City Friends Advice and Advice to a Teenage I believe everyone of us has got some experience, about living in foreign country or using different language. Some of them are way too complicated, to be understood by other people. Some of them are even described by poetry. There are many of poems, telling about living within foreign community. But two of them, in my opinion, have got something special about them.
These two poems are: "Search for my tongue" by Sujata Bhatt and "Unrelated Incidents" written by Tom Leonard.As we look through "Search for my tongue", we see use of different language, right in the middle, just like in songs. It's written in some kind of African language, probably Gujerati. We clearly see, that the poem is about language. Leonard's poem, entitled "Unrelated Incidents" has no punctuation or capital letters.
The way it's written is also difficult to understand. but it gives an idea of different spelling, within the same language, called dialect. The poem is also about the language, and some kind of difficulties by public speaking (i. . news).
Although both poems are about language, they also say, how important it is, as a part of culture and our identity. Both poets address the reader directly: "You ask me what I mean" and "lik wanna yoo"; they remind the reader that not everyone speaks or thinks in Standard English. Doing so, they make reader feel a bit uncomfortable, being on the top of the situation, to make you ask yourself: "What if, I wouldn't understand the dialect? " There are also many metaphors, mainly in Bhatt's poem.She describes being between two languages as disadvantage: "two tongues in your mouth". But also she feels like her mother's tongue is like a part of her physical identity.
The poet develops the idea of her 'tongue' as a physical thing using metaphor of plant: "it grows back, a stump of a shoot". This means, that her language (tongue) is a deeply rooted part of her identity, exactly as plants and cultures (use of metaphor and topic of the poem). Therefore the metaphor is strongly related to all the ideas about the poem.
