The Complete Guide to Checking Out Me History

The poem in one breath

What happens, and why it matters on this paper

Here is the whole poem. A speaker looks back on what he was taught. An authority he never names — he simply calls them ‘dem’ — told him about the Norman Conquest, about Dick Whittington and his cat, about the cow that jumped over the moon, about Lord Nelson, Columbus, Florence Nightingale, Robin Hood and Old King Cole. Every time he lists one of these things, he sets beside it someone he was never told about: Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the revolt that ended in the independence of Haiti; Nanny, a leader of the Maroons of Jamaica; Shaka, the Zulu king; the Caribs and Arawaks, Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean; and Mary Seacole, the Jamaican-born nurse of the Crimean War.

Three of those untaught figures — Toussaint, Nanny and Mary Seacole — are given their own stanzas, written in short lines and in the most beautiful language in the poem: beacons, stars, sunrises, rivers. Then the speaker returns to his refrain one last time and turns it round. He is no longer being told. He is now finding out his own history for himself, and making his own identity.

That is the poem's spine: being told, then telling. Everything else — the spelling, the rhymes, the two kinds of stanza, the images of blindness and light — serves that movement. Hold on to it and you will always know where you are in the poem and what any detail is doing.

Why it belongs in a cluster about power and conflict: there is no battlefield in this poem, but there is a struggle over something powerful states have always cared about — the story a people is allowed to tell about itself. The conflict is between a voice and an institution, and the weapon on both sides is language.

What just happened

• A speaker lists what an unnamed authority, ‘dem’, taught him: dates, British heroes, legends and nursery rhymes.
• Beside each item he sets a figure he was never taught: Toussaint, Nanny, Shaka, the Caribs and Arawaks, Mary Seacole.
• Three of those figures get their own short-lined stanzas full of light and vision.
• The poem ends with the speaker finding out his own history and making his own identity.

Why it matters. The poem stages a conflict over who controls the story of the past — and resolves it by having the speaker take the story back.

What to remember

• The poem's spine is the move from being told to telling.
• The conflict is over history and identity, and it is fought in language.

The title: a phrase from the street, not the classroom

What ‘checking out’ promises before the poem begins

The title is the poem's last idea placed at the front. It is also a deliberately informal phrase. ‘Checking out’ something is what you do when you look into it for yourself — investigate, test, inspect, see whether it is any good. It is not the language of a history syllabus. It sounds spoken, casual, confident.

Then there is ‘me’ where Standard English would put ‘my’. Before a single line has been read, the title has announced two things: the poem will be in a voice that does not follow the classroom's rules, and the history in question belongs to that voice. ‘Me History’ is a claim of ownership made in the speaker's own grammar.

Finally, notice the verb form. ‘Checking’ is ongoing. The title does not say the speaker has checked out his history; it says he is doing it. That matters for the ending, which many readers treat as a victory and some treat as a beginning. The title quietly supports the second reading: this is work in progress.

Grade 9 insight. Grade 9 move: in an essay, use the title as evidence about voice. ‘The informal verb and non-standard pronoun of the title announce, before the poem begins, that history is about to be retold in a language the classroom did not teach.’

What just happened

• ‘Checking out’ is a spoken, informal phrase meaning to investigate for yourself.
• ‘Me’ for ‘my’ claims the history in the speaker's own grammar.
• The ongoing verb form suggests a task still under way.

Why it matters. The title sets up both the poem's voice and its argument: history reclaimed by the person it belongs to, in his own words.

What to remember

• Quote the title's spelling exactly — ‘Me’, not ‘My’.
• The title is the ending's idea, placed first.

The opening: being told, being blinded

The refrain and the bandage

The poem begins with its refrain, repeated: ‘Dem tell me’. Three words, and the whole power relationship is in them. ‘Dem’ is the subject — the ones who act. ‘Tell’ is the verb — and it is a one-way verb: you are told, you do not discuss. ‘Me’ is the object — the one acted upon. The repetition makes the telling feel relentless, like the drumbeat of years of lessons.

