"Search For My Tongue"

Search For My Tongue 
Sujata Bhatt

You ask me what I mean
by saying I have lost my tongue.
I ask you, what would you do
if you had two tongues in your mouth,
and lost the first one,
the mother tongue,
and could not really know the other,
the foreign tongue.
You could not use them both together
even if you thought that way.
And if you lived in a place you had to
speak a foreign tongue,
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,
(munay hutoo kay aakhee jeebh aakhee bhasha)
(may thoonky nakhi chay)
(parantoo rattray svupnama mari bhasha pachi aavay chay)
(foolnee jaim mari bhasha nmari jeebh)
(modhama kheelay chay)
(fullnee jaim mari bhasha mari jeebh)
(modhama pakay chay)
it grows back, a stump of a shoot
grows longer, grows moist, grows strong veins,
it ties the other tongue in knots,
the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth,
it pushes the other tongue aside.
Every time I think I've forgotten,
I think I've lost the mother tongue,
it blossoms out of my mouth.

About Poet:

    “Search for My Tongue” was written by the poet Sujata Bhatt. Sujata Bhatt was born in Gujarat, India, but immigrated to the United States with her family when she was 12. “Search for My Tongue” combines English and Gujarati, Bhatt’s native language, as it explores what it is like to be an immigrant in a new culture, the pressures of assimilation, and the relationship between language and identity.

 

About Poem :

    Sujata Bhatt’s poem is about what it is like to live in a foreign country feeling disconnected from the cultural background. The poet feels at the beginning of the poem that she has lost her original language now that she is living abroad. The poet feels that she has lost an important part of herself that she needs to recover to feel herself again.

    Sujata Bhatt use a mixture of language in her poem. There is the conversational of the opening, the extended metaphor of language being like a plant and there is also the use of Gujarati. The poem is also about Colonialism and Emigration. The lost language can be seen as representative of the loss of a cultural heritage of values and ways of thinking. The fact that Sujata Bhatt is Asian may suggest that she is referring to how the colonized India imposing laws and language.

 Colonialism can generally be defined as the systematic establishment of ruling power systems by external political cultural authority; as Eavan Boland remarked, “Power has just as much to do with a poetic sphere of operation as any other…power has operated in the making of canons, the making of taste, the nominating of what poems should represent the age and so on”.

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