How do I analyse Checking Out Me History for GCSE?

What is Checking Out Me History about?

The speaker complains about what "Dem" (them) taught him at school. He lists the British history, folk tales and nursery rhymes he learned, from 1066 to Dick Whittington and his cat. Nobody told him about the Black and Caribbean people from his own heritage.

Between those lists come passages celebrating the people he was never taught about. Toussaint L'Ouverture led the revolt against slavery in Haiti. Nanny of the Maroons led escaped enslaved people in Jamaica against the British. Mary Seacole, a Jamaican nurse, cared for soldiers in the Crimean War. He also asks what happened to the Caribs and Arawaks, peoples who lived in the Caribbean before Columbus arrived.

The poem ends with the speaker taking charge. He is "checking out", or investigating, his own history, and shaping his own identity.

What is the context of Checking Out Me History?

John Agard was born in 1949 in British Guiana, now Guyana, in South America. It was a British colony until it became independent in 1966, and its schools taught a curriculum shaped by Britain. Agard moved to Britain in 1977. He is well known for performing his poems aloud, and much of his work explores identity and the power of language. The speaker's voice is close to his own, since he grew up in that colony.

The heroes in the poem are real. Toussaint L'Ouverture led the revolt against slavery in what was then a French colony, and Haiti declared independence in 1804. Nanny of the Maroons led escaped enslaved people against British forces in 18th-century Jamaica, which now honours her as a national hero. Mary Seacole went to the Crimean War in the 1850s after the British turned down her offer to help, and nursed soldiers there anyway.

The speaker's anger is that his schooling left these people out and filled the gap with British heroes and nursery rhymes. The poem asks who decides which stories count, and what that decision does to the people left out.

How does Agard present identity in Checking Out Me History?

Agard's first weapon is his voice. The poem is written in Caribbean Creole, with spellings that show how the words sound: "Dem" for them, "me" for my, "de" for the. A Creole is a language that grew out of a mix of languages. Writing this way is a deliberate choice. It refuses the Standard English of the lessons he is attacking and makes his own voice the one that counts.

"Dem tell me" is repeated again and again. "Dem" is never named, so it could be teachers or the whole colonial system that decided what he should learn. The repetition sounds like a chant of complaint, and it shows how one-sided his education was.

His education is presented as an injury. "Bandage up me eye" is a metaphor, describing one thing as if it were another. A bandage should help a wound heal, but this one covers his eyes, and the next line says it would "Blind me to me own identity". The harm is to his sense of who he is.

The British history he was taught is mixed with folk tales and nursery rhymes, so real events sit beside "de cow who jump over de moon". Putting them together makes the whole curriculum seem trivial, as if he was handed stories when he needed history.

The heroes he found for himself are described through light and vision. Toussaint is "a slave / with vision", Nanny is a "see-far woman", and Mary Seacole is "a healing star" to wounded soldiers. These images make them guiding lights, and "a healing star" answers Florence Nightingale's famous lamp, which the speaker mentions earlier.

The final lines turn from being told to taking action. "I carving out me identity" is in the present tense, so it is happening now, and "carving" suggests hard, careful work, like cutting a shape into stone. The speaker is no longer handed an identity. He makes one.

What do the form and structure of Checking Out Me History add?

The poem is written in free verse, with no regular rhythm, though rhyme appears often. It is spoken in the first person and written to be heard, which suits a poet known for performing his work.

It switches between two kinds of stanza. A stanza is a group of lines, like a paragraph in a poem. The "Dem tell me" stanzas use rhyming couplets, pairs of lines that rhyme, such as "dat" with "cat", and their bouncing beat sounds like a nursery rhyme, which mocks the lessons they describe. The stanzas about Toussaint, Nanny and Mary Seacole are printed in italics, with very short lines, so they look and sound different, more like a song of praise.

In those italic stanzas, each thought is broken across many short lines. This is enjambment, where a sentence runs on past the end of a line, and here it makes you read slowly and gives each word weight. There is almost no punctuation anywhere in the poem, which, like the Creole spelling, ignores the rules he was taught.

Near the start, "history" and "identity" end two lines in a row, describing things done to him. The last two lines end on the same two words, but after "But now" the speaker is in charge of both. That shift is the poem's volta, a turning point, and it turns a complaint into a declaration.

Which poems does Checking Out Me History compare well with?

Checking Out Me History pairs well with poems about identity, and about people pushing back against those in power. The Émigrée, London and Tissue are all strong choices.

What could an exam question on Checking Out Me History ask?

Checking Out Me History could appear on AQA Paper 2, Section B. The paper prints one named poem from the Power and Conflict cluster, and you compare it with one other poem from the cluster, which you choose and write about from memory. The question is worth 30 marks, assessed on AO1 (your response, backed by quotations), AO2 (how language, form and structure create meaning) and AO3 (context). There are no marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar in this section.

Two focuses to practise: how poets present identity, and how they present resistance to people in power. Checking Out Me History fits both, as the printed poem or as the one you bring from memory.

Here is an original model opening for the second focus, comparing Checking Out Me History with London:

Both poets show power working on people's minds. Blake hears "mind-forg'd manacles" in the voices around him, chains made by the ideas people have been taught to accept. Agard's speaker describes a similar trap, accusing "Dem" of trying to "Blind me to me own identity". Yet the endings differ. Blake closes on suffering with no escape in sight, while Agard closes on action: "I carving out me identity". The verb "carving" suggests hard, deliberate work, done in the present.

Notice that it quotes the poet's own spelling exactly. Correcting Agard's Creole would lose the point he is making.

Key quotations from Checking Out Me History to learn

These six are short enough to learn. Keep Agard's spelling exactly as he wrote it.

• "Dem tell me": repetition that makes education sound like orders from an unnamed authority.
• "Bandage up me eye": a metaphor in which something meant to heal is used to blind.
• "de cow who jump over de moon": nursery-rhyme nonsense set beside real history, mocking what he was taught.
• "a slave / with vision": Toussaint's greatness lies in his ideas, and the short lines give each word weight.
• "a healing star": Mary Seacole as a guiding light, a metaphor to rival Florence Nightingale's lamp.
• "I carving out me identity": the final line, where he stops being told and starts making himself.