Who are ‘dem’? The poem never says. They could be teachers, a school system, colonial authorities, or the whole of official culture. Leaving them nameless is a choice with an effect: an authority that never needs to introduce itself is an authority that feels permanent and everywhere. You cannot argue with a pronoun.

The speaker then says what that telling did to him. His education is pictured as a bandage: ‘Bandage up me eye’, and the bandage is made of his own history. A bandage is meant to protect and heal. Tied over an eye, it blinds. The image exposes a gap between what the education claimed to be — care, giving, improvement — and what it did: it kept him from seeing. He goes on to say it blinded him to his own identity, linking history and selfhood in the poem's first lines.

“Bandage up me eye” — The speaker, Opening

The verb leads the line, so the action done to him comes first. The bandage is an image of care turned into concealment, and because it is made of ‘me own history’, the line suggests that his own past was used to hide him from himself — told from someone else's point of view, framed to keep him in the dark. Keep the spelling: ‘me eye’ is the voice the bandage could not silence.

Methods: metaphor · irony · phonetic spelling

Grade 9 insight. Grade 9 move: say the bandage is about framing, not just omission. The speaker does not claim he was taught nothing about his past; he claims his past was used against him. That is a more interesting accusation — and it prepares the ending, where the same history becomes the material he carves with.

What just happened

• The refrain sets the power relationship: ‘dem’ act, the speaker receives.
• ‘Dem’ are never named, which makes the authority feel permanent and everywhere.
• The education is a bandage over his eye, made of his own history.
• History and identity are tied together from the very first lines.

Why it matters. The opening defines power in this poem as the right to tell — and shows its effect as a kind of blindness.

What to remember

• Analyse the grammar of the refrain: subject, one-way verb, object.
• The bandage is care turned into concealment.

The taught list: history as a jingle

Dates, heroes and nursery rhymes in one breath

The stanzas that list what ‘dem’ taught are written in long lines that rhyme in easy pairs. They mix real history with pantomime and nursery rhyme as though there were no difference: the Norman Conquest beside Dick Whittington's cat; Lord Nelson and Waterloo; Columbus and 1492; Florence Nightingale and her lamp beside Robin Hood; the dish that ran away with the spoon; Old King Cole. The rhymes chime almost automatically, so the stanzas jog along like a skipping song.

The first item sets the tone: ‘1066 and all dat’. The most famous date in English history is waved away with a shrug. The phrase also echoes the title of a famous British comic book of 1930, 1066 and All That, which mocked the way British pupils learned history as a string of memorised dates. So the speaker borrows a joke the British made about their own schooling and turns it on the version that was exported to him.

Why mix history with nursery rhyme? Because it shows how the speaker experienced what he was taught. Nursery rhymes are learned before a child can question them; they are absorbed, recited, never examined. Placing the Battle of Hastings beside the cow jumping over the moon suggests the official history was handed over in the same way — something to memorise and repeat, not to think about. The satire is not against the British figures as people; it is against the way they were taught.

There is a further detail careful readers notice: the poem pairs Nelson with Waterloo, though Nelson died at Trafalgar ten years before Waterloo, which was Wellington's battle. Whether that is the speaker's satire — British victories taught as one undifferentiated pile of glory — or simply the pairing the rhyme wanted, the poem does not settle. Either way, it fits the picture of a history delivered as a heap rather than understood as a sequence.

Another reading. A double-edged reading: by reducing British history to a jingle, the poem risks doing exactly what it accuses ‘dem’ of — simplifying a history for effect. A strong answer can argue that the mirror image is deliberate: the speaker gives the official story the same careless treatment it gave his.

What just happened

• The taught stanzas rhyme in easy pairs and jog along like a skipping song.
• They mix real events with legends and nursery rhymes without distinction.
• The opening item, ‘1066 and all dat’, echoes a British comic book that mocked school history.
• The Nelson and Waterloo pairing adds to the sense of a history taught as a heap.

Why it matters. The form of these stanzas is the speaker's criticism: an education that treated history like children's verse produced pupils who could recite it without understanding it.

