The Full Text of “Search For My Tongue”
The Full Text of “Search For My Tongue”
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“Search For My Tongue” Introduction
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“Search for My Tongue” was written by the poet Sujata Bhatt, who 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. “Search for My Tongue” was first published in 1988, as part of Bhatt’s first collection of poems, Brunizem.
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“Search For My Tongue” Summary
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The speaker addresses someone who has just asked her what she means when she says she has lost her "tongue," meaning her language. The speaker asks this person what they would do if they had two different tongues (a figurative way of referring to language that the speaker uses throughout the poem) in their mouth, but then no longer had the first one, their native language, and couldn’t ever feel totally at ease with other one, the foreign language. The speaker says that you couldn’t use both of these languages at the same time, even if you thought and understood things in two languages at once. What's more, if you lived somewhere where you always had to speak in a foreign language, then your first language (again envisioned as a tongue) would start to decay until it eventually died in your mouth and then you had to spit it out and get rid of it entirely. The speaker says that she thought she had in fact spat out her own tongue (her first language), but something different happens in her dreams.
The speaker then shows what happens at night when she dreams, and speaks in Gujarati, her native language, for seven lines.
The speaker then translates what she has just said in Gujarati into English. She explains that, in her dream, her first language (again depicted as a tongue) grows back. At first it is just a small shoot, like the sprout of a plant. But then it grows longer and becomes stronger, to the point that it can even tie the foreign tongue up in knots. This first tongue is then compared to a budding flowers that blooms inside the speaker’s mouth, and in doing so pushes away the foreign tongue. The speaker concludes that each time she thinks she has forgotten or lost the ability to speaker her first language, it blooms like a flower out of her mouth.
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“Search For My Tongue” Themes
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Language, Identity, and Communication
The poem’s speaker is someone living in a foreign country who fears forgetting her native language. The poem shows how challenging it is for the speaker to have to speak only in a foreign language, and suggests that in losing her “mother tongue,” she would lose part of herself. The poem thus implies that language and identity are closely connected, with the former being essential to the preservation of the latter. It also explores the related anxiety surrounding the struggle to communicate, to express oneself fully, without access to one's native language.
Referring to her native language as her "mother tongue" reflects the fact that this language is an indelible part of who the speaker is; the loss of her language would be a loss of her heritage and sense of self. This, in turn, is why the speaker worries about her native language being “lost” from lack of use in her new home: “If you lived in a place you had to / speak a foreign tongue,” the speaker says, “your mother tongue would rot.” Like a malnourished plant, the language she grew up with would wither and die until she “had to spit it out”—get rid of it altogether.
At the same time, the speaker struggles to feel comfortable with the dominant language of her new home. She says she “could not really know” this other language, which suggests that no amount of study would make it feel as smooth and natural as the language she grew up speaking. She thus could never fully be herself—never really communicate fluently—using only in this foreign language. Implicitly, then, the poem suggests that the speaker is in danger of losing the ability to express herself altogether.
And yet the poem itself is written in two languages—suggesting that one’s native tongue isn’t so easily erased after all. The speaker uses English at the beginning, followed by a stanza of Gujarati. That the Gujarati section describes a dream suggests that this is the language in which she thinks and dreams, even if it’s not the one she always speaks in; this is the language she uses to essentially communicate with herself, which further establishes the important link between language and self-expression.
The section of Gujarati in the center of the poem also asks the reader to experience a sense of alienation themselves, similar to the alienation the speaker experiences in the culture she now inhabits. If the reader doesn’t know Gujarati, they must navigate a stanza of foreign language and experience some part of what it is like to be an outsider and struggle to communicate.
In the subsequent English translation of this stanza, though, the speaker insists that her native tongue keeps growing back, little by little, ultimately “push[ing] the other tongue aside.” Turning to her native language seems to have revitalized her, to the point that her mother tongue now “blossoms out of [her] mouth.” The joyous end of the poem reaffirms the connection between language, identity, and self-expression, suggesting that by using her native language, the speaker has regained part of herself.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-31
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Immigration and Assimilation
While “Search for My Tongue” establishes a general connection between language and identity, it also explicitly links this to the immigrant experience and the specific tension immigrants like the speaker may feel when trying to adjust to life in a new country without forgetting where they came from. The poem explores how immigrants must often negotiate between two supposedly irreconcilable identities: their own, and that of the dominant culture to which they now belong. The poem shows how that dominant culture can threaten to erode an immigrant's identity, while also reaffirming the enduring power of the speaker’s sense of self. In the end, the poem also suggests that immigrants may develop a new, distinct identity that integrates both of their cultural experiences.
