Other Cultures Poems

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“Is it always a positive benefit to live in two cultures at the same time?” How far do you think this is true of three poems?

From the poems on the course, a reader can see that there are both negative and positive aspects of living in two different cultures.

In presents from Aunts in Pakistan, the girl, who lives in England, gets clothes from her aunts, traditional Pakistani clothes. At first, the writer says “They sent me a Salwar Kameez, peacock blue, and another glistening like an orange split open”, which shows that she achnologes the beauty of the clothes. However, the writer goes on to say, “I tried each satin-silken top, was alien in the sitting room.” This shows that as she put the clothes on, she felt out of place in her house and she couldn’t see herself in traditional Pakistani clothes like her family. She also said, In a simile, that the clothes showed her own lack of beauty: “I could never be as lovely as those clothes”. The bright colours suggest the clothes are burning: “I was aflame, I couldn't rise up out of its fire”, a powerful metaphor for the discomfort felt by the girl, who “longed for denim and corduroy”, plainer but comfortable and not noticeable. Also she notes that where her Pakistani Aunties can “rise up out of its fire” - that is, “look lovely” in the bright clothes - she felt unable to, because she was “half-English”. This might mean because she is educated in England. This sense of being between two cultures is shown when the “school friend” asks to see the girls “weekend clothes” and is not impressed. The school friend’s reaction also suggests that she has little idea of what the girl- as a young Pakistani woman - is, and is not, allowed to do at weekends, despite living in Britain.

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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 ...

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