High Grade Analysis of Search for my Tongue

In this video, we cover:

• Apostrophe & The Question-and-Answer Frame: How opening with "You ask me what I mean" uses apostrophe to respond to an unseen listener, foregrounding the idea that the immigrant experience is widely misunderstood and establishing an educational purpose.

• The "Lost Tongue" Idiom vs. Metaphor: Distinguishing between the idiom of being rendered speechless and the literal loss of a language, showing how language loss causes vulnerability and shyness.

• Two Tongues & Bodily Discomfort: Analysing the uncomfortable physical image of having two tongues in one mouth to mirror the unnatural friction of navigating multiple cultures.

• "Mother Tongue" vs. "Foreign Tongue": The juxtaposition between the intimate, nurturing connotations of "mother" and the cold, alienating distance of "foreign".

• Patterns of Negative Language & Grotesque Imagery: How words of loss and limitation culminate in visceral, grotesque imagery ("rot / rot and die in your mouth") to convey the horror of cultural erasure.

• The Dream as a Volta: Why the turning point occurs during sleep, symbolising that native culture lives deep within the subconscious and can never be permanently repressed.

• Gujarati Script & Structural Dominance: The significance of placing the Gujarati text before the English translation, visually and structurally asserting the dominance of the mother tongue.

• The Botanical Metaphor: Tracking the aggressive vitality of plant imagery ("stump of a shoot," "strong veins," tying the foreign tongue in knots, pushing it aside) to demonstrate that native heritage is alive, natural, and powerful.

• Present Tense & Active Immediacy: Why repeating active verbs like "grows" reinforces that bilingual identity struggles are not past events, but ongoing daily realities.

• The Final Coda: How the closing image—"it blossoms out of my mouth"—serves as a definitive, confident answer to the opening question, shifting the tone from despair to hard-won solace.

• Form & Conversational Authenticity: Why free verse is used to create an authentic, realistic speaking voice appropriate for a poem centred on human communication.

Timestamps

• 0:00 – The Core Theme: Culture, Identity, & The Immigrant Experience

• 1:19 – Apostrophe vs. Direct Address: The Question-and-Answer Framework

• 2:50 – Idiom vs. Metaphor: Losing Your Tongue & Communication Struggles

• 4:45 – "Two Tongues in Your Mouth": Physical & Cultural Discomfort

• 5:18 – Juxtaposition: "Mother Tongue" (Intimacy) vs. "Foreign Tongue" (Distance)

• 6:39 – The Reality of Bilingual Thought & Patterns of Negative Language

• 8:10 – Grotesque Imagery: Rotting, Dying, & The Helplessness of "Had To"

• 9:50 – The Volta: Dreams, The Subconscious, & Innate Culture

• 10:24 – Gujarati Script: Meaning, Placement, & Cultural Dominance

• 11:54 – The Plant Metaphor: Shoot, Veins, & Tying the Foreign Tongue in Knots

• 12:54 – Repetition, Present Tense, & Ongoing Bilingual Realities

• 15:21 – The Final Coda: "It Blossoms Out of My Mouth" & Reclaimed Solace

• 17:50 – Form & Metre: Free Verse & Conversational Authenticity

All of these videos are on my YouTube channel. However, there are a few benefits to watching them here instead:

1. You can register to keep a track of which videos you’ve watched

2. You can bookmark lessons for later

3. There may or may not be no ads, but I can neither confirm nor deny and I definitely didn't tell you if YouTube asked, OK?

There are also study materials on the site that can help with this IGCSE:

• Fiction Technique Bank: An extensive revision toolkit outlining key linguistic and structural devices, complete with explanations and model examples to show you how to analyse writer's craft rather than just spotting techniques.

• Unlocking Shakespeare: A complete student guide packed with practical reading strategies, contextual breakdowns, and methods to decode Early Modern English without getting stuck in the language.

• Still I Rise Teaching PowerPoint: A fully resourced, line-by-line slide deck exploring form, structure, poetic devices, and historical context for focused study or revision.

• Poetry Technique Bank: A dedicated guide designed specifically to master poetic form, metre, rhyme schemes, and structural choices across both seen anthology and unseen poetry questions.

Lesson Transcript

0:00 – The Core Theme: Culture, Identity, & The Immigrant Experience

This is such a nice but straightforward poem, so we're going to get through this pretty quickly. And basically, to give you the sort of thematic overview, this poem is exploring this idea of culture and identity, specifically the ways in which you can lose your original culture when you're living in a different culture. So it's very much exploring the immigrant experience in that way.