The speaker's "two tongues" can be understood as representing different aspects of the speaker’s identity. These languages—and especially her first language, her “mother tongue”—are inextricably connected to who she is, reflecting where she came from as well as the new culture of which she is a part.
Yet the speaker also highlights the conflict between these two languages. The dominant culture threatens to actively destroy the speaker’s original identity; she feels she can't use the new, foreign tongue without implicitly pushing her native language aside. Society, it seems, doesn't want to allow for the nuance of bilingualism or having an identity that cannot be contained within a single cultural experience.
When the speaker says “[y]ou could not use” both languages “together / even if you thought that way,” this suggests that even though the speaker thinks and understands the world in both English and Gujarati, within the dominant, English-speaking culture she now inhabits, it is not acceptable to speak with both languages. Instead, there is overwhelming social pressure to speak and communicate only in English—to essentially choose one identity over another.
Yet the speaker goes on to say, “but overnight while I dream,” and then does speak in her native language, Gujarati, throughout the center of the poem. After this stanza, the speaker asserts that her mother tongue “grows back.” Through an extended metaphor, she envisions this language growing like a flowering plant that finally “blossoms out of [her] mouth.” Implicitly, the poem suggests that just as the speaker can still remember and speak in her native language, this aspect of her identity still lives in her, despite all the pressures and constrictions of the larger society. Like a flowering plant, her native language and identity is vital and alive, and can grow back again and again.
Finally, it is important that the poem doesn’t only express the resilience of the speaker’s native language. The poem also actively brings together English and Gujarati, incorporating both into a new form of expression that can encompass the complex nature of the speaker’s identity. The poem thus subtly suggests that despite social pressures to completely assimilate, it is important for immigrants to forge identities and understandings of themselves that include all aspects of their experience.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-31
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Search For My Tongue”
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Lines 1-4
You ask me ...
... in your mouth,At the start of the poem, the speaker addresses someone (a “you”) who has asked her “what [she] mean[s]” when she says she has “lost [her] tongue.” The word “tongue” is often used to stand in for language, since people use their tongues and mouths to shape words. Here, the speaker uses the word “tongue” in this way—as a metonym for language itself. What the speaker means here, then, is that she has said she has lost her own language, and someone has asked her what she means by this.
Yet as the poem goes on, the speaker makes this metonym more literal: “I ask you,” she says, “what would you do / if you had two tongues in your mouth.” In these lines, the speaker asks both the “you” she addresses, as well as the reader, to imagine what it would be like to literally have two tongues, and how difficult it would be to speak.
At the level of sound, these lines replicate some of this difficulty: the alliteration of /w/ sounds in “what would” and /t/ sounds in “two tongues” create a kind of tongue twister. At the same time, the assonance in “you,” “two,” and “do” emphasizes the speaker’s address to the “you,” asking this “you” and the reader to imagine what she describes.
This opening of the poem can be read as establishing its primary conflict, as the speaker describes what it is like to have to live with “two tongues” or two languages. The lines themselves enact this duality in a number of ways. First, the repetition of “tongue” (which appears in its second iteration as “tongues”) as well as “you” and “I” calls attention to the fact that the speaker must deal with having “two tongues.” It also suggests that there is a kind of gap or misunderstanding between the “you” on the one hand and the “I” on the other, as though the speaker’s experience isn’t fully seen or understood by the person she addresses.
Additionally, the lines alternate between instances of enjambment ("mean / by"; "do / if") and end-stopped lines. This alternation builds a kind of tension and back-and-forth into the poem at the outset, implying that the speaker’s internal experience, too, is one of tension and inner conflict.
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Lines 5-7
and lost the ...
... the foreign tongue. -
Lines 8-11
You could not ...
... a foreign tongue, -
Lines 12-16
your mother tongue ...
... while I dream, -
Lines 17-23
munay hutoo kay ...
... modhama pakay chay -
Lines 24-28
it grows back, ...
