checking out me history and the emigree

Introduction

• Both explore how power can attempt to control or erase personal and cultural identity

• Both speakers resist through memory, language and emotional attachment

• Agard was educated under colonial rule with Eurocentric history not his- universally apply to those living in oppression

• Carol travelled widely through Eastern Europe- link to modern day refugee crisis

• Through vivid imagery, structural choices and emotive language, both poets show that true identity survives and resists even the most powerful attempts at suppression

Point 1

Both Agard and Rumens explore how external forces seek to suppress cultural identities, but their speakers resist this control through memory and voice

• ‘Bandage up me eye with me own history’

  • deliberate concealment of true heritage

• ‘Branded by an impression of sunlight’

  • memories are permanent despite efforts to erase them

Point 2

Both poets depict emotional attachment as a powerful means of resisting oppression, with the speakers using personal connections to reclaim lost identities

• ‘I carving out me identity’

  • reinforces speaker actively shaping identity, using emotional connection and memory

• ‘I comb its hair and love its shining eyes’

  • represents attachment to homeland, memory feel tangible

Point 3

In both poems, language and structure become tools of resistance, allowing poets to challenge the forces that seek to control identity and history

• ‘But dem never tell me bout Mary Seacole’

  • ‘but’ enjambment- tie together white and black history- cannot be ignored

  • ‘Dem’- non standard grammar subverts expected form of English, challenging the forces that seek to control identity

• ‘There once was a country…’

  • ellipsis suggests hard to define- marked by loss and corruption