Search for My Tongue

The poem at a glance

Bhatt was born in Ahmedabad, India, grew up speaking Gujarati, and has lived most of her adult life in the United States and Germany. The poem stages an argument with an unnamed ‘you’ about losing a language, and with it a culture, a family, an identity. It moves in three stages: the fear of loss in English, a passage of actual Gujarati (with phonetic transliteration) at the centre, and a triumphant return to English carrying the dream’s discovery: the tongue grows back.

Methods that matter

Structure: a foreign language at the heart of the poem

The boldest structural choice is the Gujarati section placed at the literal centre of the poem. For most readers it is unreadable, and that is the point: for a moment you are shut out of a language, feeling a small dose of the exclusion the speaker lives with daily. Its central position also matters: the mother tongue is not an appendix or a memory but the core the whole poem grows around, exactly as it is the core of the speaker.

Extended metaphor: the tongue as a plant

The pun on ‘tongue’ (the muscle, the language) grows into an extended botanical metaphor. Neglected, the mother tongue would ‘rot and die’, dead organic matter to be spat out; recovered in dreams, it is a shoot, a bud, a blossom. The metaphor turns language into something living that needs tending, so losing it becomes a physical, almost bodily bereavement, and regaining it a kind of spring.

Voice: an argument with ‘you’

The poem opens conversationally, ‘You ask me what I mean’, and immediately turns the question back: ‘I ask you…’. The direct address makes the reader the sceptic who must be convinced, and the insistent repetition, especially the doubled ‘the bud opens’ near the end, has the rhythm of someone feeling a recovery happen in real time rather than merely describing it.

Key quotations

Quotation	Method	Why it matters
‘I have lost my tongue’ (opening lines)	Pun, direct address	The double meaning does the poem’s work in five words: losing a language feels like losing part of your own body.
‘rot and die in your mouth’	Decay imagery	The neglected mother tongue becomes something dead inside you: visceral disgust makes the loss of culture physical.
‘the bud opens, the bud opens’	Repetition, growth imagery	The doubling enacts the unfolding as it happens: recovery is not stated but performed, petal by petal.
‘it blossoms out of my mouth’ (final line)	Extended metaphor resolved	The poem ends in full flower: identity was never lost, only dormant, and it returns with unstoppable force.