presents from my aunts in pakistan How does the poet express her unresolved conflict of identity in the poem?

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Tom Beckett S5
English – Presents from My Aunts in Pakistan

Presents from My Aunts in Pakistan

How does the poet express her unresolved conflict of identity in the poem?

Presents from my aunts in Pakistan was written by Moniza Alvi in the late 1950’s and is about a Pakistani born girl with an English mother and a Pakistani father. They migrated to England only a couple of months into her life, now sensing that she is ‘of no fixed nationality’ and living in two worlds. The Poet compares the exotic presents she receives with what she had seen at her school. The presents seem to form a link to an alternative way of life in Lahore, her birth place.

Moniza Alvi writes about herself at thirteen unsure about her ethnic group. Her aunts send her three tunics from Pakistan, one peacock blue, one orange and the other apple-green for her teenage years. She also receives a pair of black slippers laced with gold embroidery. A set of glass wristlets were given to Moniza but when she tried them on one snapped drawing blood from her wrists. The poet explains that like in the UK, fashions changed, the salwar bottoms she received were narrow, when they used to be broad and stiff.

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When she tries her new outfits on for the first time she feels out of the ordinary, an ‘alien in the sitting-room’ and doesn’t think she suited the clothes. She feels that wearing the clothes in the British culture she has grown up to recognize would be inappropriate; although she was passionate about her new items of clothing she ‘couldn’t rise up out of its fire’ being only half-Pakistani. ‘Unlike Aunt Jamila’ is the final line of the second stanza; I think that here, she desperately longs to be more like her aunt. Earlier in the stanza she says ...

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