Search for my tongue Flashcards
Meaning
Educating the readers on the struggle of being bi-lingual as well as exploring the links between identity and language. We see her worry over losing her mother tongue and futhermore herself.
Structure
- starts gruesome harsh but ends with growth and beauty
- rhetorical questions
- enjambment
- symbolism ( mother tongue mid poem to show she hadn’t lost anything)
rhetorical question
- ‘What would you do if you had two tongues in your mouth’
direct address to the reader asking them to understand her struggle and sympathise with her crisis
middle of poem
Bhatt’s mother tonngue shows that she has not lost her mother tounge and still has her identity.
Title
search- frantic and desperate
start of poem
- worried voice
gruesome imagery
‘ rot and die in your mouth’
end of poem
‘blossoms out of my mouth’
beautiful and blossom shows growth and beauty
Language features
- vivid imagery
- own dialect
vivid imagery
‘rot and die in your mouth’ gruesome. the reader feels sorry for the inner turmoil of ‘losing’ her mother tongue and connection to home.
‘grows stronger veins’ her mother tongue is part of her . she cannot lose it
‘blossoms out of her mouth’ shows stability
’ and lost the first one’ and ‘ couldn’t know the other’ feels conflicted
Writing in own dialect
shows her connection to her language and shows how happy the connection is from preceded by gruesomeness to growth and beauty
themes
-identity
- culture
-language
-impsct of colonisation
-fear
What poems can search for my tongue be compared with
poem at thirty-nine, halfcaste, remember,if
Why can search for my tongue and poem at thirty-nine be compared?
both poems see poets asserting their identity,sometimes in a context unfriendly. to them
Why can search for my tongue and half-caste be compared?
about being proud of your identity
Why can search for my tongue and remember be compared?
Both poems are about a conflicted speaker who is worried whether they have lost a piece of themselves by losing their language and one that is worried they’ll be forgotten without their oartner