The poem is called "Search for My Tongue," and that tongue is an extended metaphor, yes, for language, but that language has so much more meaning to it than just the words that we speak, and in fact actually embodies the culture that the speaker of the poem was uh raised in. And the speaker of our poem is writing—we don't know who they are specifically beyond the fact that there's someone who is, you know, living in a different culture and struggling with the loss of their original culture; we don't know anything beyond that—but they frame the poem as a conversation to someone who doesn't have this experience, someone who doesn't understand what it's like to have an original culture and then feel like you're losing that to the new culture that you are living in. So let's get dive straight into this poem and like look at some of these techniques.

1:19 – Apostrophe vs. Direct Address: The Question-and-Answer Framework

Now I would say that this "you" of the poem, a lot of people would call that direct address because it's directly addressing the audience, and I understand why. I personally would argue actually that this technique is apostrophe. Now I know what you're thinking: apostrophe, what, no, you're not—not the punctuation mark apostrophe! Uh, this is a poetic technique where the speaker of the poem is addressing uh someone who is not there, a sort of another character or or maybe like a concept, like they're speaking to death or something like that um. And the reason I say that it's apostrophe is because the way that it's phrased: "You ask me what I mean." So as if the speaker of the poem has been posed a question, and then this is their response.

I think it's really important that the beginning of the very sort of opening of the poem focuses in on a question-answer sense of style, because what it does is immediately foreground the—this speaker, uh the immigrant experience is not widely understood, and therefore it foregrounds the the poet's purpose being to educate or highlight that experience to us as the reader so that we better understand. Even if we uh are monocultural, we understand what it is like um for people who have multiple cultures, multiple languages.

2:50 – Idiom vs. Metaphor: Losing Your Tongue & Communication Struggles

And she has this metaphor that I was saying about before that's extended throughout the poem of: "I have lost my tongue." There are two ways to look at this. Uh first is as an idiom: an idiom is like a classic phrase or saying, and in this case, when you've lost your tongue, the idiom means that you you know you you don't know what to say, you're silent. On the other hand, it can also be a metaphor, where tongue is a metaphor for the language that you speak, and then so losing your tongue is losing the language that you spoke.

Here's why it's significant that there were two ways to look at it: we could kind of say there's an almost cause and effect between them, in the sense that the metaphor is about losing your language, and as a consequence of that, perhaps our speaker is suggesting that they now feel more shy, more vulnerable, and therefore communication more widely feels difficult for them.

The speaker then flips it back onto this uh imagined listener, this listener we don't know: "I ask you, what would you do." Now the classic effect with apostrophe, as much as with direct address, is that even though we the reader aren't necessarily the person that the speaker is speaking to, it still puts us in a position of feeling like it is directly speaking to us. It is causing us to reflect on ourselves and our lives. And of course this interrogative of "I ask you, what would you do" is outright asking us to, you know, listen to her experience and then reflect for ourselves, fitting again part of the writer's purpose of highlighting this experience of people with uh multiple cultures by getting us to reflect on how we would feel, getting us to empathize.

4:45 – "Two Tongues in Your Mouth": Physical & Cultural Discomfort

Our metaphor extends um, and we have this image of: what would you do if you had "two tongues in your mouth." Again, tongue is representing language, so two tongues in the mouth is, you know, having more than one language. But I think what's key about this imagery is that it sounds very uncomfortable, and it reflects the discomfort our immigrant feels, as if things don't quite feel natural, things don't feel like they're quite fitting together. Perhaps it's a bit overwhelming and too much, just as having two tongues in your mouth would be.

5:18 – Juxtaposition: "Mother Tongue" (Intimacy) vs. "Foreign Tongue" (Distance)

She calls one of the languages the "mother tongue." Now again, this is a, you know, classic phrase we use all the time in the English language meaning the language that you were raised speaking. That being said, I think Sujata Bhatt is taking advantage of why why we call it the mother tongue, and those connotations in mother of something that's nurturing, of something that there's a great close relationship and history there. And so by using that phrase "mother tongue" that is very commonly used, we are reminded of how significant and important a first language can be to a person.

That then of course is flipped with the fact that the other language is referred to as the "foreign tongue," with that juxtaposition in the closeness and intimacy connoted by "mother" contrasting with the distance connoted by "foreign." And so we see that there's a real sadness in losing the one that you are close to, but also at the same time not being able to get closer to the one you don't know. So what it feels like when we're presented with these two scenarios, what it feels like is there's sort of it's a lose-lose situation for our speaker.

