Grade 9 Notes: Checking Out Me History

The speaker

A voice that was told its history, and takes the telling back

The speaker is never named, and the poem is in the first person throughout. His voice is the poem's most important feature: he speaks in a Caribbean English, spelled to show how it sounds, rather than in the Standard English of the schoolroom. He has been educated — he knows 1066, Nelson, Columbus, Florence Nightingale and the nursery rhymes — and the poem is built from his realisation that this education was chosen for him by others, ‘dem’, and that it left out the figures who belonged to his own history. He moves across the poem from being acted upon (told, bandaged, blinded) to acting (checking out, carving out). He is angry, but his anger is controlled and often witty: he mocks the taught history by setting it beside nursery rhymes, and he celebrates the untaught figures in the most beautiful language in the poem. By the last lines he has become the author of his own identity.

The opening — being told

Refrain, blindness and a list

The poem begins with repetition: ‘Dem tell me’. The pronoun ‘dem’ is never defined. It could be teachers, the school system, the colonial authorities, or the whole of official culture. Leaving it undefined makes it more powerful: an authority that does not need a name. The repetition also sets up a rhythm of being talked at — the speaker is the object of the sentence, the one who receives.

Then the poem turns the education into an injury: ‘Bandage up me eye’ with his own history, blinding him to his own identity. A bandage is supposed to heal; here it covers the eye so that it cannot see. The metaphor is precise: the education was presented as care, and it worked as concealment.

Grade 9 insight. Grade 9 move: the bandage is made of ‘me own history’. The speaker is not saying he was taught nothing about himself; he is saying that his own history was used to blind him — perhaps a version of it told from someone else's point of view. The line is about framing, not just omission.

The middle — two lists

What dem told, and what dem never told

The middle of the poem alternates between two kinds of stanza. In one, the speaker lists what he was taught: ‘1066 and all dat’, Dick Whittington and his cat, a balloon pioneer, nursery-rhyme cows and spoons, Lord Nelson and Waterloo, Columbus and 1492, Florence Nightingale and her lamp, Robin Hood, Old King Cole. In the other, he turns to someone he was never taught: Toussaint L'Ouverture, Nanny of the Maroons, Shaka, the Caribs and Arawaks, Mary Seacole.

The taught list is deliberately muddled. Real historical events sit beside pantomime legends and nursery rhymes, rhyming cheerfully, as if they were all the same kind of thing. The effect is mockery: an education that serves up the Battle of Hastings and the cow jumping over the moon in the same breath has turned history into a set of jingles. The speaker's grievance is not only what was left out but how carelessly what was included was handled.

The untaught figures are given different language entirely. Toussaint becomes ‘Toussaint de beacon’; Nanny is a ‘see-far woman’ whose struggle flows toward ‘freedom river’; Mary Seacole is ‘a healing star’ and ‘a yellow sunrise’. These are the poem's most lyrical images — light, vision, water, movement — and they are the opposite of the bandaged eye.

The ending — taking the telling back

From ‘dem’ to ‘I’

The poem returns to its refrain, and then changes direction. ‘But now’ the speaker is ‘checking out me own history’, and he is ‘carving out me identity’. For the first time, ‘I’ is the subject of the sentence. ‘Checking out’ suggests investigating for himself — looking something up, testing it. ‘Carving’ is stronger: it is physical, effortful and permanent, the way you carve a name in stone or a figure from wood.

Grade 9 upgrade. Instead of: At the end the speaker decides to learn about his own history.

Write: The ending reverses the grammar of the whole poem. Every earlier sentence made the speaker the object of ‘dem tell me’; the final lines make him the subject who checks and carves. ‘Carving’ answers ‘bandage’: one covers the eye, the other cuts something new into the world. Identity, in the last line, is not received — it is made, by hand, by the person it belongs to.

Another reading. A more cautious reading: the poem ends on intention, not achievement. He is ‘checking out’ and ‘carving out’ — present continuous, work in progress. The identity is not finished; the poem leaves him at the beginning of the task.

