Key Quote
“"Dem tell me / Dem tell me / Wha dem want to tell me"”
John Agard · Checking Out Me History
Focus: “Dem”
The aggressive repetition of 'Dem tell me' establishes the poem's central conflict: a colonial education system that controls what histories are taught, suppressing Black and Caribbean narratives in favour of a white British curriculum.
Technique 1 — ANAPHORA & PHONETIC DIALECT
The anaphoric repetition of 'Dem tell me' — repeated throughout the poem — creates a drumbeat of accusation. 'Dem' (them) is unspecified but clearly refers to the colonial education system that controlled the curriculum. By using phonetic Caribbean dialect ('Dem', 'Wha', 'bandage up me eye') rather than Standard English, Agard reclaims his linguistic identity — the very thing the education system tried to suppress.
The dialect is a deliberate political choice: Standard English represents the hegemonic (dominant) culture that controlled the narrative; Creole represents the suppressed voice. Agard refuses to translate — the reader must meet him on his linguistic terms. This is an act of cultural resistance: language becomes the battlefield where colonial power is both exercised and challenged.
Key Words
RAD — PROGRESS
The poem charts a powerful progression from passive recipient of colonial education ('Dem tell me') to active agent of self-education ('But now I checking out me own history'). The shift from being told to telling — from object to subject — represents the speaker's intellectual emancipation (freedom of mind). By the end, the speaker has wrested control of their narrative from the colonial system.
Key Words
Technique 2 — DUAL STRUCTURE — CONTRASTING STANZAS
Agard alternates between two structural modes: regular stanzas in standard font listing British curriculum content (Guy Fawkes, 1066, Dick Whittington) delivered in a dismissive, nursery-rhyme rhythm, and italicised stanzas celebrating Black and Caribbean heroes (Toussaint L'Ouverture, Nanny de Maroon, Mary Seacole) in reverent, metaphor-rich language. The structural contrast enacts the poem's argument: the two histories are treated completely differently.
British history is reduced to trivial rhymes ('De man who discover de balloon'), while Caribbean history receives powerful natural imagery ('a healing star / among the wounded'). Agard inverts the expected hierarchy: the 'important' British history is presented as childish and insignificant, while the 'hidden' history is treated with beauty and gravitas. The form itself performs the revaluation (reassessment of worth) the poem demands.
Key Words
Context (AO3)
COLONIAL EDUCATION
Agard grew up in Guyana (then British Guiana), where the school curriculum was dictated by the British Empire. Caribbean children were taught British history, literature, and values while their own heritage was ignored or denigrated. This cultural erasure (removal from record) was a deliberate tool of colonial control: by replacing indigenous knowledge with British narratives, the empire maintained ideological dominance even after physical control ended.
BLACK BRITISH IDENTITY
Agard moved to Britain in 1977 and has spent decades challenging the invisibility of Black history in British education. The figures he celebrates — Toussaint L'Ouverture (leader of the Haitian Revolution), Nanny de Maroon (Jamaican freedom fighter), Mary Seacole (Jamaican-British nurse in the Crimean War) — were systematically excluded from British curricula. Agard's poem is part of a broader movement to decolonise (remove colonial bias from) education.
Key Words
WOW — COUNTER-NARRATIVE & EPISTEMIC VIOLENCE (Gayatri Spivak)
Agard's poem is a counter-narrative — a story told from the margins that challenges the dominant version of history. Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Spivak coined the term epistemic violence to describe how colonial powers suppress the knowledge, histories, and voices of colonised peoples. The British curriculum Agard describes commits epistemic violence: it doesn't just ignore Caribbean history — it replaces it, making children believe there is only one history worth knowing. Agard's poem performs what Frantz Fanon called 'decolonisation of the mind': the process of recognising and rejecting the internalised beliefs imposed by colonial education. The final declaration — 'I carving out me identity' — uses the verb 'carving' to suggest that reclaiming history is not passive learning but active, physical, even violent labour. Identity is not given; it must be sculpted from the raw material of recovered memory.
Key Words