In Wales, wanting to be Italian — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
In Wales, wanting to be Italian
The poems
What you need to know
In Wales, wanting to be Italian by Imtiaz Dharker (2014): a string of playful questions about the teenage longing to belong somewhere else and be someone more glamorous.
Dharker's childhood in Glasgow and life between countries, the questions and invented words, key quotations, and the poems it compares well with.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Is there a name for that thing / you do when you are young?', 'There must be a word for it in some language', 'What is it called, living in Glasgow, / dying to be French', 'dying to shrug and pout', 'and make yourself understood / without saying a word?', 'from somewhere like Zanzibar?', 'in Wales, longing to be Italian', 'without embarrassment, Bella! Bella!', 'lounge by a Vespa with a cigarette', 'impossibly pointed shoes'.
Form: four stanzas made almost entirely of questions, speaking straight to the reader as 'you', with invented German compound words for a feeling that has no name.
Structure: from the search for a word, through examples in Glasgow and Bombay, to the comic picture of a sixteen-year-old in Wales who longs to be Italian.
Context: Dharker, born in Lahore, Pakistan, and brought up in Glasgow, divides her time between London, Wales and Mumbai and calls herself a 'Scottish Muslim Calvinist'; Freddie Mercury, born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar and schooled in India, who made himself a new identity as a rock star.
Compares well with Us (identity and the words for belonging), Jamaican British (the pull between two identities) and The Émigrée (longing for another place).
