Checking Out Me History by John Agard: Poem Analysis for GCSE

Checking Out Me History is a poem by John Agard about a speaker taught British history and nursery-rhyme figures at school while the history of his own Caribbean heritage went unmentioned. It comes from Agard's collection Half-Caste and Other Poems and is studied as part of the AQA Power and Conflict cluster for GCSE English Literature.

The poem sits in the anthology Poems Past and Present, where it is often compared with London for its treatment of institutions that shape thought, and with The Emigree and Tissue on the theme of identity. In the exam, Checking Out Me History might be printed on the paper in Section B, with a student comparing it from memory with one other poem from the same cluster, so its short, memorable phrases are worth learning by heart.

What is Checking Out Me History about?

In plain terms, the poem is about a speaker frustrated that his schooling taught him British history, dates such as 1066 and nursery-rhyme characters while ignoring the Black historical figures who shaped his own heritage. He sets these two versions of history side by side, moving from a list of what he was taught to a list of the people his education missed, among them Toussaint L'Ouverture, Nanny of the Maroons and Mary Seacole. By the end, he turns from complaining about this gap to actively filling it himself, researching and claiming a history that was never given to him in the classroom.

Who is John Agard and why does the context matter for AO3?

John Agard is a poet born in Guyana who later moved to Britain, and this movement from a Caribbean colony to the imperial centre underlies the contrast the poem draws between two versions of history. AO3 covers the relationships between texts and their contexts, so linking the speaker's complaint about a whitewashed education to Agard's own background gives a contextual argument beyond biography alone.

The poem's Creole spelling, heard throughout in the speaker's recurring complaint, signals that a reclaimed history is being told in his own voice, spelled as it sounds and refusing the correction into standard English that a British classroom would expect, so the language itself becomes part of the poem's argument about whose version of history gets to be standard.

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What do the key quotations in Checking Out Me History mean?

The poem's key quotations move from the speaker's complaint about what he is taught, through the Black historical figures presented in italic stanzas, to an act of reclaiming his own identity at the end. Learning them in this order makes it easier to structure a paragraph that tracks the poem's shift from being told to telling.

• "Dem tell me" - spoken by the speaker as he lists what his education gave him. The short, repeated phrase works like a chant, presenting his schooling as something imposed on him and framing everything that follows as somebody else's version of history.
• "Bandage up me eye with me own history" - the speaker's own account of what that schooling did to him. The metaphor of a bandage suggests an injury dressed with the wrong material, so his own history becomes the thing covering his sight instead of revealing him to himself.
• "a slave with vision" - part of the italic stanza praising Toussaint L'Ouverture, left out of the speaker's official lessons. Pairing servitude with foresight turns a word usually associated with powerlessness into a mark of leadership, presenting the revolution he led as planned and deliberate.
• "fire-woman struggle" - part of the italic stanza honouring Nanny of the Maroons, the leader of escaped slaves in Jamaica. The compound noun fuses her with elemental imagery, presenting resistance as a natural force, while the alliteration binding fire to struggle makes rebellion itself seem to burn.
• "a healing star among the wounded" - part of the italic stanza about Mary Seacole. Combining light and healing lifts this contribution above the battlefield it describes, presenting care as a form of heroism to set alongside the rebellions praised elsewhere in the same stanzas.
• "checking out me own history" and "I carving out me identity" - the ending of the poem, where the speaker moves from what he was told to what he is actively doing. Turning identity into something built by his own hand, this closing image answers the earlier bandaged sight with a picture of construction instead of injury, echoing the poem's title.

How do form and structure work in Checking Out Me History?

Checking Out Me History uses an irregular form and a clear structural pattern to dramatise the contrast between two versions of history. The poem alternates between stanzas describing the British history and nursery-rhyme figures the speaker was taught and italicised stanzas celebrating Toussaint L'Ouverture, Nanny of the Maroons and Mary Seacole, so the layout itself separates the official curriculum from the history being reclaimed.

Phonetic spelling and the near absence of standard punctuation mark the whole poem as written in Creole, refusing the correction into standard English that the speaker's schooling would impose. The recurring refrain breaks at the close into a different claim, so the structure itself enacts the shift from being told to telling.

What are the main themes in Checking Out Me History?

