The speaker challenges a listener who calls him half-caste, mocking the term by applying it to a painting, the English weather and a symphony, and asks the listener to come back with a whole mind to hear the rest of his story.
How Agard's Caribbean voice, phonetic spelling, repeated demand to explain, absurd comparisons and talk of halves turn the insult back on the person who uses it.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Excuse me / standing on one leg', 'Explain yuself / wha yu mean', 'mix red an green', 'is a half-caste canvas', 'I offer yu half-a-hand', 'I dream half-a-dream', 'wid de whole of yu eye', 'de other half / of my story'.
Form: free verse in three stanzas, a short opening and a short ending around a long middle, with almost no punctuation beyond slashes, written to be spoken and performed, and a repeated demand that builds through the poem.
Context: John Agard (born 1949 in British Guiana, now Guyana), who moved to Britain in 1977 and performs his poems aloud; the term half-caste, used in Britain in the 20th century for people of mixed race and now widely seen as offensive; and the Caribbean English he writes in, a voice of his own set against standard English.
Compares well with: No Problem (racism and a speaker who answers back), The Class Game (identity, dialect and prejudice) and Cousin Kate (being labelled by others).