6:39 – The Reality of Bilingual Thought & Patterns of Negative Language

And that lose-lose situation continues to be built in the next lines: "you could not use them both together / even if you thought that way." So I think that's a reference to the fact that people who are bilingual, when they're dreaming or they're thinking, can often sort of go back and forth between the two languages. They can say, you know, think one thing in French and then another thing in English, and maybe the languages mingle together. So even one sentence could have multiple languages within it, and they can handle that fine in their minds because they know both languages. But when they're speaking to others, it's probably quite rare that they have someone they can speak to who also can do that. And therefore when they speak out loud, they have to commit to one of the two languages, because most of the people that they're around don't know both, and therefore can't do that sort of mix of the two.

What I've just said there is just a sort of explanation of what the poet is saying, but in terms of the crafting that's going on, I would pick up on first of all the pattern of negative language, right? So we've had "lost," said twice; uh "not know the other"; "not use them both." This pattern of negative language of uh limitation, of loss, really makes the situation feel almost quite hopeless. And so our speaker is really trying to show how difficult their situation is.

8:10 – Grotesque Imagery: Rotting, Dying, & The Helplessness of "Had To"

And that keeps going with our next lot of imagery: "if you lived in a place you had to / speak a foreign tongue, / your mother tongue would rot, / rot and die in your mouth." So just as with the two tongues in your mouth, the goal of the "rot and die in your mouth" is designed to just be grotesque. Our first one was uncomfortable imagery; now we've got flat-out grotesque imagery um that's designed to perhaps trigger an emotional response in our reader uh in reaction to the fact that this person can't speak another language anymore.

You know, it's—if you think about it, telling someone, "Oh, I've lost my original language," someone who doesn't know what that's like might be like, "Okay, cool, sorry about that," and feel nothing. But when you talk about your tongue rotting and dying in your mouth, that suddenly that image is so powerful and visceral in how unpleasant and and uncomfortable and sad it is, suddenly we understand the situation a lot better. So our poet is using these metaphors, these images, to help the reader and the person that the speaker in the poem is speaking to understand.

I think it's also worth uh noting the repeated use of "had to," and how that and how that again uh creates a sense of helplessness, because our speaker, it seems like they have no control. They have no control over having to speak the foreign tongue; they have no control of losing the mother tongue. So everything feels very helpless and hopeless, because this horrible thing is happening to them and they can't really do anything about it.

9:50 – The Volta: Dreams, The Subconscious, & Innate Culture

We then, however—that's where we leave off—we then have a volta, because: "overnight while I dream." So I think it's important to note that the volta occurs with a dream, because dreams represent our subconscious, if you will, that sort of deep, innate part of us. And so for things to change, for our speaker to realize actually they haven't lost their mother tongue, by having that in the dream, it's kind of making a point as though, you know, your culture is an innate part of who you are, it never leaves you. And we'll see that as we carry on going through.

10:24 – Gujarati Script: Meaning, Placement, & Cultural Dominance

Now the reason it's a volta is we have a section in the language of Gujarati. Obviously I cannot read um the language of Gujarati, and I'm not going to attempt to because I would get rightfully slammed in the comments section um. But for those of you that like me don't know what that says, I have done the research, and I you can trust me when I say what the Gujarati says is what the last chunk of the poem says uh—unless, of course, there's a twist where all people who can speak Gujarati are messing with us, and actually that section says something like, "Poo poo, I like ice cream, haha, fooled you," you know, something just to troll us! Can you imagine, like, this poem has been taught for years, and all Gujarati speakers are on this secret trolling against people who can't speak Gujarati, being like, "Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's that's what the poem says!"

Anyway, so what the poem says is: it grows back, a stump of a shoot, grows longer, grows moist—the "it" is the language, by the way—grows strong veins, it ties the other tongue in knots, etc. The reason this is this Gujarati bit is significant, it's not just because it's a literal representation of the return of her language, but also structurally it comes first. The Gujarati version comes before the English version, and that symbolizes the dominance of the mother tongue. And that's reinforced by what the Gujarati is actually saying.

11:54 – The Plant Metaphor: Shoot, Veins, & Tying the Foreign Tongue in Knots

So we have a new metaphor that comes in and joins our tongue metaphor, and it is all plant imagery, a plant metaphor. So the "grows back a stump of a shoot / grows longer, grows moist, grows strong veins." It's no coincidence that she's using natural imagery here to represent her tongue coming back, because of course it's this idea of it's her natural, innate culture and language that she was born with, and so she's using this plant metaphor.

I think another reason she uses this plant imagery is because it simultaneously has a beauty about it, with the "strong veins," with the "moist" and the bud opening, but also at the same time there is an aggression, there is a forcefulness in there as well uh with the "ties the other tongue in knots," "pushes the other tongue aside." So there's a sense of beauty and also power and strength in this mother tongue language.

