Search For My Tongue and Presents From My Aunts In Pakistan

Search For My Tongue and Presents From My Aunts In Pakistan

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.

Both poets feel as if they don’t belong in either culture they long to

just have a simple background from one country although other people

who have that wish that they had different exciting backgrounds.

Both poems are autobiographical and talk to you as a the reader not

to a group of people. “You ask me what I mean” is the first line of

“Search for my Tongue” Sujata Bhatt uses the first line to show that

she is answering a question, not that anyone has directly asked but

that she knows people are thinking. Unlike “Presents from my aunts”

which uses a lot of similes throughout the poem this poem is one big

metaphor. “If you had two tongues in your mouth, and lost the first

one.” The poet describes her language all through the poem like she

has two tongues in her mouth and Gujerati is her “mother tongue” and

English is her “foreign tongue”

In each poem the poets both want to get rid of their original cultures