What to remember

• The satire targets the way history was taught, not the figures as people.
• Nursery rhymes are absorbed, not questioned — that is the point of the mixture.

Toussaint and Nanny: the figures given sight

Short lines, beacons and rivers

Each taught stanza ends by turning to someone ‘dem’ never mentioned, and two of those figures open out into stanzas of their own. The change is visible before it is heard: the lines suddenly shrink to two or three words, sometimes one. The jogging rhythm stops. Each word is given space and weight.

Toussaint L'Ouverture comes first. The poem describes him as an enslaved man with vision, who defeated the soldiers Napoleon sent and whose revolt led to the first Black republic. He is ‘Toussaint de beacon’ of the Haitian Revolution. A beacon is a fire lit on high ground to guide or to warn. The image makes him a source of light that others steer by — the very thing a speaker with a bandaged eye has lacked.

Nanny's turn arrives through a rhyme. A taught stanza about the dish running away with the spoon ends by naming ‘Nanny de maroon’ — the heroine the nursery rhyme left no room for, slotted into its own rhyming pattern so that the omission is heard. Her stanza then follows a chain of images: she is a ‘see-far woman’, a visionary who sees beyond the present; her struggle burns like fire, becomes a hopeful stream, and flows to ‘freedom river’. The images move, and they move in one direction — toward freedom.

“see-far woman” — The speaker, Nanny stanza

A compound invented for her. The official vocabulary had no word for this heroine, so the speaker coins one — an act of creation that previews the ending's carving. It is also an image of sight: she sees far, where the speaker was blinded. The figures are not only the history he was denied; they are the vision he was denied.

Methods: compound adjective · neologism · imagery of sight

Grade 9 insight. Grade 9 move: link the two stanzas through SEEING. Toussaint is a beacon and a man of vision; Nanny is ‘see-far’. Set against the bandage of the opening, the poem's image system argues that real knowledge is a kind of sight, and that the untaught figures are where sight lives.

What just happened

• The figures' stanzas switch to very short lines, slowing the reader.
• Toussaint is a beacon — a guiding light — of the Haitian Revolution.
• Nanny enters through a nursery-rhyme stanza that never mentioned her.
• Her stanza flows from vision through fire and stream to a river of freedom.

Why it matters. Form and imagery together re-rank history: the figures the curriculum skipped are given the poem's slowest lines and its brightest language.

What to remember

• Both figures are presented through sight — the answer to the bandage.
• The shape on the page is itself an argument.

Mary Seacole, and the turn

A star beside a lamp — then ‘But now’

The last figure's stanza is the most like a story. A taught stanza about Old King Cole closes by rhyming his name with Mary Seacole's — the merry monarch of the nursery rhyme set beside a woman the classroom ignored. Then her stanza follows her: she travelled far from Jamaica to the Crimean War; she volunteered; even when the British said no, she went anyway, facing the cold.

That refusal is history, not exaggeration. Seacole's offer to join the nursing effort was turned down, and she travelled to the Crimea at her own expense. The poem's point is sharpened by the fact: she was excluded once at the time, and excluded again from the classroom.

Then the images arrive. She is ‘a healing star’ among the wounded and ‘a yellow sunrise’ to the dying. Remember that Florence Nightingale appeared in the taught list with her lamp. A lamp lights a room; a star lights the night and guides travellers; a sunrise ends the night altogether. Without a word of argument, the poem has ranked the forgotten nurse above the famous one.

Another reading. A reading worth having: Seacole cared for British soldiers. The poem's heroes are not simply enemies of Britain; one of them served the very people who refused her. That shows the poem's complaint is about recognition, not about sides.

After Seacole, the refrain returns — and then the poem changes direction. ‘But now’ marks the break. The speaker announces he is ‘checking out me own history’ and ‘carving out me identity’. For the first time in the poem he is the subject of an active verb. ‘Checking out’ is investigation: looking for himself. ‘Carving’ is stronger — physical, effortful, permanent, the way you cut a name into stone or shape a figure from wood.