12:54 – Repetition, Present Tense, & Ongoing Bilingual Realities

You probably noticed that throughout the poem, we have a fair amount of like repetition: "grows back," "grows longer," "grows strong veins"; "the bud opens," "the bud opens in my mouth." We had it before: "rot," "rot and die"; "thought you had to spit it out," "I thought I spit it out." I wouldn't say the effects of the repetition are always the same um. I think with the "grows," it's linked to something that is across this poem, and it's linked to the fact that the poem is in present tense, and I think that's creating an active immediacy to things.

So by the repeating the "grows," it creates more of a physical sense, of physical active sense um along with the present tense of the mother tongue returning and coming back. And I think in terms of why make it present tense, why make it active in the moment, I think there are a couple of reasons. One is I think that the poet wants to make sure we don't feel like this is a past tense thing that they're done with um; this is something that uh bilingual people will be going through all the time. It's an active, ongoing issue, and therefore warrants a present tense about it.

I think there's also something more unpleasant in the "rot and die" when it is feels like it's happening in that moment as opposed to it's happened with the "rot and rot and die in your mouth." I think the repetition here, if I was being generic, I would say, "Oh, it adds emphasis." We don't just want to say it adds emphasis, don't do that! You need to explain: why would our poet want to add emphasis at this point? And I think it's part of the passionate tone of our speaker, and how much they want our um reader to understand this situation, because they are really trying to stress the unpleasantness of this imagery. Ditto the "spit it out" um, like really reinforcing just how horrible it all is.

Similarly with "the bud opens," "the bud opens in my mouth," I wonder if there's a little bit of a tone of incredulity, almost as if our speaker is like wonderfully and pleasantly surprised that this can be happening, like: oh my god, the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth! It's more repeating out of a surprise joy that they can't believe this is all happening.

15:21 – The Final Coda: "It Blossoms Out of My Mouth" & Reclaimed Solace

And the way the poem ends: "Everytime I think I've forgotten, / I think I've lost the mother tongue, / it blossoms out of my mouth."

That "everytime" just reinforces what I've been saying about the why this is in present tense, right? This is not a one-off thing that happened in the past; it's a sort of ongoing experience for our speaker, but also other bilingual, bicultural people. And what I think the last lines are doing is essentially serving as a coda, a final answer to—you remember we had that like question and answer right at the beginning of what do you what I mean by saying "I have lost my tongue"? We get a sort of final answer to the question, which is more balanced than in the beginning. So in the beginning, it's: you know, I've lost my tongue, here's what that means, it's so horrible. And then the addition is: I think I've lost my tongue, but actually I haven't, it blossoms out of my mouth.

So this last uh sentence of the poem really summarizes the point that the entire poem is making. And if we look at that last bit of the plant metaphor, of it blossoming out of her mouth, the "blossom" is like what I was saying before about the beauty of that language and how natural it is that it comes out from her. But also, if you think about what I was saying before about losing your tongue and its idiom being a struggle with communication, "blossom" is the opposite of that. It can suggest someone who is growing and improving in their ability to communicate, whereby "mouth" symbolizes communication. So it's almost like a reverse of what we had before, and in that sense, we see the transformative power of language and the confidence it can give us: the lack of confidence suggested by "lost my tongue" versus the great confidence suggested by it blossoming out of her mouth.

So what's interesting about the tone that this poem ends on, I wouldn't say it's like a positive or happy tone straightforwardly, because they are still ultimately saying, you know, they go through the experience of thinking they've lost their mother tongue, which is um, you know, not nice, but then it always returns and comes back. So it's more of a comforted, like a a solace that they're getting in knowing that they will always have their language with them.

17:50 – Form & Metre: Free Verse & Conversational Authenticity

One more thing that I think that's just worth noting about the poem as a whole is the conversational tone that it is written in. And that conversational tone is partly created by the fact that it's in free verse, which means that there's no rhythm or rhyme to it um, so it feels a lot more natural in the way that they are speaking. And that's partly just because of the way they're trying to frame this poem: they're trying to—even though the imagery is, you know, it's very metaphorical and it's very imagery-based, it still has a realism to it thanks to that conversational tone um, and it has an authenticity to it as a consequence of that as well.

Like, I love me a poem with a rigorous rhythm and rhyme, but nobody talks like that! That doesn't feel authentic to the way human beings speak, whereas I think because this is a poem about language and the way that we communicate to each other, our poet has wanted to have more realism, more authenticity in that style um of having that instead.