English Lit - Checking Out Me History

• John Agard


  Poet born in Guyana, South America in 1949, moved to Britain in 1977, famous for poetry focusing on identity and ethnicity with social observation and humor
• The poem has no punctuation
• Rhyme scheme


  • Forces white and black historical figures together, builds up and climaxes on names of black figures to emphasize their importance
• Enjambment


  • Continues sentences beyond line breaks, forcing combination of white and black historical figures in same sentence
• Repetition of "Dem"


  • Suggests anger at miseducation of history
• Contrast between verses


  • Verses about white figures have simple, childlike rhyme and rhythm, verses about black figures are in free verse with natural imagery, suggesting lack of control over their portrayal
• Form


  • Reflects oral poetry tradition, with repetition, phonetic spelling, and strong rhythm to emphasize importance of remembering history
• Opening metaphor of "bandaging eye"


  Represents being deliberately held back from seeing own history, but poem ends with "checking out me own history, carving out me identity"
• The poem uses repetition, phonetic spelling, and strong rhythm to remind us of the importance of oral history and the significance of non-white figures in history
• Blinding me with my own history, bandage up me eye with me own history: 'The speaker'
• The speaker's eye being bandaged

  Represents being deliberately held back from seeing his own history
• In the final lines of the poem

  The speaker says "Dem tell me Dem tell me what Dem wanted to tell me" and "now I checking out my own history I carving out my identity"
• Carving


  An active, even strenuous task, suggesting the speaker must actively seek out and find his identity
• The speaker's name being at the end of each stanza symbolizes how his new-found history has empowered him with a new sense of identity
• Use of Creole language and phonetic spelling

  • Represents the speaker's refusal to conform to the rules of the English language, standing against the Eurocentric view of identity
• The lack of punctuation symbolizes the speaker's refusal to accept the restrictions forced on him by the rules of communication
• Types of intertextual/contextual references in the poem

  • Famous historical events (e.g. 1066, Battle of Trafalgar)
  • Characters from black history (e.g. Toussaint Louverture, Nanny of the Maroons, Shaka)
  • Characters from nursery rhymes/fables (e.g. Dick Whittington, the cow who jumped over the moon, Robin Hood)
• Inclusion of nursery rhyme/fable references


  Suggests the presentation of history to the speaker is as fictional and ridiculous as a nursery rhyme, making historical figures as unimportant as fictional characters
• The lack of punctuation in certain verses forces the reader to pause and read them in the way the poet intends, mirroring how the exclusion of black historical figures from the mainstream narrative prevents a full understanding of history