Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan — Edexcel GCSE English Literature 1ET0
Edexcel GCSE English Literature · 1ET0
Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan
The poems
What you need to know
Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan by Moniza Alvi (2000): a girl growing up in England, torn between the clothes her aunts send from Pakistan and the life around her, and how Alvi uses shifting lines, colour and clothing to show a divided identity.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the collection it compares well with, and on which themes.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'They sent me a salwar kameez / peacock-blue', 'glistening like an orange split open', 'Candy-striped glass bangles / snapped, drew blood', 'I tried each satin-silken top', 'was alien in the sitting-room', 'I longed / for denim and corduroy', 'My costume clung to me / and I was aflame', 'My aunts requested cardigans / from Marks and Spencers', 'there was conflict, a fractured land / throbbing through newsprint', 'of no fixed nationality'.
Form and structure: free verse with lines set at shifting distances from the margin, like a self that cannot settle, moving from the presents to memories of the voyage to England and an imagined Pakistan.
Language: rich colours and textures of the clothes against plain English denim, the bangles that 'drew blood', clothes as fire, the mirror-work in which she tries to see herself, and the fretwork screen she looks through at the end.
Context: Alvi, born in Lahore in 1954 to a Pakistani father and a British mother and brought to England as a baby, who did not go back to Pakistan until after her first collection; the poem's prize in 1991; the salwar kameez; and the Mughal Shalimar Gardens of Lahore.
Compares well with: Hurricane Hits England (two cultures and a Caribbean past), Home Thoughts from Abroad (longing for a homeland), Nothing's Changed (belonging and being shut out) and Stewart Island (leaving one country for another).
