Moving Between Different Cultures in Poetry Essay -- Half Caste Search

Moving Between Different Cultures in Poetry For my essay I will be looking at two poems which deal with the experience of moving between different cultures, these are Half-Caste and Search for My Tongue. These poems are written from experience. John Agard the author of Half-Caste was born in Gugana and moved to Britain in 1977. He is half-caste himself and his poem expresses his feelings about the term half-caste. Sujata Bhatt the authoress of Search for My Tongue was born in India in 1956, her family moved to the United States of America in the 1960's and she now lives in Germany. In her poem Search for My Tongue she explains how she feels about having two different languages her birth language, Gujerati and her second language, German. Half-Caste and Search for My Tongue, create very vivid images, which makes it easier for the reader to interpret and understand both the poems and the authors' opinion on the different cultures. Half- Caste creates many images, by using descriptive language and humour. It creates such images as a man, 'standing on leg' and having 'half mih ear' because he is only half-caste so he only has half what a normal person would have but it also creates images about objects 'mix a red an green is a half-caste canvas' and even music 'mix a black key wid a white key is a half-caste symphony'. This helps the reader to understand how the author is feeling about the term half-caste, and can also come to a conclusion about the term themselves. All the imagery in this poem makes the reader think about how anybody who has ever been called half-caste feels. Search for My Tongue creates a very vivid image using very descriptive metaphors, 'it grows back, a stump of a shoot, grows ... ...age which creates vivid images for the reader. Using gujerati in the middle of the poems shows that her mother tongue, her birth language, is still strong and at times, even stronger then her second language. In conclusion both of these poems deal with the issues faced when moving between different cultures in their own ways. They both use language and imagery to express their messages Half- Caste explores the way that we use the term 'half-caste' in our vocabulary and exaggerates it. This is to a great effect as it makes the reader think more about racial issues and the way that we treat people from different cultures. Search for my Tongue deals with moving between different cultures by actually writing about the language barriers and losing your identity. This is how we can link the poems together and show how people move between different cultures.