Moniza Alvi - Presents from my Aunts in Pakistan

A comment from Michael Peverett’ s blog:

"Presents from My Aunts in Pakistan" is almost a perfect classroom poem. It comes from Moniza Alvi's first full-length collection, The Country At My Shoulder, which was published in 1993 – the collection was nominated for various prizes and was a New Generation promotion. Alvi's situation as a westerner conscious of a non-western heritage that she can only partially connect with, feels like it epitomizes a situation that schools want to talk about. Alvi, at the time a teacher herself, retained an oddly childlike enthusiasm for talking about a characteristic preoccupation of the secondary school: Who am I? The word "my" is one of the potent ones in her poetry: it notates the theme, the issue, the connection, the disarming certainty, the lightness. Hovering behind it is the phrase "little me", and the rebuke that lies in wait if you dare to pick up on it.

Influence in the classroom is two-way and Alvi, like many another teacher, has something of the attractive directness of her charges. It's hard to think of a less dilatory title, for example; there's no issue here with knowing what we're talking about! And obviously the poem is located so firmly in a child's preoccupations that it is, as one fan nails it, what you "can totally relate to". For this, it's not necessary to drop exactly onto the paradigmatic issue of half-answering to a second country.

"I love the poem, although I found it hard to 'get into' at first, because I was unused to poetry, now I really love and understand it. The more you read it, the more you notice, Its amazing all of the different meanings you find.
How amazing is Moniza????
She conveys typical teenage behaviour of wanting to fit in – anywhere! and the way we all feel out of place sometimes."

"Sitting in a store dressing-room, even in one's own country, can make you feel like these clothes don't belong to me, or I wish they could belong to me but I don't fit with them. It's a beautiful color, but makes me look washed out and feel inferior. I somehow always go back to the same styles and colors. That's where I feel secure!"

That's a reading that's shifted quite a long way even from the second country of parents that every teenager has to contend with. But naturally identifying with some element of the poem's cultural pressures adds force:

"i fink this poem shows how a girl is trn between her culture.it help myself to portray the image in which she is tryin to create how her own culture is hurting her and they they another is trying to control her life."

"and I was there – of no fixed nationality, this poem encapsulates the struggle that the children of the east face in the western countries they have adopted as their own, the struggle between two such different cultures each claiming them as its own... that the children feel in a land that their parents view as alien but they view as their own."

These remarks are from that treasure-house of spontaneous reader-responses, the internet. In the classroom, alas, differentiation is one thing and a top exam grade is another; for that, as I see from the advice for teachers, you have to develop the ideas fully, carefully describe contrasted emotions, and connect to broader issues of identity. Exam advice:

"Make it clear what the poet is writing about.
Refer to anything you know about the context of the poem which helps you understand the poems.
Remember to comment in detail about how the poem is written, referring to particular words and phrases."

Considered as a teaching aid, Alvi's poem is useful in so many ways, of which the least is its basic poetic toolkit (which includes vibrant colours, similes, alliteration, and things that, the teacher modestly queries, could be symbolic). "Presents from My Aunts" permits some straightforward facts about Pakistan (what is a salwar kameez, formation of Bangladesh in 1971, the famous Shalimar Gardens, etc) and is a good comprehension exercise.

Though a measure of guidance may be needed:

"The teacher reminded the class that many pupils had something in common with her by having backgrounds influenced by two cultures. In Presents from My Aunts in Pakistan, the poet Moniza Alvi talks about the confusion she felt as a child towards her dual heritage. The teacher stressed that the poem was written in [about] the 1960s and that many people today have successfully fused the two cultures they inherited."

[The lesson continued well: there was focus and comment on "some of the key messages in Moniza Alvi's poem", and pupils "were able to discuss openly and calmly issues such as racism in society, cultural difference, their pride in their own cultural heritage and their conviction that they had successfully fused two (or more) cultures."]

Those earlier comments obviously weren't burdened with scholastic labour. Nevertheless, they make highly nuanced responses to Alvi's luminous poem. (The point of the English lesson is not what you know, you already know almost everything, but what you can be made to understand that you know.) The topic is multiculturalism, which puts the word "my" to the question, but the determining framework of the discourse is inevitably western individualism. At the same time, since it's "my" struggle with the kameez, and "my" haunted exclusion from the Shalimar Gardens, no-one else can take this away from me: it's "my" history. But all lessons are after all coercive by dint of being communal: denying the assimilative momentum of the classroom towards a Hertfordshire norm isn't within the range of moves allowed; you would have to not speak. By temporarily foregrounding our varieties of cultural inheritance, and at the same time relegating them to an impractical mode, that is, to something "within us", in fact a background and not a foreground at all, we make some play for ourselves in the dominant culture. We recognize and enjoy our differences. We don't impose them. The dominant culture becomes more comfortable and more resilient. The past and the remote are enshrined.