.
The persona's schoolfriend is clearly white British. She seems to be a close friend because she spends time with the persona in her bedroom, but she knows virtually nothing of the persona's other culture. During the week, they wear uniforms, so nothing worn at school would reveal the other culture, but the persona's "weekend clothes" seem to surprise her, although they do not impress her. The persona tries to see herself in the "mirror work" on the Pakistani clothes (small plastic reflecting pieces sewn onto the cloth - thanks for this, Gemma!), but sees only the journey to England she made as a five year old. She herself is mixed race. .
In the penultimate stanza, she goes back in memory to the country of her birth, but the memories are largely based on newspaper cuttings of that country and the conflicts in Asia in the early 1960s: "a fractured land," both in the way it was divided (Pakistan was originally linked to Bangladesh as Eastern and Western Pakistan, and the countries themselves were formed out of religious conflict in India. It is not a place to which she feels she belongs. Lahore is where her aunts stay in secluded rooms away from male gaze. It is a place where there is great poverty: "beggars, sweeper-girls" (the gender seems to be significant). She is there, gazing at the beautiful gardens, but through "fretwork," so her view is obscured. She is "of no fixed nationality" and feels she does not belong properly to either country, culture or race.
Hurricane Hits England by Grace Nichols .
Grace Nichols was born in Guyana in the Caribbean in 1950 and came to England in 1977. The Hurricane described in the poem was that of the Great Storm in 1987, which brought great destruction and havoc to England and its landscape, particularly the trees.
In the first verse of the poem, the persona stands outside the action and uses the pronouns, he and she. We are told at the beginning what the outcome of the experience has been: it brought "her closer to the landscape".