Search for my toungue by Sasha Bhatt

John Kearns English

10M Miss Clare

Search For My Tongue by Sujata Bhatt

Search For My Tongue is a poem written by Sujata Bhatt. She was in Ahmedabad, India, and learned to speak, read and write the English language when immigrating with her family to the United States. Because her primary language and dialect is Gujarati, the language used in her poems is very simple.

The poem starts off with Bhatt answering a question, her answer explains what the question was and so shows that she is having a conversation with someone. She asks the person what would they do if they had two tongues. This is of course an analogy and is meant to represent language and culture, so the real question she asks is what would you do if you had two cultures and couldn’t understand the foreign one “I ask you, what you would do if you had two tongues in your mouth”.

She further mentions the idea of tongues, and asks what the person would do if he/she had to languages, and lost their native language, their mother tongue, and was forced to know, live and speak the foreign tongue. “If you had two tongues in your mouth, and lost the first one, the mother tongue, and could not really know the other, the foreign tongue”.

She explains that if you were to live in a place spoken in foreign culture and language, then your culture, and your language would rot and die “And if you lived in a place ...

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She explains that if you were to live in a place spoken in foreign culture and language, then your culture, and your language would rot and die “And if you lived in a place you had to speak a foreign tongue”. Bhatt uses the description of rotting to make the reader imagine a piece of rotting meat and to spit it out “your mother tongue would rot, rot and die in your mouth until you had to spit it out”.

Bhatt then explains that whilst she thought she had spat out her mother tongue, her identity. It comes back to her in her dreams “I thought I spit it out but overnight while I dream”. The next part of the poem is in a Gujarati dialect and is meant to show the readers what it feels like to not be able to hear or express yourself in your own language, just as she felt when she was in that position, when she had lost her mother tongue.

In the final stanza she describes the growth and return of her mother tongue, using a plant blossoming into a flower as an analogy to describe its strengthening and growth. It also details its supremacy over the other tongue, the foreign language. “It grows back, a stump of a shoot grows longer, grows moist, grows strong veins, it ties the other tongue in knots”.

The final lines describe her joy and relief as the mother tongue shows its supremacy and domination over the other tongue. And shows how the mother tongue comes back stronger than ever as it blossoms out of her mouth “the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth, it pushes the other tongue aside. Every time I think I’ve forgotten, I think I’ve lost the mother tongue, it blossoms out of my mouth”.