Search for My Tongue Flashcards
What does the title tell us?
Poet desires to recover her identity
You…I ask you
Direct address –> Engages reader
Lost my tongue
Idiom –> acts as an extended metaphor
What would you do
Invites reader to consider her situation
Mother tongue…Foreign tongue
Contrast –> Between the close links to her identity v.s. something ‘alien-like’
spit it out
Harsh consonent sounds –> mirrors the struggle she has to go through
but overnight while I dream
Volta –> indicates a triumphant tone
grows
Repetition –> evokes the tongue is gradually increasing in length
A stump of a shoot…the bud opens…it blossoms out
Semantic field of flowers –> Beauty of life which contrasts with the imagery of death
your mother tongue would rot
Imagery od death
How many stanzas are in this poem?
3 stanzas with the middle stanza in the Gujarati language –> poet visualises her mother language flooding back
What does the lack of rhyme suggest?
Implies the poem has more of a conversational tone which creates a further inviting tone to empathise however, also it also highlights the poet’s fluency in her second language
What does the lack of meter suggest?
Accentuates uncertainty that the poet feels
Themes of?
Identity, Culture, Language
