Where It All Goes Down
Grab a mirror. Or, you know, just set your phones on "selfie" mode (no selfie sticks allowed, though). Now, hold it up to your face, open your mouth, and say "Ahhh." Congratulations—you've just found the setting for "Search for My Tongue." And, the odds are, you've also successfully searched for your tongue—bonus.
Okay, so that might be a bit simplistic, but it's clear that this poem has tongues on the brain (if we can mix up our anatomy for a second). As we discuss in the "Detailed Summary" and "Symbols, Imagery, and Wordplay," the tongue is a powerful metaphor for our speaker's connection to her native language, as well as her estrangement from her foreign, second language.
If we take her figurative language literally, then we could stop here. Setting = mouth, done and done. But that's not really what's going on in this poem, is it?
The point of Bhatt's extended metaphor is, instead, that language is as much a part of our identity as any body part is. So, this setting is meant to lead us inward, to reflect on how the backdrop of our daily language use helps to color our identity. If the words you use are like actors on a stage, the language you use is the stage itself. In other words, your language is a big part of the setting in which your identity is developed.
Did we get all that from a tongue metaphor, you ask? No—Bhatt did.