Sarah Belfield
Comparison Of Two Poems
A persons culture is their background and very important to someone’s life and in both poems “Search For My Tongue” and “Presents From My Aunts In Pakistan” show the difficulties of having two different cultures .
The first poem “Search” focuses on less visual effects such as language. She writes the beginning and of the poem in English but the middle is made up of Gujerati. Even though we cannot tell what the writing means it doesn’t matter because we still get the same effect from it, the almost angriness and distress from the poet, Sujata Bhatt . The other poem “Presents” uses visual items like clothes to show the difference in cultures: “my costume clung to me I was aflame.” Moniza Alvi sees her Pakistani clothes as a “costume” rather than normal clothes. She calls it this because they are so different to English clothes that when she wears them it’s like she is putting on a play and she is an actress at the weekends. “I longed for denim and corduroy.” Most people see Pakistani clothes as beautiful creations but she doesn’t like them and would prefer to wear boring English clothes such as jeans. All through the poem “presents” the poet talks about the difference in the two cultures and explains that she feels she has “no fixed nationality” and like the other poet wants empathy form the reader and wants the reader to know how it feels to have two separate parts of your life. Moniza Alvi calls her Pakistani clothes her “weekend clothes” this shows that she doesn’t see them as clothes she wants to wear but clothes she is forced to wear by her parents and relatives so that she remembers her culture in Pakistan.
