Although her 'mother tongue' dies during the day, it 'grows back' in her dreams at night. When she is asleep in her dream she starts to speak the mother tongue written in Gujerati with the transliteration of the English language then repeats the Gujerati in English, she does this because she has two languages so she has to uses both of these, it also makes it more difficult for us to read it therefore communicating her difficulty of learning a new language.
Sujata Bhatt uses a semantic field using imagery of plants describing as if the language was growing back ‘It grows back, a stump of a shoot, grows longer, grows moist, grows stronger veins’ all which are related to plants, the plant represents the tongue pushing out the other tongue killing off her existing language. This imagery suggests that she is feeling trapped and angry to not be able to use the mother tongue however when she is asleep it grows back again.
This is a negative benefit of living in two cultures at the same time because it is hard for her to remember her own language and be able to speak the language of the country she is in.
‘Half Caste’ is about a mixed race speaker who has been offended by someone being called half caste, the speaker responds to the abuse in a form of a series of challenging questions. Agard does this with an ironic suggestion of things only being ‘half’, he also looks at the work of artists who mix things which is only using half but in fact it is unique. Tchaikovsky uses the black and white notes and Picasso mixes colours yet you would not call their art ‘half caste’
John Agard uses an Afro-Caribbean patois and spelling this imitates the accent of the speaker to show how he stands out in British culture. The punctuation is also non-standard using a slash in no format scheme and also neither commas nor full stops where as ‘Search for my tongue’ although the writer is from a different culture she still had correct grammar and spelling throughout.
The speaker in ‘half caste’ uses a lot of repetition ‘explain yuself’ and ‘wha yu mean’.
John Agard playfully points out how England's weather is always a mix of light and shadow, this leading to a weak one-liner on “half-caste” and “overcast”. The joke about one leg in the beginning of the poem is recalled later in the poem but this time by suggesting that the mixed race person uses only half of ear and eye, and offers half a hand to shake, leading to the physical impossibilities of dreaming half a dream and casting half a shadow. The poem, like a joke, has a punch line the poet invites his hearer to come back tomorrow and use the whole of their eye, ear and mind then he will tell the other half of the story.
In ‘Nothing’s Changed’ it is about a black man revisiting his past, this was during the apartheid of racial separation in South Africa in a poorer area ‘District six’ Tatamkhulu Africa looks at attempts in the poem to change this system. The first stanza focuses just on the ground; it shoes it to be uncared area. In the second stanza it builds up physical imagery from bottom to top and outwards to inwards.
It shows how furious he is showing difficulty, hatred and anger; he uses metaphors to show this ‘hot, white, inwards turning anger of my eyes’.
The third stanza shows what good lives the white people have ‘brash with glass’ describes them as showing off, it says the name flaring like a flag as suddenness of how the restaurant is new, it uses a build up of words ‘new, up-market, haute cuisine’ this shows its classy and fashionable where as the fourth and fifth stanza contrasts to show inequality between the black and white people. 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 bunny chows. There is no tablecloth, just a plastic top, and there is nowhere to wash one's hands after eating: “wipe your fingers on your jeans”.
As he backs away from the glass at the end of the poem, Afrika sees himself as a “boy again” He is so angry that it describes his hands as burning. He wants to break the glass, he may want to literally to break the window, but this is obviously meant in a emblematic sense. He wants to break down the system, which separates white and black, rich and poor, in South Africa.