Language & structure: how Agard builds the speaker

The speaker is built first through phonetic spelling and Creole grammar: ‘dem’ for them, ‘dat’ for that, ‘de’ for the, ‘me’ for my, verbs without the endings Standard English expects. These are not errors. They put an accent on the page and make the reader hear a Caribbean voice. Because the poem is about an education delivered in Standard English, writing it in this voice is itself a form of answering back.

Second, grammatical position. For most of the poem the speaker is the object: dem tell me, bandage up me eye, blind me. Only at the end does he become the subject: I checking, I carving. Tracking where ‘me’ and ‘I’ fall in the sentences shows the poem's whole movement — from being acted on to acting.

Third, tone. The voice is angry but rarely shouts. It mocks — by rhyming history with nursery rhyme — and it praises, in the figures' stanzas. The combination of satire and celebration keeps the poem from being a simple rant: it is a voice in control of its anger.

Fourth, the refrain. ‘Dem tell me’ opens the poem, returns throughout, and frames the ending. Repetition imitates the drumbeat of years of instruction — and when the speaker finally breaks the pattern with ‘But now’, the break is heard.

Context in depth: schooling, empire and voice

The colonial curriculum. 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 — of slavery, of resistance, of the Indigenous peoples — was given far less room. Guyana, where the poet was born, was a British colony (British Guiana) until its independence in 1966. The speaker's two lists are a picture of that curriculum: Britain's heroes at the centre, the Caribbean's at the margins or missing.

Nation language. The Barbadian poet and historian Kamau Brathwaite argued for the term ‘nation language’ to describe the English of the Caribbean, insisting it was a full language with its own rhythms rather than a broken form of Standard English. Read in that context, the poem's spellings are a claim of dignity: the speaker's own language is fit for history and for praise.

1066 and all that. The phrase about 1066 echoes the title of 1066 and All That (1930), a famous comic book by W. C. Sellar and R. J. Yeatman that parodied the way British schoolchildren learned history as a string of memorised dates and ‘good things’. The echo suggests that even in Britain the school version of history was recognised as a jingle — and the speaker had that jingle exported to him.

Relationships

• ‘Dem’ — The unnamed authority — teachers, school system, colonial power — that chose what he learned. Never described, never given a face, only a pronoun and a verb: they tell. The speaker's relationship with ‘dem’ moves from passive receiver to open challenger.
• The untaught figures — His chosen ancestors. Toussaint, Nanny and Seacole are given the poem's most admiring language; they are the history he claims for himself and the models for his own act of resistance.
• The taught figures — Not enemies but a heap: Nelson, Columbus, Nightingale and nursery-rhyme characters thrown together. The speaker mocks the way they were taught rather than attacking them as people.
• The listener — The poem is built to be heard, and its spellings make the reader hear an accent. Any reader educated in Standard English is placed, for the length of the poem, inside a voice the classroom did not teach.

What The speaker stands for

• The bandage over the eye — an education presented as care that worked as concealment.
• Light and vision (beacon, see-far, star, sunrise) — the untaught figures as sources of sight, against the blindness of the taught curriculum.
• The nursery rhymes — history reduced to jingles; the childishness of the official story.
• Carving — identity as something made by hand, permanent and hard-won.

Why Agard made The speaker

• To show that controlling what a person learns is a form of power, and that choosing what to remember is a way of resisting it.
• To restore figures of Black and Caribbean history to the centre of attention, in language that honours them.
• To put a Caribbean voice on the page in its own spelling, so that the form of the poem itself resists the standard it criticises.
• To make the reader ask what was left out of their own education.

The strongest quotations

“Bandage up me eye” — The speaker, Opening

The education is pictured as a bandage tied over the eye. A bandage normally heals and protects; here it blinds. The image exposes the gap between how the curriculum presented itself (as care, as giving) and what it did (covering sight). Because the bandage is made of ‘me own history’, the line suggests his history was told in a way that hid him from himself.

