English Essay
How Successfully Does The Writer of ‘An Unknown Girl’ Present Her Feelings About The Country She Has Visited?
The writer, Moniza Alvi, has picked the perfect setting in the poem ‘An Unknown Girl’ for the narrator to explore her thoughts and feelings about her Indian birth culture- an Indian bazaar. Probably like Moniza who has dealt with getting to know her Pakistani birth culture after being raised in the UK, the Indian narrator has grown up away from her birth culture. Thrown in the middle of the Indian bazaar where everything is unfamiliar and strange to her much like her cultural identity. The writer has the narrator confront her culture head on forcing her through the process of emersion to come to terms with her culture and eventually embrace it as being an essential part of her identity. By finding connections between her western culture in which she was probably raised and this foreign eastern culture, the narrator develops strong feelings of longing to get to know her birth culture more.
From the start of the poem, it is clear that the writer is effectively communicating the narrator’s feelings of disconnection with her eastern heritage. The repetition of the word ‘unknown’ effectively summarises her contact with her culture; it is something foreign to her. Her first thought of disconnection is the main feeling in her mind. The fact that through-out the poem she keeps repeating ‘evening’, which is usually a time when people are asleep and dreaming of important things in their lives, further highlights that her culture has been hibernating within her waiting for someone to wake it up. Presently her culture only exists in her dreams; it is not a reality in her daily life. The title ‘unknown girl’ suggests that her own identity is a stranger to her; she does not fully know herself as she has cut off an essential part of anyone’s identity; her birth culture. At the same time, the repetition of ‘unknown girl’ through-out the poem creates a chorus-like
The writer, Moniza Alvi, has picked the perfect setting in the poem ‘An Unknown Girl’ for the narrator to explore her thoughts and feelings about her Indian birth culture- an Indian bazaar. Probably like Moniza who has dealt with getting to know her Pakistani birth culture after being raised in the UK, the Indian narrator has grown up away from her birth culture. Thrown in the middle of the Indian bazaar where everything is unfamiliar and strange to her much like her cultural identity. The writer has the narrator confront her culture head on forcing her through the process of emersion to come to terms with her culture and eventually embrace it as being an essential part of her identity. By finding connections between her western culture in which she was probably raised and this foreign eastern culture, the narrator develops strong feelings of longing to get to know her birth culture more.
From the start of the poem, it is clear that the writer is effectively communicating the narrator’s feelings of disconnection with her eastern heritage. The repetition of the word ‘unknown’ effectively summarises her contact with her culture; it is something foreign to her. Her first thought of disconnection is the main feeling in her mind. The fact that through-out the poem she keeps repeating ‘evening’, which is usually a time when people are asleep and dreaming of important things in their lives, further highlights that her culture has been hibernating within her waiting for someone to wake it up. Presently her culture only exists in her dreams; it is not a reality in her daily life. The title ‘unknown girl’ suggests that her own identity is a stranger to her; she does not fully know herself as she has cut off an essential part of anyone’s identity; her birth culture. At the same time, the repetition of ‘unknown girl’ through-out the poem creates a chorus-like