presents from my aunt in pakis

Moniza Alvi was born in Pakistan, but moved to England when she was five. One of her parents is Pakistani and the other is English. The poem is mainly about the difficulty she finds in fitting in with, or feeling a part of, either of the cultures, the Pakistani or the English. IN this respect, the poem is like: Search for My Tongue; from Unrelated Incidents; Half-Caste; and Ogun. All of them are concerned with problems associated with ideas of race and identity. Here, it is through the clothes worn in the different cultures that the poet expresses her discomfort with both traditions. The clothes from Pakistan have exotic names and bright colours, which are attractive, but the fact that the glass bangles can break and cut the wearer reminds us that they can do damage as well as good. There seem to be two reasons why the poet is unhappy with the Pakistani clothes: they do not belong to “the sitting room” of an English house; they make her feel unworthy of them because, “I could never be as lovely as those clothes.” The person is attracted to the European clothes, “denim and corduroy,” worn by her schoolfriends. It is as if she is being burned and consumed by the Pakist

The seventh verse comprises only one line. The persona is amazed to find her heart unchained by what could have been a mind constricting event, and she asks why it is so. The image suggests a person being freed from slavery, in this case, the slavery to the notion that one is in a place where one does not belong.

The persona recalls the theft of her mother’s jewellery, which she (her mother) had previously cherished. Is there a sense in which her Pakistani culture has been stolen by exposure to a British one? In the same stanza, she remarks that, although the aunts sent bright clothes from Pakistan, they wanted cardigans from Marks and Spencers. This is, of course, ironic, that they should want items from the alien culture.

Verse 9 brings the ideas together. The mystery is “sweet”; it is thawing the frozen lake that is the woman’s heart, frozen against the land and the people to whom she has come. She, too, along with her ideas, is being uprooted like the tree and perhaps being replanted in the new country. The lesson that the storm has taught her is that “the earth is the earth is the earth”: wherever one is in the world one is on the same planet, its similarities being more important than its differences; the gods of Africa and the Caribbean have found her in the far away country to which she has come.

Verse six asks another question. She asks what the uprooting of the trees symbolises. Perhaps it reflects the uprooting of immigrants like the West Indians from their native lands. This is a kind of death, because the life one has left behind is over; the place one has left is like the cratered grave. Notice that the verses all have different line lengths and different numbers of lines in each stanza, perhaps mirroring the chaos wrought by the storm.

Some topics in this essay:
West Indians, Marks Spencers, Half-Caste Ogun, Aunt Jamila”, Guyana Caribbean, Western Pakistan, Grace Nichols, Africa Caribbean, St Paul, Caribbean England, grace nichols, pakistani clothes, pakistani english, clothes pakistan, africa caribbean, england five, culture persona’s, pakistani culture, moniza alvi,