checking out me history

john agard

context

• nursery rhyme style takes inspiration from William Blake as he used this technique to present serious ideas.

• despite agards high education, he has been taught nothing of black history showing western societies willingness to discredit and dismiss black people.

• Agard is suggesting that there is ignorance in the British education system, and this important episode isn’t even mentioned, let alone studied. 

• Napoléon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader who was defeated by Toussaint. Napolean has been said to be a military genius, with huge resources available to him. And yet he was defeated in battle by the self-educated Haitian slave-leader.  

• The British government of the time refused to recognise or fund Mary Seacole’s initiative and she was forced to find money through her own business ventures. 

checking

• On one level, “checking” suggests scrutinising or examining — the speaker is re-evaluating the history he’s been taught.

• It also implies challenging authority — he’s checking the power of the dominant (colonial) narrative.

dem tell me

anaphora suggests that teaching of white history becomes a process of indoctrination for children, much like how nursery rhymes work. suggests passiveness.

echoes the opening lines; the poem is circular in structure and could end with a repetition of the unbalance in young people’s education but at end there is a twist where knowldge is gained and empowerment of a people occurs.

bandage up me eye

Bandages should be used for healing and education is to enlighten, not the opposite, which creates irony. The speaker is saying he is discouraged from learning about his own culture and history. 

1066 and all dat

all dat’ is dismissive and could imply Agard’s indifference to this version of history.  battle of hastings, a battle between the Norman-French invaders and the English that resulted in Norman victory, and is taught in schls

Dick Whittington

Dick Whittington is a fairy tale. The juxtaposition of a childish fairy tale with the Toussaint L'Ouverture rebellion suggests an imbalanced focus. The pantomime stories used in primary schools at Christmas time are a metaphor for the unimportant things that take precedence over more significant history. Toussaint L'Ouverture led a revolution that freed from oppression an entire population of black slaves in Haiti .

Toussaint de thorn

There is a chant-like quality to this stanza. The repetition highlights the emotions of the speaker; anger, frustration but immense pride. Toussaint was a ‘thorn’ in the side of the French, but a hero to the Haitian revolutionaries.

De balloon

Agard fails to mention the name of the inventor, showing that he doesn’t care about him and how it is very insignificant to him. 

He then quotes three nursery rhymes, all of which are trivial like “de moon” which add nothing to the understanding of young people of significant historical events.

These are taught to pre-school children, and are obviously not part of the curriculum for older children learning about, for example, the French Revolutionary Wars.

The nursery rhymes and the pantomime stories symbolise little importance given to people from ethnic minorities. The rhymes and the fairy tales have white characters; there is no diversity in what is taught. 

she lamp.. used to camp

This stanza demonstrates Agard’s comic skills. Florence Nightingale’s ‘lamp’ does have symbolic importance in her story, but the next line about Robin Hood who ‘used to camp’ — one assumes in Sherwood Forest while romancing Maid Marian — is a deliberately humorous anti-climax. It’s dismissive and ridicules one of the most talked about white heroes in one line. 

yellow sunrise

‘light’-related extended metaphor. Agard is therefore symbolically shining ‘light’ on his own heroes of different ethnicities. 

links to him being bandaged.

The historical figures- he perceives their achievements as enlightening and warming. 

carving out me identity

“carving” is in the present tense indicates that the process of re-educating himself has begun.  

 

 poet for the first time uses the pronoun ‘I’. He is determined to know more, to establish his own identity. 

 

“Carving” is something which takes time and skill, Agard is suggesting that the process of learning his own cultural history is not straightforward.  The process will difficult but fulfilling. 

this is a poem without punctuation; not even at the end. This could suggest that finding his identity is ongoing and will continue long into the future. 

form and sructure

The stanzas about what is taught in British schools also end in rhyming quadruplets; Balloon, Moon, Spoon, Maroon. A very predictable and cyclic pattern. However, in the stanzas about the missing episodes of history, there is no rhyme, this emphasises gaps left in teaching

peosm to compare to

tissue, london, mld, emigree