“carving out me identity” — The speaker, Final line

The poem's last words answer its first image. The bandage covered; the carving cuts something new into the world. Identity is no longer received from ‘dem’ — it is made, by hand, by the person it belongs to. And it is made in his own grammar: ‘me’ survives into the last line, so the new identity is carved in the voice the classroom did not teach.

Methods: metaphor · active verb · end-position emphasis · pronoun shift

What just happened

• Seacole enters by rhyming with Old King Cole, then her stanza follows her to the Crimea.
• The British refused her; she went anyway — a detail that is historically true.
• She becomes a star and a sunrise, quietly outshining Nightingale's lamp.
• After ‘But now’, the speaker becomes the subject: checking, carving.

Why it matters. The final movement completes the poem's argument: the speaker stops being the object of history and becomes its author.

What to remember

• Lamp, star, sunrise — the poem ranks through its images.
• ‘Carving’ answers ‘bandage’: one covers, the other creates.

Schooling in the colonies, and a language of its own

The context the poem is about

Most poems have a context. This one is about context — about which facts a society decides to teach its children. In Britain's Caribbean colonies, schooling was largely modelled on British education. Children studied British history and English literature and sat examinations set in Britain. The history of the Caribbean itself — slavery, resistance, the Indigenous peoples — was given far less room.

Guyana. The poet was born in Guyana, which was the British colony of British Guiana until its independence in 1966. You do not need any more biography than that, and you should not invent any — but the fact explains the shape of the speaker's two lists. The taught list is a recognisable picture of a curriculum centred on Britain: the Norman Conquest, Nelson, Columbus, Nightingale, and the nursery rhymes of an English childhood.

Read in this context, ‘Bandage up me eye’ stops being a vague complaint and becomes a description of a real educational system — one that put Britain at the centre and the Caribbean at the edge, so that a child could know about Dick Whittington's cat and nothing about the woman who led the Maroons of his own region.

Nation language. The Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite argued for the term ‘nation language’ for the English of the Caribbean — a full language with its own rhythms and sounds, not a broken form of Standard English. In that light, the poem's spellings are a claim of dignity: the voice the classroom treated as incorrect is used to write history and to praise heroes.

Put the two contexts together and the poem's form becomes part of its argument. A voice that was educated in Standard English answers back in its own. That is why ‘correcting’ the poem's spelling in a quotation is such a serious mistake: it repeats, in miniature, the attitude the poem attacks.

Avoid. Do not write a potted history of colonialism. Context earns credit on 8702 only when it changes how a word, image or structural choice reads. One fact, attached to one fragment, changing one reading.

What just happened

• Colonial schooling in the Caribbean largely followed a British model.
• The poet's birthplace, Guyana, was British Guiana until 1966.
• Kamau Brathwaite argued that Caribbean English is a ‘nation language’, a full language in its own right.

Why it matters. These contexts turn the bandage into a real system and the spelling into a claim of dignity — both readings the words alone only hint at.

What to remember

• This is a poem whose context is the choice of context.
• Never correct the poem's spelling when you quote it.

The real figures, and what their histories change

Toussaint, Nanny, Seacole, Shaka, the Caribs and Arawaks

Toussaint L'Ouverture. Formerly enslaved, he became the leading figure of the revolution that began in 1791 in the French colony of Saint-Domingue. When Napoleon sent an army to restore French control, Toussaint was captured and taken to France, where he died in prison in 1803. Independence was declared in 1804, and Haiti became the first nation founded by formerly enslaved people. The poem compresses this — he did not live to see the republic declared — but its central claim, that he led a successful revolt against slavery and empire, is history.

Nanny of the Maroons. The Maroons were communities of people who escaped slavery and built settlements in Jamaica's mountainous interior. Nanny was a leader of the Windward Maroons in the eighteenth century, in their war against British colonial forces, and she is honoured today as a National Hero of Jamaica. Much of what is known about her comes from oral tradition rather than written record — which fits the poem: she survived in memory more than in the official archive.

