Search For My Tongue by Sujata Bhatt
The Context Of The Poem
Sujata Bhatt was born in the Indian state of Gujarat where her mother tongue was Gujarati. Later she moved onto United States where she learnt English. In and interview, she says " I have always thought of myself as an Indian who is outside India". Her mother tongue is for her and important link to her family and to her childhood. " That's the deepest layer of my identity".
What Is The Poem About
1. The poet explains what it is like to speak and think into two languages.
2. She wonders whether she might lose the language she began with.
3. However, the mother tongue remains with her in her dreams.
4. By the end, she
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The poet expresses how hard it is for her to know two languages but neglect the one that she feels most belongs to her
2. She explains these ideas in Gujarati.
3. 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:
1. It is a part of the body- the part you speak with.
2. It has also come to mean the language that you speak.
3. The phrase lost my tongue (line 2) is used colloquially to
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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
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