Presents From My Aunts In Pakistan Revision Guide

Presents From My Aunts In Pakistan…

Revision Guide For Year 10’s Studying Poems From Other Cultures!

“They sent me a salwar kameez, peacock blue…

BEAUTY AND APPEAL TO THE SENSES…

Exotic

Description…

Gives the audience a clear image in their mind…

“…and another glistening like an orange split open…”

Appeal to senses… Taste = “Orange” Sight = “Glistening”

How does she describe the

clothes?What does this show

about the way she feels

towards them?

“Candy-Striped glass bangles, snapped, drew blood.”

These beautiful, exotic clothes, have harmed her…

Cause her discomfort…

Pain…

Rejection from her culture?

When she tries on the clothes, does her opinion of the clothes change?

“I tried on each satin-silken top – was alien in the sitting room…”

When you think of an

alien, what do you

think?

… outside world…

…alone……disconnected from the world around you…

If she describes herself as being “alien”, what does this show about her feelings and emotions?...

DISCOMFORT AND ALIENATION….

“ I could never be as beautiful as these clothes…”

Why does she say this?...

Disconnected from the clothes…

Uses the word “never”… so how much she tries, she could NEVER be as beautiful as the clothes, even if she tries.

Part of the British culture now…

“I longed for denim and corduroy”….

DESIRE AND LONGING…

Although she admires the clothes highly, she believes she doesn’t fit into them, because she doesn’t fit into the culture…

Belongs in the western culture…

As a teenage girl, she cares about what she wears, and how she is portrayed to others…

Her identity is important to her, so maybe the denim and corduroy fits her more than the Pakistani clothes…..

“My costume clung to me…”

Think about the use of the word “costume”…

The kinds of people who wear costumes are actors…

Hiding behind something which she isn’t…

“ To consider the cruelty, and the transformation from camel to shade, marvel at the colours like stained glass…”

This line itself it packed with different themes from the poem, including…

Beauty and appeal to the senses…

Pain…

Within the line, she admires the camel skinned lamp, but then again considers the cruelty which was put upon the camel before it was made, and this links to how she admires the clothing, yet feels the pain when she puts the clothes on…

“My mother cherished her jewellery, Indian gold, filigree. But it was stolen from out car…”

Use of word cherished enhances a sentimental value of the jewellery, and how much she loved her jewellery.

“Indian gold, filigree…” = represents the Pakistani culture… But then… “It was stolen from the car”… which comes back to the western culture that she lives in today.

“My salwar kameez didn’t impress the school friend , who sat on my bed, and asked to see my weekend clothes…”

“Didn’t impress my friend”… shows her friends are perhaps from a fully westernized background, and that her friend doesn’t admire the Pakistani clothing as much as she does.

Perhaps after this she feels uncomfortable, because she was expecting a different reaction from her school friend…

“I pictured my birthplace from fifties photographs”…

It hard for her to imagine her birthplace, because she moved to England at such a young age.

She has no memories of the place herself, so she has to look at pictures…

Misses her birthplace…

The shape of the poem “meanders” from side to side…

Perhaps she feels that her identity is swaying from side to side, because she doesn’t know what her identity is…

As she is a teenage, she doesn’t have a fixed identity…