My Mother's Kitchen — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
My Mother's Kitchen
The poems
What you need to know
My Mother's Kitchen by Choman Hardi (2004): a daughter lists the kitchen things she will inherit as her mother, who has fled her homes many times, prepares to go home at last.
Hardi's Kurdish background and her family's escape from Iraq, the free verse and closing rhyme, 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: 'I will inherit my mother's kitchen', 'her plates, an ugly collection from various sets', 'rusty pots she doesn't throw away', 'soon all of this will be yours', 'My mother is planning another escape', 'for the first time home is her destination', 'It is her ninth time', 'She never feels regret for things', 'She used to sing for the grapes to ripen', 'never inherit my mother's trees'.
Form: three stanzas of unrhymed free verse in plain, everyday language, a list of ordinary kitchen things, the mother's own words, and one full rhyme at the end ('bees' and 'trees').
Structure: the inheritance, the mother's plan to go home, and her past escapes, ending on the one thing she misses and the daughter cannot inherit.
Context: Hardi, born in 1974 in Sulaymaniyah in Iraqi Kurdistan, fled Iraq with her family in the late 1980s and was given asylum in the UK in 1993; the Anfal campaign of 1988, in which Saddam Hussein's government attacked the Kurds of northern Iraq.
Compares well with We Refugees (people forced to flee), The Émigrée (a lost homeland) and Kumukanda (a mother, and what a child does and does not inherit).