Methods: metaphor · irony · phonetic spelling

“Dem tell me” — The speaker, Refrain

The poem's refrain. ‘Dem’ is an authority with no name; ‘tell’ is a one-way verb — you are told, you do not discuss. Repetition makes the telling relentless, like years of lessons. The Creole spelling of the pronoun is itself a small act of resistance: the institution is named in the voice it did not teach.

Methods: refrain · repetition · pronoun · Creole spelling

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

The poem's last words and its turning point. For the first time the speaker is the subject of an active verb. ‘Carving’ is physical and permanent — the identity is cut into being rather than handed over. It answers the bandage of the opening: one covers, the other creates. The non-standard ‘me’ remains, so the new identity is made in the speaker's own language.

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

Other readings

• The empowerment reading: the poem is a journey from passive receiver to active author, and its ending is a triumph — identity reclaimed.
• The unfinished reading: the present continuous verbs (checking, carving) show work in progress. The poem ends at the start of the task, not its completion.
• The satirical reading: the poem's sharpest weapon is not anger but comedy — the taught list is mocked by being made to rhyme with nursery rhymes, so the official curriculum is shown up as childish.
• The double-edged reading: by reducing British history to a jingle, the poem risks doing what it accuses ‘dem’ of doing — simplifying a history for effect. A careful answer can argue that this mirror-image is deliberate.

Essay arguments

• Agard presents education as a form of power: the refrain ‘Dem tell me’ makes the speaker the object of a one-way telling, and the bandaged eye shows that what was offered as knowledge worked as concealment.
• The poem's structure enacts its argument: rhyming stanzas of taught history jog along like nursery rhymes, while the untaught figures are given slow, short-lined stanzas full of light — so the form itself re-ranks what matters.
• The ending turns the speaker from object to subject: ‘checking out me own history’ and ‘carving out me identity’ answer the bandage of the opening, presenting identity as something made rather than received.

In theme essays

• Power: he is the person power acts on — told, bandaged, blinded — until he acts back.
• Identity: the poem's last word is identity, carved by him.
• History and memory: he chooses which past to remember.
• Language: his voice is the poem's form — Creole spelling as resistance.

Questions that get asked

• Compare the ways poets show the effects of power on individuals in Checking Out Me History and one other poem from Power and Conflict.
• Compare the ways poets show ideas about identity in Checking Out Me History and one other poem from Power and Conflict.
• Compare the ways poets show the ways people resist power in Checking Out Me History and one other poem from Power and Conflict.
• Compare the ways poets show the past in Checking Out Me History and one other poem from Power and Conflict.

The untaught figures

Toussaint, Nanny and Mary Seacole — the history given light

The figures the speaker was never taught are the poem's heroes, and Agard treats three of them at length: Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that ended in the independence of Haiti; Nanny, a leader of the Maroons — communities of people who had escaped slavery — in Jamaica; and Mary Seacole, the Jamaican-born nurse who cared for British soldiers in the Crimean War. Shaka, the Zulu king, and the Caribs and Arawaks, Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, are named more briefly. What unites the figures is that they resisted power — slavery, colonial armies, official refusal — and that the speaker's education passed over them. The poem gives them its most lyrical language: light, vision, rivers and stars.

Toussaint and Nanny — vision and freedom

Resistance to slavery

Toussaint's stanza moves in short, separate lines, giving each word space. The poem calls him an enslaved man with vision, who beat back Napoleon's soldiers, and links him to the birth of the first Black republic. He is ‘Toussaint de beacon’ — a light for others to steer by — of the Haitian Revolution. The beacon image turns him into guidance: the very thing the bandaged speaker lacked.

Nanny's stanza is built from images of sight and water. She is a ‘see-far woman’ — a visionary, someone who sees beyond the present — whose fiery struggle becomes a hopeful stream flowing to ‘freedom river’. The movement of the images, from vision to fire to stream to river, gives the stanza a direction: it flows toward freedom.

Grade 9 insight. Grade 9 move: notice that both Toussaint and Nanny are presented through SEEING — vision, beacon, see-far. They are the opposite of the speaker at the poem's start, whose eye was bandaged. The figures are not just the history he was denied; they are the sight he was denied.