Mary Seacole. Born in Jamaica in 1805, she offered to join the nursing effort when the Crimean War began and was refused. She travelled to the Crimea at her own expense, set up a ‘British Hotel’ near Balaclava, and cared for sick and wounded soldiers. She published an account of her life in 1857. For much of the twentieth century she was largely forgotten in British school history while Nightingale was celebrated; in 2016 a statue of her was unveiled outside St Thomas' Hospital in London.

Shaka, the Caribs and the Arawaks. Shaka was the Zulu king who built the Zulu kingdom into a powerful state in southern Africa in the early nineteenth century. The Caribs and Arawaks were Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean whose populations were devastated by violence, enslavement and disease after Columbus arrived in 1492. The poem's question about what happened to them points at the history that the celebration of Columbus leaves out.

Each fact changes a line. Toussaint's revolution was a signal to enslaved people far beyond Saint-Domingue, so ‘Toussaint de beacon’ is close to literal. Seacole's refusal by the British is a documented event, so the line about the British saying no is not a poetic exaggeration — and her absence from the classroom becomes a second exclusion. Nanny's survival in oral tradition makes the poem's spoken voice the right voice to carry her. And the pairing of Columbus with 1492 carries a silence the poem breaks: the date the curriculum celebrated was the beginning of a catastrophe for the Caribs and Arawaks.

Examiner insight. Accuracy is the poem's own demand — it accuses an education of getting history wrong. Keep every fact you use to what is certain, and do not decorate the figures with details you are not sure of.

What just happened

• Toussaint led the revolt that ended in Haiti's independence in 1804, though he died in a French prison in 1803.
• Nanny led the Windward Maroons and survives largely through oral tradition.
• Seacole was refused, went to the Crimea at her own expense, and was long forgotten in school history.
• The Caribs and Arawaks were devastated after 1492 — the history behind the Columbus pairing.

Why it matters. The figures are real, and their real histories make the poem's lines more precise and more pointed than they look on a first reading.

What to remember

• Use one fact to change one reading — never a biography.
• The poem compresses Toussaint's story; say so if you use it.

The speaker: from object to author

A voice in control of its anger

The speaker is never named and never described. Everything we know about him comes from his voice — and that voice is the poem's most important feature. He speaks a Caribbean English, spelled to show how it sounds: ‘dem’ for them, ‘dat’ for that, ‘de’ for the, ‘me’ for my, verbs without the endings Standard English expects. He is educated; he can list the curriculum from memory. The poem is built from his realisation that this education was chosen for him by others, and that it left out the people who belonged to his own past.

Track where he sits in his own sentences. For most of the poem he is the object: told, bandaged, blinded. Only at the end does he become the subject: checking, carving. That single grammatical shift is the whole of his development, and it is the quickest route to a strong structural paragraph.

His tone is often misread as simple rage. It is more controlled than that. He mocks — by rhyming the Norman Conquest with a pantomime cat — and he praises, in the figures' stanzas, with real tenderness. The mixture of satire and celebration keeps the poem from being a rant. This is a voice that has its anger under command and chooses where to aim it.

Grade 9 upgrade. Instead of: The speaker is angry that he was not taught about Black history.

Write: The speaker's anger is aimed at control, not content: he objects that ‘dem’ chose his history for him. His answer is not to delete the British figures but to take over the telling — so the poem's real subject is authorship, and its ending puts the pen in his hand.

Another reading. A complicating reading: the speaker attacks his education using skills that education gave him — reading, listing, allusion, rhyme. The poem may be more ambivalent about schooling than its anger suggests: the classroom handed him the tools he now turns against it.

What just happened

• The speaker is known only through his voice, written in Caribbean English spelling.
• He moves from grammatical object to grammatical subject.
• His tone mixes satire and praise rather than shouting.

Why it matters. The speaker's development is the poem's argument: identity moves from being received to being made.

What to remember

• Track ‘me’ and ‘I’ through the poem — that is his journey.
• Call his anger controlled; show where he aims it.

