"Search for My Tongue" is like a poetry turducken. If you're not familiar with this culinary feast, a turducken is what happens when you roast a duck, inside of a chicken, inside of a turkey. Mmm, we can just hear you all salivating from here.
In this case, Sujata Bhatt has whipped up three levels of meaning for us to munch on: identity, which is wrapped up in language, which is then described as a "mother" or "foreign tongue." That's a long way of saying that, when the speaker of the poem says "tongue" in this poem, what she really means is language and communication. But she's not just on about how tricky it is to use Google Translate. For this poem, language is an important source of personal identity.
Questions About Language and Communication
- Why is her "mother tongue" so important to the speaker?
- What does the wild second stanza tell us about how this speaker views language?
- Why do you think the speaker can't use two languages together? What parts of the poem support your answer?
- Are there any positives, according to this poem, of knowing two languages?
Chew on This
This poem is proof that, by asking people to speak in another language, we're asking them to give up a piece of themselves.
Sorry, gang, but this poem totally discounts the benefits of being multilingual. Learning a new language is not an either-or proposition. The more languages you speak, the better off you are.