Mary Seacole — the healer who was refused

The longest of the figures' stanzas

Mary Seacole's stanza tells a small story. She travelled far from Jamaica to the Crimean War; she volunteered; even when the British said no, she still went, braving the cold. Then the images arrive: she is ‘a healing star’ among the wounded and ‘a yellow sunrise’ to the dying. The stanza sets her beside Florence Nightingale, whom the speaker was taught about — Nightingale had her lamp; Seacole is a star and a sunrise, light on a grander scale.

The detail that the British said no matters because it is true: Seacole's offer to join the nursing effort was refused, and she went to the Crimea at her own expense. The poem's point is sharpened by history — she was excluded once at the time, and excluded again from the classroom.

Another reading. A further reading: Seacole cared for British soldiers. The poem's heroes are not simply opponents of Britain; Seacole served the very people who refused her. The poem's complaint is about recognition, not about which side the figures were on.

Language & structure: how Agard builds the figures

The figures' stanzas are short-lined: a few words per line, sometimes one. The shape slows the reader, gives each image weight, and sets these stanzas visibly apart from the jogging couplets of the taught list. Form ranks the figures above the curriculum.

Their imagery is consistently of light, sight and water: beacon, see-far, fire, stream, river, star, sunrise. It is the poem's richest and most lyrical vocabulary, and it answers the blindness of the opening.

Their stanzas are less regular in rhyme than the taught stanzas, which chime almost automatically. The figures are given language that feels discovered rather than recited.

Context in depth: the real figures

Toussaint L'Ouverture and Haiti. Toussaint L'Ouverture, formerly enslaved, became the leading figure of the revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue that began in 1791. 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 story into a few short lines — 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, during 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 itself fits the poem: she survived in memory more than in the official archive.

Mary Seacole. Mary Seacole was born in Jamaica in 1805. When the Crimean War began, her offer to join the nursing effort was refused; she travelled to the Crimea at her own expense, set up a ‘British Hotel’ near Balaclava, and cared for wounded and sick soldiers. She published an account of her life in 1857, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands. 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, in the early nineteenth century, built the Zulu kingdom into a powerful state in southern Africa. The Caribs and Arawaks were Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean; after Columbus arrived in 1492, their populations were devastated by violence, enslavement and disease. The poem's question about what happened to them points at a history the celebration of Columbus leaves out.

Relationships

• The speaker — The figures are his chosen inheritance — the history he checks out and builds his identity from. They model the resistance he performs in the poem.
• The taught figures — Each untaught figure is paired against a taught one: Seacole against Nightingale, Shaka against Nelson, the Caribs and Arawaks against Columbus. The pairings make the omissions visible.

What The untaught figures stands for

• Light (beacon, star, sunrise) — the figures as sources of guidance and hope.
• Vision (see-far) — the sight the speaker's education denied him.
• Water (stream, river) — resistance as a flow toward freedom.

Why Agard made The untaught figures

• To honour figures of resistance in the language of light and vision.
• To show, through pairings, exactly what the official story left out.

The strongest quotations

“Toussaint de beacon” — The speaker, Toussaint stanza

A beacon is a fire lit on a height to guide or warn. Calling Toussaint a beacon of the Haitian Revolution makes him a source of light for others — the opposite of the bandage. The Creole ‘de’ keeps the praise in the speaker's own voice.

Methods: metaphor · light imagery · Creole spelling

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

A compound invented for Nanny: a woman who sees far, a visionary. The made-up compound is itself an act of creation — the speaker coins new words for a heroine the official vocabulary never named.

Methods: compound adjective · neologism · imagery of sight

“a healing star” — The speaker, Seacole stanza

Seacole as a star among the wounded: a fixed light in darkness, something to navigate by, and a source of healing. Set beside Nightingale's lamp in the taught list, the star is light on a greater scale — the poem quietly ranks her above the figure it was taught to admire.