The themes: power, identity, resistance

And two image systems that carry them

Power over knowledge. The poem's central claim is that deciding what people learn is a form of power. The refrain defines it: the power to tell. The speaker sums up his grievance by saying they told him only what they wanted to tell him — knowledge selected to suit the people selecting it. Power here works not by force but by omission and framing.

Identity and history. The poem frames itself with the two together. At the start he is blinded to his identity by a bandage made of his history; at the end he checks out his history and carves his identity. History is the material identity is made from — so whoever controls one controls the other.

Resistance and voice. Every untaught figure resisted power: slavery, colonial armies, official refusal. The speaker's resistance is modelled on theirs, but his weapon is language. The poem resists three times over: in the figures it chooses to honour, in the voice it speaks in, and in the ending's shift from being told to telling.

History as nursery rhyme (a minor theme). The taught list sets dates beside rhymes and legends. The satire suggests the official history was absorbed like a nursery rhyme — recited, never examined.

Blindness and sight (a minor theme, but the poem's main image system). Blindness belongs to the taught history: the bandage. Light and vision belong to the untaught figures: the beacon, the see-far woman, the healing star, the yellow sunrise. The ending completes the pattern without naming light: to check something out is to look at it for yourself. The bandage is off.

Use this in an essay. Deployable argument: Agard frames the poem with history and identity — blinded at the start, carving at the end — to argue that a person's sense of self depends on which past they are allowed to know, and that taking back the telling is a way of taking back the self.

What just happened

• Power in the poem is the power to tell — and to leave out.
• History and identity frame the poem, at its opening and its ending.
• Resistance comes through the figures, the voice and the final turn.
• Blindness against light is the image system that carries all three.

Why it matters. Knowing how the themes connect lets you answer any Power and Conflict question on this poem with an argument rather than a list.

What to remember

• Power, identity and resistance are major; nursery rhyme and sight are minor but useful.
• Link every theme to a method — refrain, image, structure, spelling.

Form and structure: two kinds of stanza

How the shape on the page makes the argument

The poem is in free verse — there is no fixed metre or stanza length — but it uses rhyme heavily in one of its two kinds of stanza. That combination is the key to its structure. The poem does not abandon traditional patterns altogether; it uses them where it wants to mock and drops them where it wants to honour.

The two kinds of stanza

The alternation does the arguing. Every taught stanza ends by turning to someone it left out, so the reader experiences the omission over and over — the rhyme pattern itself pulls the missing name into view. Then the figures' stanzas break the pattern entirely, as if the poem refuses to keep those figures inside the official shape.

The refrain gives the poem its frame. ‘Dem tell me’ recurs through the poem with the rhythm of repeated instruction. The ending breaks it: ‘But now’ is the first time the pattern is interrupted from the speaker's side. Because we have heard the refrain so often, we hear the break.

Grade 9 insight. Grade 9 move: argue that the form enacts the poem's argument. The poem does to official history what the speaker says history did to him — it interrupts it, re-spells it, rearranges it, and finally takes the pen. The structure moves from being told to telling.

Avoid. Do not claim the figures' stanzas are printed in italics or set apart in a special typeface. Printings differ. What you can say with certainty is that their lines are much shorter — and that is the shape worth analysing.

What just happened

• The poem is free verse that uses heavy rhyme in its taught stanzas only.
• Taught stanzas jog along; figures' stanzas slow into very short lines.
• Each taught stanza turns to a figure it left out, repeating the omission.
• The refrain frames the poem until ‘But now’ breaks it.

Why it matters. The structure is not a container for the argument; it is the argument — a re-ranking of history made visible on the page.

What to remember

• Always include one structural point: the two stanza types, the refrain or the turn.
• Analyse line length, not typeface.

Language: spelling, pronouns and images

Three tools, one argument

Spelling and grammar. Every non-standard form is a choice. The poem could have been written in Standard English, and was not. Read aloud, it sounds Caribbean, and the reader — especially a reader schooled in Standard English — has to adjust to it. That is a small reversal of the speaker's own schooling: for the length of the poem, the reader is the one learning someone else's way of speaking.