... other tongue aside. -
Lines 29-31
Everytime I think ...
... of my mouth.
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“Search For My Tongue” Symbols
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The Dream
The dream in the poem reflects the speaker's ultimately unshakable connection to her native language. It can be thought of as a manifestation of her truest self.
At the end of the first stanza, the speaker says, “but overnight while I dream,” and then goes on to speak in Gujarati. The speaker implies, then, that the native language she fears she has lost isn’t lost at all. On the contrary, it comes to life again while she is dreaming, and in her dreams she fluently speaks that "mother tongue."
Dreams are understood to come from the deepest levels of someone’s consciousness. As such, they often symbolize the unconscious or subconscious levels of a person’s thoughts. The fact that the speaker dreams in Gujarati, then, implies that this language lives at a deep level of her consciousness and her existence. Something so deeply connected to her identity, the poem suggests, can’t truly be lost.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 16: “but overnight while I dream,”
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The Bud and Blossom
In the last section of the poem, the speaker describes how her native language reemerges like a flowering plant. First, the speaker says that the language grows stronger, and then compares it to a “bud” of a flower that begins to open. Finally, the speaker concludes that every time she fears she has lost her native language, it “blossoms out of [her] mouth.”
Flowers, and especially the new buds of flowers, symbolize new life, and the reemergence of life after a period of dormancy. The image of the flowering plant, then, is highly symbolic in the poem. These images of buds and blossoms suggest that the speaker’s native language has never truly died at all. Instead, it might go dormant during periods of time, like a plant in winter. But implicitly, it will always come back and flower again.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Line 27: “the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth,”
- Line 31: “it blossoms out of my mouth.”
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“Search For My Tongue” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Metonymy
A metonym is a figure of speech in which a part of something stands in for the whole. Since people use their mouths and tongues to shape words, languages are also sometime metonymically called “tongues.” In “Search for My Tongue,” the speaker of the poem makes use of this metonym, referring to both her native language and the new, foreign language she must now use as “tongues.” (Technically this could also be interpreted as the related device known as synecdoche, if readers take the tongue as being something closely associated with language rather than a part of it.)
Interestingly, the speaker makes this metonym literal; she describes her “two tongues” as though the languages are two literal tongues. She also asks the reader to imagine what it would be like “if you had two tongues in your mouth,” emphasizing the difficulty of navigating between these two languages.
This metonym makes clear that the languages are inextricably connected to the speaker. Since she describes them—and especially her “mother tongue,” her native language—as part of her body, the poem implies that in losing her native language, the speaker would lose a crucial part of herself. The metonym also makes the imagined loss of the speaker’s native language intensely vivid and palpable, as the speaker imagines this “tongue” literally dying in her mouth. Finally, at the end of the poem, the speaker describes her native language reemerging as a literal, physical part of her being, emphasizing the power and resilience of her identity and sense of self.
Where metonymy appears in the poem:- Line 2: “I have lost my tongue.”
- Lines 3-4: “what would you do / if you had two tongues in your mouth,”
- Line 5: “the mother tongue,”
- Line 7: “the foreign tongue.”
- Line 12: “mother tongue”
- Line 26: “it ties the other tongue in knots,”
- Line 28: “it pushes the other tongue aside.”
- Line 30: “mother tongue,”
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Extended Metaphor
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Alliteration
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Consonance
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Assonance
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Imagery
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Enjambment
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End-Stopped Line
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Anaphora
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Asyndeton
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Repetition
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"Search For My Tongue" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Tongue
- Foreign
- The Gujarati Section
- Shoot
- Stump
- Bud
- Blossoms
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(Location in poem: Line 2: “tongue.”; Line 4: “tongues”; Line 5: “tongue,”; Line 7: “ tongue.”; Line 11: “tongue,”; Line 12: “tongue”; Line 26: “tongue”; Line 28: “tongue”; Line 30: “tongue,”)
In addition to being a physical part of someone's body, the word "tongue" can also refer to a language. In "Search for My Tongue," the speaker uses the word in both ways. When she talks about her "mother tongue" she refers to her native language. Yet she also asks the reader to imagine what it would be like to have two literal tongues and have to navigate both of these tongues, and the languages they represent, at the same time.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Search For My Tongue”
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Form
“Search for My Tongue” does not follow a fixed or traditional form. Instead, the poem creates its own form that is important to its meaning.
