, as a flower is.
The poem's form is well suited to its subject. The flower is a metaphor for the tongue, which had earlier been used as a metaphor, for speech. The poet demonstrates her problem by showing both “mother tongue” (Gujarati) and “foreign tongue” (English), knowing that for most people reading these will be the other way around, while some people, like her, will understand both.
The poem will speak differently to different generations - for parents, Gujarati may also be the “mother tongue”, while their children, born in the UK, may speak English as their first language. The poem is written both for the page, where some see the, possibly exotic, effect of the Gujarati text and for reading aloud, as some people have a guide for speaking the Gujarati lines.
In Nothings changed, it represents a society where rich and poor are divided. In the apartheid era of racial segregation in South Africa, where the poem is set, laws, enforced by the police, kept apart black and white people. The writer looks at ways to change this system, and shows how they are ineffective, making no real difference. “District Six” is the name of a poor area of Cape Town, where the man used to live. Although there is no sign there, the guy can feel that this is where he is, “...my feet know, and my hands.” Similarly the “up-market” inn, “brash with glass” and the bright sign, “flaring like a flag”, is meant for white people only. There is no sign to show this but people, being poor, will not be allowed past the “guard at the gatepost”. The “white’s only inn” is elegant, with linen tablecloths and a “single rose” on each table. It is contrasted with the fast-food “working man's cafe” which sells the local snack “bunny chows”. There is no tablecloth, just a plastic top, and there is nowhere to wash your hands after eating, “wipe your fingers on your jeans”. In the third stanza, contrast is clearly shown, the smart inn “squats” amid “grass and weeds”.
The most important image in the poem is that of the “glass” which shuts out the speaker in the poem. It is a symbol of the divisions of colour, and class. As he backs away from it at the end of the poem, the man sees himself as a “boy again”, who has left the imprint of his “small, mean mouth” on the glass. He wants “a stone, a bomb” to break the glass - he may wish literally to break the window of this inn, but this is clearly meant in a symbolic sense. He wants to break down the system, which separates white and black, rich and poor, in South Africa.