IDENTITY
WITHIN CULTURE
I Lost My Talk
~Rita Joe
I lost my talk
The talk you took away.
When I was a little girl
At Shubenacadie school.
You snatched it away:
I speak like you
I think like you
I create like you
The scrambled ballad, about my word.
Two ways I talk
Both ways I say,
Your way is more powerful.
So gently I offer my hand and ask,
Let me find my talk
So I can teach you about me.
Rita Joe’s poems often deal with the time she spent at the Indian Residential School in
Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, but also reflect a positive outlook on life and on the revival of her
Mi’kmaq culture.
Meaning:
1. What do you learn about the speaker of the poem from each stanza?
2. Where in the poem do the speaker’s feelings change? What indicates the change?
Form and Style:
3. State three observations about the style of this poem and describe the effects. Consider
diction, syntax, rhythm, imagery, etc.
4. Examine stanza two. What is the effect of Rita Joe’s frequent use of the pronouns “I”
and “you” in this stanza? What technique does she use in structuring these lines?
5. Explain the metaphor in the last line of the stanza.
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won't you celebrate with me
~Lucille Clifton
won't you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.
Meaning:
1. The speaker concludes the poem by explaining that she is celebrating “that everyday /
something has tried to kill me / and has failed.” What has tried to kill the speaker?
2. Though Clifton claims she “had no model” in shaping her life, she draws from several
literary models to write her poem, including Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” the Bible,
and the sonnet form. What does referring to these texts suggest about Clifton’s struggle
and the poem’s meaning?
Form:
3. Clifton’s poem is a sonnet. In what ways is it like other sonnets you may have read? In
what ways is it different? Why might using a non-traditional approach to the form (free
verse, little punctuation, and no capitalization) be appropriate to her subject matter here?
Creative extension:
4. What Clifton initially suggests is a celebration seems, by the poem’s end, to be a struggle
for survival: “come celebrate / with me that everyday / something has tried to kill me /
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and has failed.” What struggles have you faced and emerged triumphant from? Use
Clifton’s final line as a point of departure for your own poem of resistance.
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(parantoo rattray svupnama mari bhasha pachi aavay chay)
Sujata Bhatt
from Search For My Tongue
You ask me what I mean
by saying I have lost my tongue.
I ask you, what would you do
if you had two tongues in your mouth,
and lost the first one, the mother tongue,
and could not really know the other,
the foreign tongue.
You could not use them both together
even if you thought that way.
And if you lived in a place you had to
speak a foreign tongue,
your mother tongue would rot,
rot and die in your mouth
until you had to spit it out.
I thought I spit it out
but overnight while I dream,
(munay hutoo kay aakhee jeebh aakhee bhasha)
(may thoonky nakhi chay)
(foolnee jaim mari bhasha nmari jeebh)
(modhama kheelay chay)
(fullnee jaim mari bhasha mari jeebh)
(modhama pakay chay)
it grows back, a stump of a shoot
grows longer, grows moist, grows strong veins,
it ties the other tongue in knots,
the bud opens, the bud opens in my mouth,
it pushes the other tongue aside.
Everytime I think I've forgotten,
I think I've lost the mother tongue,
it blossoms out of my mouth.
Sujata Bhatt was born in 1956 in Ahmedabad, the largest city in the Indian
state of Gujarat, where her mother tongue was Gujarati. Later, her family
lived for some years in the United States, where she learned English. She now
lives in Germany.
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Señora X No More
~Pat Mora
Straight as a nun I sit.
My fingers foolish before paper and pen
hide in my palms. I hear the slow, accented echo
How are yu? I ahm fine. How are yu?
of the other women who clutch notebooks and blush
at their stiff lips resting
sounds that float graceful as
bubbles from their children's mouths.
My teacher bends over me, gently squeezes
my shoulders, the squeeze I give my sons,
hands louder than words.
She slides her arms around me:
a warm shawl, lifts my left arm
onto the cold, lined paper.
"Señora, don't let it slip away," she says
and opens the ugly, soap-wrinkled fingers of my right hand
with a pen like I pry open the lips of a stubborn grandchild.
My hand cramps around the thin hardness.
"Let it breathe," says this woman who knows
my hand and tongue knot, but she guides
and I dig the tip of my pen into that white.
I carve my crooked name, and again at night
until my hand and arm are sore,
I carve my crooked name,
my name.
Meaning:
1. Who is the speaker of this poem and how do you know it? Explain by using
direct examples from the text.
2. What is the speaker learning how to do and how does she feel about it?
3. What can we surmise about the speaker’s life from the details given.
Please use quotes from the text to support your answer.
Form and Structure:
4. Discuss the poet’s use of imagery. What images stand out to you and
what emotions do they elicit within you?
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Wherever I Hang
~Grace Nichols
I leave me people, me land, me home
For reasons, I not too sure
I forsake de sun
And de humming-bird splendor
Had big rats in de floorboard
So I pick up me new-world-self
And come, to this place call England
At first I feeling like I in a dream –
De misty grayness
I touching de walls to see if they real
They solid to de seam
And de people pouring from de underground system
Like beans
And when I look up to de sky
I see lord Nelson high – too high to lie
And is so I sending home photos of myself
Among de pigeons and de snow
And is so I warding off de cold
And is so, little by little
I begin to change my calypso ways
Never visiting nobody
Before giving then clear warning
And waiting me turn in queue
Now, after all this time
I get accustom to de English life
But I still miss back-home side
To tell you de truth
I don’t know really where I belaang
Yes, divided to de ocean
Divided to de bone
Wherever I hang me knickers – that’s my home.
Piercy
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A Work of Artifice1
The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers,
the hands you
love to touch.
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15
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1. What is the subject and theme of the poem?
2. Comment on the use of extended metaphor in the poem.
3. Comment on the tone of the poem.
4. Discuss the speaker/s in the poem. Marge
Marge Piercy is an American novelist, essayist and poet best known for fiction with a feminist slant. Her writing
stems from a political commitment that began in the 1960s in the Vietnam anti-war movement.
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An artful or crafty expedient; a stratagem. Subtle but base deception; trickery. Cleverness or skill; ingenuity.
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This sonnet by one of the most famous Romantic poets of the nineteenth century tells
the story of a traveller who comes across the ruins of an incredible statue built to
commemorate a once-powerful ruler. Ozymandias is another name for Ramses II, an
Egyptian pharaoh who ruled during the thirteenth century and was given to
commissioning statues of himself.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
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Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
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Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
-Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822)
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 The English lyric poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was a leading figure in the Romantic
movement. He fought all his life for political freedom. He drowned while sailing in
Italy. “Ozymandias” was written in 1817.
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