- The poet expresses how hard it is for her to know two languages but neglect the one that she feels most belongs to her
- She explains these ideas in Gujarati.
- She then translates her thoughts for us in English (so line 31-38 mean something similar to lines 17-30), showing that although her mother tongue dies during the day, it grows back in her dreams at night, becoming strong and producing blossoms.
Try reading it aloud. Each line of Gujarati script is followed by a phonetic English version in brackets, so even if you don’t know any Gujarati, you can still have a go.
Do you notice any kind of patterning in the sound of the Indian language? If the poem says more or less the same thing twice, might it as well be written in one language only? What do you think would be lost if the Gujarati disappeared?
Language
Now think about the language that is used in the poem. How many meanings does the word “tongue” have in the poem? Consider these:
- It is a part of the body- the part you speak with.
- It has also come to mean the language that you speak.
- The phrase lost my tongue (line 2) is used colloquially to mean that someone is tongue-tied and doesn’t know what to say.
Read the poem carefully and see where Sujata Bhatt plays with these meanings. For example, she imagines that knowing two languages is like have two tongues in your mouth (line 4)
The poet compares her tongue to a plant, as she develops her ideas. This is called Extended Metaphor
Answers
This poem (or rather extract from a long poem) explores a familiar ambiguity in English “tongue” refers both to the physical organ we use for speech, and language we speak with it. (Saying “tongue” for “speech” is an example of metonymy). In the poem Sujata Bhatt writes about the “tongue” in both ways t once. To lose your tongue normally means not knowing what to say, but Ms. Bhatt suggests that one can lose one’s tongue, in another sense. The speaker in this poem is obviously the poet herself, but she speaks for many who fear they may have lost their ability to speak for themselves and their cultures.
She explains this with the image of two tongues, a mother tongue (one’s first language) and a second language (the language of the place where you live). She argues that you cannot use both together. She suggests, further that if you live in palace where you must “speak a foreign language” then the mother tongue will “rot and die in your mouth”.
As if to demonstrate how this works, Ms. Bhatt rewrites lines 15 and 16 in Gujarati, followed by more Gujarati lines, whish re given in English as the final section of the poem. For readers who do not know the Gujarati script, there is also phonetic transport using approximate English spelling to indicate the sounds.
The final section of the poem is the writers’ dream in which her mother tongue grows back and “pushes the other tongue aside”. She ends triumphantly asserting that, “Everything I think I’ve forgotten, I think I’ve lost the mother tongue, it blossoms out of my mouth”.
Clearly this poem is bout cultural and personal identity. The familiar metaphor of the tongue is used in a novel way to show that losing one’s language cultural is like losing part of one’s body. The poets’ dream my 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 poems ending is ambiguous perhaps it is only 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 striking extended 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 poets’ mouth. It is as if her mother tongue is exotic, spectacular or fragrant, as a flower might be.