The poem “ Minority” writtenby Imtiaz Dharker is an eight-stanza poem that reveals another kind ofunderstanding that is not as well known as the popular belief of the word “ minority”. The speaker describes how she is a minority due to being a minority in race andoccupation. Dharker started off thepoem with the first point of view “ I was born a foreigner” in order to create acloser relationship which can be contrast with the word foreigner. As she goeson, it is clear that she is not going to talk only about foreigner in the termof a person who has a different origin from where they are.
Although thespeaker said the she was a “ foreigner everywhere”, she still stressed that” even in the place planted with her relatives” to show the level ofloneliness that she felt living in this world. The repetition of “ I” throughout the poem and how she barely mention anyone else are suggesting that she isso lonely that she has no one to refer to. Through showing the insight into theauthor feeling, she portrays how it feels to be in the minority and in thiscase how it feel to not fit in with the society. In the first four stanza, this poem describes the foreigner’s experiences that most people acknowledge. Inorder to show how different of the author feel with the rest of the society, the third stanza only has two sentence which shows the comparison for itscontrast with the rest of the poem. Continuing with another simile “ like food cookedin milk of coconut”, she uses sensory images to express the feeling of beingforeign. Just like “ the unexpected aftertaste”, she is not completely alike tohow others assume.
However, in the last fourstanzas, she continues to show the deeper insight and different angle of aforeigner for those who do not experience it. When Dharker talks aboutlanguage, she used the phrases “ unfamiliar taste” and imageries “ word tumbleover”, “ cunning tripwire on the tongue” to talk about the verbal abuse that theminority received. The author begins to change her tone starting from the sixthstanza.
The aggressive tone works really well as she was talking about aproblem that has kept her awake to fight for her rights, the minority’s rights. She talks about her safe zone which is being able to write on paper and claimsthat ” a page doesn’t fight back”. This sent a strong idea about pen and paperare weapon to go against the prejudice. The last stanza provides a revelation, theperspective contrary to popular belief – “…one day, you meet the strangersidling down your street, realise you know the face simplified to bone, lookinto its outcast eyes and recognise it as your own.” The author and speaker conclude the poem withthe idea of everyone really being all the same and that it is only thesuperficial that people being lost in. Once one looks past the superficial, one realizes that all of use arehuman.
One could also look at it from adifferent perspective. It could alsomean the realization that all of us are foreigners.