Creole: A language that develops from contact between languages and becomes the first language of a community. Caribbean English Creoles have their own grammar and sounds; the poem's spellings represent them. Never call them errors or slang.

Pronouns. ‘Dem’ is the authority, ‘me’ the object, and ‘I’ arrives as a subject only at the end. No other feature gives you a whole-poem argument so cheaply. Follow the pronouns and you have followed the shift of power.

Imagery. Three images carry the poem's journey: the bandaged eye at the start, light and sight in the figures' stanzas, and carving at the end. Blindness, vision, making. The light images also rank the figures: Nightingale is given a lamp in the taught list, while Seacole becomes ‘a healing star’ and a sunrise. Toussaint is a beacon. The taught figures are named; the untaught figures shine.

“Toussaint de beacon” — The speaker, Toussaint stanza

A beacon is a fire on high ground that guides or warns. The image makes Toussaint a source of light for others, answering the bandage of the opening. The Creole article ‘de’ keeps the praise in the speaker's own voice: the hero is honoured in the language the classroom did not teach.

Methods: metaphor · light imagery · Creole spelling

Coinage. The speaker makes up words where the official vocabulary has none — Nanny's ‘see-far’ is the clearest case. Inventing a word is an act of authorship, and it previews the final carving: the speaker is already making things with language before he says he is making his identity.

Examiner insight. Quote the poem exactly as spelled. A fragment ‘corrected’ into Standard English loses the very feature you should be analysing, and an examiner will notice.

What just happened

• The spelling puts a Caribbean voice on the page and makes the reader adjust to it.
• Pronouns track the shift of power from ‘dem’ to ‘I’.
• Images move from blindness through light to carving.
• Coined words like ‘see-far’ are small acts of authorship.

Why it matters. Agard's language does what the speaker describes: it takes control of how history is told.

What to remember

• Spelling is a choice, never an error.
• Lamp, star, sunrise: the poem ranks through light.

Readings: triumph, beginning, satire, mirror

Four ways to read the poem, and how to use them

The empowerment reading. The poem is a journey from passive receiver to active author, and the ending is a triumph: identity reclaimed, the bandage off, the pen in the speaker's hand. This is the most common reading and it is well supported by the pronoun shift and the force of ‘carving’.

The unfinished reading. The final verbs are ongoing — checking, carving. The poem leaves the speaker at the start of a task, not its completion. Read this way, the poem is less a victory than a declaration of intent, and identity is something that has to be made continuously rather than won once.

The satirical reading. The poem's sharpest weapon is comedy, not anger. By making the official history rhyme with nursery rhymes, it shows the curriculum up as childish. On this reading, the laughter does more damage than any accusation could.

The mirror reading. By reducing British history to a jingle and compressing Toussaint's story into a few lines, the poem simplifies history for effect — the very thing it accuses ‘dem’ of doing. A careful answer can argue this mirror image is deliberate: the speaker gives the official story the same treatment it gave his, so the reader feels what selective telling is like.

Another reading. A counter-reading on schooling: the speaker uses everything his education gave him — literacy, allusion, rhyme, the very list he mocks — to write the poem. The poem may be arguing not that the education was worthless, but that it was incomplete and one-sided.

Use this in an essay. Using two readings: ‘The ending can be read as a triumph, but its present-tense verbs suggest something more demanding: identity, for Agard's speaker, is not recovered once and kept, but carved continuously against the pressure of what he was told.’

What just happened

• Empowerment: the ending as triumph.
• Unfinished: the ending as a beginning.
• Satire: comedy as the poem's weapon.
• Mirror: the poem simplifies history as ‘dem’ did, perhaps on purpose.

Why it matters. Weighing two readings against each other is how a personal response becomes an argument rather than a summary.

What to remember

• Present readings as readings, then choose one and defend it.
• The ongoing verbs are your evidence for the unfinished reading.

