In the two poems, Sujata Bhatt’s “Search for my Tongue” and Pat Mora’s “Sonrisas” contain diction and imagery that reveal a similar purpose of showing how a person who has two languages or cultures, and the difficult challenges they face in their lives, and how they can’t fully be themselves because there stuck in between.
The authors use diction in each of their poems to emphasis how extremely annoyed the author is, while having a multi-cultural life. When a person has two tongues in their mouth, they forget their mother tongue and the “foreign” tongue becomes dominate, with that the mother tongue is “forgotten” because it isn’t used as much. This may lead to the mother tongue getting in the way of the “other” tongue and the persons mouth becomes a mouth full of tied in “knots”. It is very difficult and annoying at times for the author because she has two tongues in her mouth and…show more content… She wants to only have one tongue but that’s not possible because in the place she is in her life now, both tongues are needed. This is to show that there are people who can’t be on one side, because there stuck in between and they really can’t go to either side without fully leaving the other language. Leaving the other language isn’t possible because they need it in their lives. When Mora was talking about the two different doorways she says how one is “quiet” and the people are very dull and boring because their “careful” and they might sometimes “quick[ly]” smile why turning back to talking to each other and drinking their “black coffee”. Shows how formal the culture is and how annoying it can be because she doesn’t like how strict and direct it is. The words are formal and when they are used in the sentences we can tell the tone of the author is annoying because she is tired