How does the poet express the difficulties of being in a minority?

How does the poet express the difficulties of being in a minority?

In the poem ‘Search for my tongue’ Bhatt has expressed how through her

own personal experience she has found learning a new language to be

difficult physically and emotionally. Throughout the poem she has

conveyed how her ‘mother language’ Gujarati slowly started to erode,

as she took on her ‘foreign tongue’ English. She shows this through

not only the vocabulary of the poem but the structure etc too.

The intention of the poem is to convey how although learning a new

language is extremely difficult, your ‘mother tongue’ will always

remain an essential part of your identity. Bhatt is worried that she

is forgetting her mother tongue and that her second language will

never be as natural. At the start of the poem Bhatt uses a second

person address and conversational language ‘You ask me what I mean’

and rhetorical questions ‘I ask you’ which makes it sound like she is

talking to the reader about her problem and asking them to empathise

with her. When Bhatt says ‘what would you do’ it suggests a level of

detachment as does the absence of imagery in the opening lines. The

tone is quite negative and quite depressing. She sounds as if she is

in despair.

Towards the middle of the poem she uses Gujarati to show us her

‘mother tongue’ and emphasise its great difference from English. In

the last part of the poem Bhatt uses metaphorical language, which is

more poetic than previously in the poem and very different to the

conversational language at the start for example, she uses the

metaphor of her mother tongue growing back as a flower.

The structure of the poem is quite unusual due to it not being broken

down into regular and conventional stanzas. The form of the poem

reminds the reader of how your language develops and grows over time.

The first part of the poem explains the problem Bhatt has of being

fluent in two languages. She repeats ‘tongue’ and uses the image of

having ‘two tongues in your mouth’ to try to convey the difficulty of

it to the reader. The next part of the poem explains how when she is

asleep she dreams in her mother tongue, it is the middle of the poem

and the centre of the conflict she is experiencing as she feels she is

not content with either language and worries she may lose her Indian

Identity by taking on the second language as she is stuck between

cultures. In line 12 the ‘mother tongue’ seems to take on physical