Comparing with another Power and Conflict poem

Four partners and what each lets you argue

On this paper the poem is always half of a comparison. Choose your partner by the question's key idea, then compare methods — voice, form, imagery, structure, endings — not just topics.

Ozymandias (Percy Bysshe Shelley). Both poems are about who controls the record of the past. Shelley's king tried to fix his own legend in stone, and time has erased all but a broken statue; the sculptor's art tells the truth he did not intend. Agard's speaker attacks a version of history fixed by ‘dem’ and carves his own. The decisive difference: in Shelley, time and an artist humble the powerful; in Agard, a powerless person rewrites the record himself, now.

The Emigrée (Carol Rumens). Both poems present identity defended against an authority that wants to control it, and both make language the place identity survives. The difference is volume and direction: Rumens's speaker guards a memory of her city quietly, under threat, while Agard's speaker declares his history aloud and ends carving an identity in the open.

London (William Blake). Both poems show institutions controlling minds — Blake hears ‘mind-forg'd manacles’ in every voice and names the church and palace; Agard names a faceless ‘dem’ who bandaged his eye. The difference: Blake's speaker walks and observes the suffering of others in a regular, chiming form; Agard's speaker describes his own experience in a voice that breaks the standard.

Tissue (Imtiaz Dharker). Both poems are about records and who writes them. Dharker reflects on paper — maps, documents, the recorded births and deaths of a family — and on how fragile such records are. The difference: Tissue meditates on the impermanence of all records; Checking Out Me History demands that one particular record be rewritten.

Choosing a partner

Avoid. Never pair the poem with a text from outside the Power and Conflict cluster, and never compare by subject alone. ‘Both poems are about history’ earns little; say what each poem does with its voice, form and imagery, and name a real difference.

What just happened

• Ozymandias: who controls the record of the past.
• The Emigrée: identity carried in language under pressure.
• London: institutions that control minds.
• Tissue: records and who writes them.

Why it matters. The comparison is the task itself; the right partner gives you a thesis with a real point of difference.

What to remember

• Pick the partner the question's key word suggests.
• Keep both poems alive in every paragraph.

The examination: Section B in practice

Printed poem, remembered poem, one argument

AQA 8702 Paper 2, Section B: the question names one Power and Conflict poem and prints it; you compare it with one other poem from the cluster, chosen and quoted from memory. Three objectives are credited: AO1, an informed personal response with references; AO2, analysis of language, form and structure with terminology; and AO3, which on this board means context. AO4 is not credited on this question. Comparison is not a separate objective — it is the task, rewarded through the quality of your argument and analysis.

If Checking Out Me History is printed, use the paper: mark the shifts between the two kinds of stanza, the pronouns, and the images of blindness and light. If another poem is printed and you bring this one, carry a handful of fragments in the poem's own spelling — ‘Dem tell me’, ‘Bandage up me eye’, ‘Toussaint de beacon’, ‘a healing star’, ‘carving out me identity’ — and a clear sense of the structure. Each fragment can carry a whole paragraph.

A plan that works

• A comparative thesis: shared ground and the decisive difference.
• Voice: Agard's Creole speaker against the partner poem's voice.
• Imagery: blindness and light, against the partner's central image.
• Structure: the two kinds of stanza and the turn, against the partner's shape.
• Endings compared, with one precise contextual fact that changes a reading.
• A short conclusion answering the question's exact words.

Checklist before you write

• Is my partner a Power and Conflict poem that fits the question's key word?
• Have I written a thesis someone could disagree with?
• Have I planned at least one structural comparison?
• Is every contextual point attached to a fragment and changing its meaning?
• Am I quoting the poem's spelling exactly?

What just happened

• One poem is printed; the other is chosen and quoted from memory.
• AO1, AO2 and AO3 are credited; on 8702 AO3 is context.
• Five short fragments in Agard's spelling are enough to carry an essay.

Why it matters. Knowing exactly what is credited lets you spend every minute on argument, analysis and context that changes a reading.

What to remember

• AO codes never transfer between boards — here AO3 is context.
• Integrate both poems throughout; never bolt the second on at the end.