Checking Out Me History — AQA GCSE English Literature 8702
AQA GCSE English Literature · 8702
Checking Out Me History
The poems
What you need to know
Checking Out Me History by John Agard: what it is about, its context, and how Agard uses language, form and structure.
Key quotations and how to analyse them, and the poems in the cluster it compares well with, with similarities and differences.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Dem tell me', 'Bandage up me eye with me own history', 'Blind me to me own identity', 'a healing star / among the wounded', 'a yellow sunrise / to the dying', 'I carving out me identity'.
Form: a dramatic monologue in Caribbean English, repetition ('Dem tell me'), and the stanzas about figures left out of his schooling.
Context: John Agard, Guyana, and the history taught in a colonial education.