The poem is written in three stanzas. The first and third stanzas are written in English, while the middle stanza is written in Gujarati, the speaker’s native language. This structure suggests that for the speaker, Gujarati is, in a sense, at the center of her identity. Connecting with this language and this aspect of herself is essential, the poem suggests, and since the Gujarati section of the poem describes the speaker’s dreams, the poem also implies that this language lives in a deep part of the speaker’s consciousness.
Importantly, the last stanza is actually a translation of this Gujarati; the speaker translates what she has just said into English. The poem shows, then, that while Gujarati is an essential part of the speaker and who she is, the English language is also now part of who she is, and she can use both languages, together, to fully express her experience.
Finally, it is notable that the first stanza ends with a comma, and the second stanza ends without punctuation; each, then, leads fluidly into the next. This suggests that these two aspects of the speaker’s experience and identity are not as disparate or mutually exclusive as they might initially seem. Instead, the poem’s form suggests that the speaker can bring these elements of her experience together, into an integrated, complex whole.
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Meter
As a free verse poem, like many contemporary poems, “Search for My Tongue” does not use a fixed meter. Instead, the poem sounds spoken and even colloquial. From the beginning, when the speaker addresses a “you,” to the middle of the poem, when she speaks in Gujarati, the speaker seems to be addressing the reader—and herself—as though in conversation.
Since the poem itself is about communication and self-expression, these qualities are important to its meaning. Just as the speaker celebrates her native language reemerging organically, like a flowering plant, the poem itself seems to emerge organically from the speaker’s communication about her experience, suggesting that the speaker values an experience of language that is natural, immediate, and direct.
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Rhyme Scheme
“Search for My Tongue” is a free verse poem that has no fixed rhyme scheme. However, the poem does contain patterns of sound and meaning throughout.
For example, in the opening stanza, the assonant sounds of “you,” “do,” and “two” emphasize the speaker’s address to the person she is addressing and ask the reader, too, to imagine themselves within her situation. Later in this stanza, the consonant /t/ sounds in “rot,” “spit,” "it," and "out" convey the violent finality the speaker fears experiencing with the loss of her native language. Instead of rhyme, then, the poem uses other kinds of sound echoes to connect words together and create music and meaning.
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“Search For My Tongue” Speaker
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Several aspects of “Search for My Tongue” suggest that the speaker is someone living in a new country, who must now use a new foreign language and fears losing her native language as a result. The speaker asks the reader to imagine, for example, what it is like to “liv[e] in a place” where “you had to / speak a foreign tongue.” These lines imply that the speaker is an immigrant facing pressure to assimilate to a new culture and adopt its dominant language. As a result, the speaker fears that her “mother tongue” will “rot” and that she will lose it altogether. In the middle of the poem, the speaker then does speak in her native language, showing that in fact this language isn’t lost at all; she is bilingual and both aspects of her identity are alive within the poem.
While the speaker of the poem remains unnamed and ungendered, the poem can be read as in the voice of the poet, Sujata Bhatt. Bhatt was born in India but immigrated to the United States with her family when she was 12. Her native language, like that of the speaker in the poem, is Gujarati. And Bhatt has remarked that the Gujarati language and her childhood in India is “the deepest layer of [her] identity.”
At the same time, the open-ended quality of the poem and of the speaker’s identity is important to its meaning. While the poem specifically invokes Gujarati, a language from the state of Gujarat in India, many other immigrants and people of mixed ancestry might find some aspect of their experience reflected in the dynamics of language, identity, and culture the speaker describes.
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“Search For My Tongue” Setting
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While the setting of “Search for My Tongue” remains unspecified, the speaker suggests that she is living in a new, foreign culture—implicitly an English-speaking culture such as the United States or the United Kingdom. The setting isn’t physically described, but its pressures on the speaker are evident, as she mentions, for instance, thinking in both languages (English and Gujarati) but not being able to speak in both of these languages at the same time. Implicitly, the culture where the speaker now lives demands that she assimilate in both identity and language and speak only in English, the dominant language of this society.
