Checking Out Me History

Checking Out Me History by John Agard is a protest about the history the speaker was taught at school. It was all about British figures and nursery-rhyme characters, while the heroes of his own Caribbean and Black history were left out. He decides to find out about them for himself.

Agard was born in Guyana, in the Caribbean, in 1949, and moved to Britain in 1977.

Agard writes in dialect, spelling words the way they sound in Caribbean speech. This is part of the protest: he refuses to use the ‘proper’ English of the history he was taught.

The poem has two voices:

• The history he was given: ‘Dem tell me / Wha dem want to tell me’, such as ‘Dem tell me bout 1066 and all dat’. These parts are in regular rhyming lines, like a playground chant.
• The history he discovers, about heroes such as Toussaint L'Ouverture and Mary Seacole. These parts are set apart, in short free-verse lines full of light and hope.

The speaker says his education was like being blindfolded: ‘Bandage up me eye with me own history’.

His new heroes are described with images of light and vision. Toussaint is ‘a slave / with vision’ who led a revolution in Haiti. Mary Seacole, who nursed soldiers in the Crimean War, is ‘a yellow sunrise / to the dying’.

There is no punctuation, as if he refuses the rules of the language he was taught. The poem ends with a defiant statement: ‘I carving out me identity’.

Themes: identity; the power of those who control education and history; protest and rebellion.

Compares well with:

• The Émigrée: identity and belonging.
• London: a protest against the people in power.
• Tissue: human power, and who records history.