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Search For My Tongue: - Sujata Bhatt

The poem describes the poet's experience of losing her native tongue while living in a foreign country where she had to speak a different language. Initially, she fears her mother tongue will rot and die in her mouth as the foreign language takes over. However, in her dreams her native language reasserts itself, growing stronger until it pushes the other language aside and blossoms out of her mouth once more. The poet draws on her own experience of living in the US and worrying that she would forget her original Gujarati language.

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IZKAAN SHINAN YOOSUF
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759 views6 pages

Search For My Tongue: - Sujata Bhatt

The poem describes the poet's experience of losing her native tongue while living in a foreign country where she had to speak a different language. Initially, she fears her mother tongue will rot and die in her mouth as the foreign language takes over. However, in her dreams her native language reasserts itself, growing stronger until it pushes the other language aside and blossoms out of her mouth once more. The poet draws on her own experience of living in the US and worrying that she would forget her original Gujarati language.

Uploaded by

IZKAAN SHINAN YOOSUF
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Search for my Tongue

-Sujata Bhatt-
SLIDESMANIA
You ask me what I mean
Search for my Tongue
by saying I have lost my tongue. it grows back, a stump of a shoot
I ask you, what would you do grows longer, grows moist, grows
if you had two tongues in your mouth, strong veins,
and lost the first one, the mother tongue, it ties the other tongue in knots,
and could not really know the other, the bud opens, the bud opens in my
the foreign tongue. mouth,
You could not use them both together it pushes the other tongue aside.
even if you thought that way. Every time I think I've forgotten,
And if you lived in a place you had to I think I've lost the mother tongue,
speak a foreign tongue, it blossoms out of my mouth.
 
your mother tongue would rot,  
rot and die in your mouth  
until you had to spit it out.
I thought I spit it out
but overnight while I dream,
SLIDESMANIA
Sujatha Bhatt was born in 1956 in India but later lived
in the USA and Germany . She writes in both English
and Gujarati, which she describes as her ‘mother
tongue’ . This poem was written when she was at
university in America. She was worried she might
forget her original language. She writes about being
stuck between two cultures; “I have always though of
myself as an Indian who is outside India”

Sujatha
Bhatt
SLIDESMANIA
Briefing of what happens through out poem!

We will talk about this second.


We will talk about this first.

After that we will talk about this. And we will talk about this last.
SLIDESMANIA
ABOUT Content
1. The poet writes about losing her tongue = forgetting
how to speak her Mother tongue.
2. But then, as she dreams, her mother tongue re-
asserts itself
3. She writes for a while in Gujarati, then translates it
for us

Explanation
Comes from when she was in America studying English,
and feared she was being ‘Americanised’/losing her Indian
identity.
She writes: ‘I have always thought of myself as an Indian
SLIDESMANIA

who is outside India … That's the deepest layer of my


identity."  
DID YOU KNOW?
Feelings of the Poet

1. At first she talks about the two languages as though they were at war, and is
fearful the foreign tongue seemed to be winning.
2. However, she finished confidently reasserting her knowledge of her Indian identity.
Quotations
‘rot and die’
‘I thought I had spit it out’
 
‘then overnight while I dream’
‘every time I think I've forgotten … it blossoms out of my mouth’
Explanation

= the foreign tongue is winning by default (‘rot’) or because she is consciously not
using it (‘spit it out’)
SLIDESMANIA

 
= the allusion to her ‘dreams’ has TWO meanings one, she speaks Gujarati literally in
her dreams, but also, it is her dream (her longing) to speak it always.

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