At another level of the poem, the setting can be understood as that of the speaker’s consciousness. Within this “setting,” the speaker is able to free herself from the constrictions of the larger, social setting. She can dream in Gujarati, and experience the reemergence of her native language like a flowering plant in a natural landscape. This setting of the speaker’s inner world, in contrast to the threatening, deadening effect of the larger culture she describes, is vibrant and vividly alive.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Search For My Tongue”
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Literary Context
“Search for My Tongue” was included in Sujata Bhatt’s first collection of poems, Brunizem, first published in 1988. The collection’s title refers to a type of dark soil or earth that can be found in North America as well as Asia (including India) and Europe; the title, then, alludes to the creative “earth,” or source, of Bhatt’s poems, which draw on a range of cultural influences and languages, including Bhatt’s childhood in India and her experiences immigrating to the United States. Bhatt moved to Germany shortly after Brunizem was published and lives there now with her husband and daughter.
“Search for My Tongue,” and other of Bhatt’s poems that incorporate different languages, can be understood through the lens of bilingual poetry. In bilingual literature, writers bring together different languages into a single work in order to convey experiences of language, culture and identity that can’t be expressed in a monolingual way.
A more recent term that could also be applied to Bhatt’s work is that of translingual writing and poetry. Translingual poetry attempts to displace the centrality of English as the presumed, dominant mode of writing; it creates room for different languages and modes of expression. In “Search for My Tongue,” it is clear that both English and Gujarati are centrally important to the speaker’s experience and to her identity. Both, then, are necessary for the poem’s meaning.
As a poem, “Search for My Tongue” has reached many readers who can relate to the speaker’s depictions of her multicultural experience and the pressures of assimilation. The poem is taught in British schools as part of the AQA (Assessments and Qualifications Alliance) anthology, and in 1994, the poem was choreographed by Daksha Sheth. The UK-based South Asian Dance Youth Company performed the poem with Sheth’s choreography, under the title “Tongues Untied,” in nine cities across the UK.
Historical Context
A key part of the historical context of “Search for My Tongue” begins long before the poem was published in 1988. The poet, Sujata Bhatt, was born in India, which had been a British colony until 1947. The legacy of colonialism in India means that English is still a dominant language, particularly in education, and Bhatt attended an English school while a child in India. Even though she was in her own country, then, and her native language was Gujarati, she already navigated two languages—a colonial language, and her own “mother tongue.”
In “Search for My Tongue,” too, it is clear that the speaker doesn’t only negotiate between two languages; one language, the “foreign tongue,” is dominant, and essentially oppressive to the speaker’s native language. This dynamic of power in language, culture, and identity, is crucially important to the poem, as the speaker eventually resists the pressures of assimilation to claim her own native language and all aspects of her identity.
More immediately to the time the poem was published, the 1980s were the era of the Reagan administration in the U.S. and the Thatcher administration in the UK, a period of intense conservatism and anti-immigrant policies. States in the U.S. began to establish English-only laws during this decade, making it illegal for people to speak a language other than English. When the speaker of the poem says, then, that she lives in a place where she “ha[s] to / speak a foreign tongue,” she invokes real pressures of xenophobia and assimilation that are also acutely present today.
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More “Search For My Tongue” Resources
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External Resources
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Interview with Sujata Bhatt — Read this interview with Sujata Bhatt to learn more about why she values poetry and how different cultures influence her work. The interview includes an audio and video clip in which Bhatt discusses the importance of poetry to her.
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Sujata Bhatt on the Blending of Languages in Poetry — Watch this short video to see Sujata Bhatt discuss why she writes poetry in English, as well as why in some poems, including “Search for My Tongue,” she combines English and Gujarati, her native language.
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“Search for My Tongue” Recited by Fatima Djalalova — Watch this clip from a 2019 Ted Talk to hear 11th-grader Fatima Djalalova from Uzbekistan recite Bhatt’s poem and discuss what it means to her. Djalalova is a native speaker of Russian and Uzbek, and a student in an international school where English is the dominant language. In this clip, she explores the connection between language and identity and talks about the importance of linguistic diversity.
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Biography of Sujata Bhatt — Read more about Sujata Bhatt’s life and work in this article from the British Council.
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Audio of Poems from Brunizem — Listen to Sujata Bhatt read a number of poems from her first collection, Brunizem, in which “Search for My Tongue” first appeared. Like “Search for My Tongue,” many of the poems in this collection draw on different cultural influences and linguistic traditions.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Sujata Bhatt
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