Methods: metaphor · light imagery · implicit comparison

Other readings

• The figures as role models: each one resisted power, and the speaker learns resistance from them.
• The figures as a counter-curriculum: the poem itself becomes the lesson the school did not give.

Essay arguments

• Agard gives the untaught figures the poem's language of light and vision — beacon, see-far, star, sunrise — so they become the sight that the speaker's bandaged education denied him.
• Each untaught figure is set against a taught one, so the poem's structure makes the omissions visible: Seacole beside Nightingale, Shaka beside Nelson.

In theme essays

• Resistance: the figures' own histories are histories of resistance.
• Power and history: the pairings show who the record favoured.

Questions that get asked

• Compare the ways poets show people who resist power in Checking Out Me History and one other poem from Power and Conflict.
• Compare the ways poets show heroism in Checking Out Me History and one other poem from Power and Conflict.

Power over knowledge

The poem's central claim is that deciding what people are taught is a form of power — and that the taught version of history served those who chose it.

The refrain ‘Dem tell me’ defines power in the poem: the ability to tell, and to decide what is told. ‘Dem’ never appears as people, only as an authority that speaks. The speaker's complaint is summed up in the line that they told him what they wanted to tell him — knowledge selected to suit its sellers.

The bandaged eye shows the effect. An education can blind as well as inform, and the speaker experienced his as blinding: it kept him from seeing his own history and so from seeing himself. Power here works not by force but by omission.

Another reading. A counter-reading worth considering: the speaker was taught to read, write and reason — and uses those skills to write the poem. The education he attacks also gave him the tools to attack it. The poem may be more complex about schooling than its anger suggests.

Use this in an essay. Deployable argument: Agard presents power as the right to tell — a nameless ‘dem’ selects history for the speaker and bandages his eye — so the poem's resistance takes the form of telling back.

Identity and history

The poem argues that identity is built from the history you know — and that taking control of that history is how you take control of who you are.

The opening links history and identity directly: bandaged with his own history, he is blinded to his own identity. The ending links them again: checking out his own history, he carves out his identity. History is the material identity is made from. Whoever controls one controls the other.

The poem's choice of figures shows what kind of identity the speaker is building: one rooted in Caribbean and African resistance — revolt against slavery, maroon communities, a woman who served despite being refused. He is choosing ancestors.

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.

Resistance and voice

The poem resists in three ways: through what it remembers (the figures), how it speaks (Creole spelling), and what it does at the end (takes the pen).

Every untaught figure resisted power: Toussaint and Nanny fought slavery and colonial armies; Seacole went to the war after being refused. The speaker's own resistance is modelled on theirs, though his weapon is language. Writing the poem in his own voice is itself resistance to the standard he was taught.

The form resists too. The poem breaks the regular rhyming pattern of the taught stanzas with the short, irregular lines of the figures' stanzas — as if the poem itself refuses to stay inside the official shape.

Use this in an essay. Deployable argument: the poem's resistance is triple — in the figures it honours, in the voice it uses, and in the ending's shift from being told to telling.

History as nursery rhyme (minor)

The taught list mixes historical facts with nursery rhymes and legends, mocking an education that treated history as children's verse.

The cow jumping over the moon and the dish running away with the spoon (from Hey Diddle Diddle), Old King Cole, Dick Whittington and his cat, Robin Hood: these sit beside 1066, Nelson and Columbus with no distinction. The rhymes jog along. The effect is satirical: an official history is shown to be no more serious, in the way it was taught, than a nursery rhyme.

There is a sharper point underneath. Nursery rhymes are learned before a child can question them. Setting history beside them suggests the speaker's history was taught the same way — absorbed, not examined.

Blindness and sight (minor)

The poem's imagery runs from a bandaged, blinded eye to beacons, stars and sunrises — from being kept in the dark to finding light.

Blindness belongs to the taught history: the bandage, the blinding. Light and sight belong to the untaught figures: the beacon, the see-far woman, the healing star, the yellow sunrise. The image system argues that real knowledge is a kind of sight.

The ending completes the system without naming light: to check something out is to look at it for yourself. The bandage is off.