The poem explores identity, the power of education and those who control historical narrative, cultural heritage, and rebellion. Identity runs through the poem's movement from an education that obscures the speaker's sense of self to an ending in which he actively builds his own sense of who he is.

The poem's treatment of education asks who decides which figures count as history, since the speaker's curriculum includes 1066 and Dick Whittington while omitting Toussaint L'Ouverture, Nanny of the Maroons and Mary Seacole. Cultural heritage and rebellion sit together in the italic stanzas, where each figure is remembered for resisting or serving under conditions of slavery and colonial war, offering the speaker a heritage of resistance and service.

Which poems does Checking Out Me History compare well with?

Checking Out Me History compares well with London on the theme of institutions controlling minds, and with The Emigree and Tissue on the theme of identity. London, also studied in the Power and Conflict cluster, shares an interest in how institutions and authority shape what people are allowed to think and know, giving a comparison built around control of the mind alongside control by force.

The Emigree and Tissue both explore identity shaped by displacement, memory and fragile, changeable structures, so pairing either with this poem supports a question on how poets present identity or how people are affected by difficult experiences. All three poems sit within the same AQA anthology, so any of these pairings can be written about from memory in Section B.

How should you revise Checking Out Me History for the exam?

Revising Checking Out Me History for a closed-book exam means learning a small set of short, quotable phrases well enough to use them accurately under pressure. Both papers in AQA GCSE English Literature are closed book, so no copy of the text is allowed in the exam and quotations have to be recalled from memory. In Paper 2 Section B, the poem might be the one printed on the paper, with the second poem for comparison chosen by the student, so it is worth being ready to write about this poem either as the given poem or as the comparison brought in from memory.

Learning one short quotation for each stage of the poem, the refrain, the bandaged eye, one of the italic figures and the final act of reclaiming identity, gives enough material to support points on AO1, AO2 and AO3 without needing the whole text in memory. Practising a timed comparison paragraph against London, The Emigree or Tissue, turns that stored material into the kind of answer Section B rewards.

Related guides

• AQA Power and Conflict poems
• London poem analysis
• Tissue poem analysis
• The Emigree poem analysis
• AQA GCSE English Literature Paper 2 guide
• GCSE English tutors

What happens in Checking Out Me History, in order

Checking Out Me History moves in a fixed order from its opening refrain to its closing couplet, alternating stanzas of what the speaker was taught with the history his schooling left out. Reading it in sequence is the way to answer a question asking for the word or phrase that completes a quotation, since each line follows a fixed partner and not a thematic grouping. The sequence below follows the poem from its first line to its last, using only the short phrases needed to place each moment.

• "Dem tell me / Dem tell me / Wha dem want to tell me" opens the poem, and the same refrain returns later, just before the closing turn.
• "Dem tell me bout 1066 and all dat" and "Dick Whittington and he cat" give the first history-and-nursery-rhyme pairing, before the stanza turns on "But Toussaint L'Ouverture / no dem never tell me bout dat."
• More nursery-rhyme figures follow, from "de cow who jump over de moon" to "de dish ran away with de spoon", before the stanza names the gap: "dem never tell me bout Nanny de maroon."
• "Dem tell me bout Lord Nelson and Waterloo / but dem never tell me bout Shaka de great Zulu" sets the British admiral against the Zulu king left out of the lesson.
• "Dem tell me bout Columbus and 1492" is answered in the same breath by "what happen to de Caribs and de Arawaks too", shifting the question from a missing leader to a missing people.
• "Dem tell me bout Florence Nightingale and she lamp" opens a list that runs through Robin Hood and "ole King Cole" and leads into the one name withheld from it, Mary Seacole.
• The poem ends "But now I checking out me own history / I carving out me identity", the word "now" marking the point where the speaker stops being told and starts telling.

The poem's place in Section B is set out in full in our guide toAQA English Literature Paper 2, covering the paper's timings and both its sections.

Who is John Agard?

John Agard was born in British Guiana, now Guyana, and moved to Britain in the late 1970s, bringing the Caribbean Creole voice that the poem's speaker sets against the standard English of his schooling. He has worked as a poet, playwright and short-story writer and performs his own poetry, holding posts including Poet in Residence at the BBC and at the South Bank Centre. Another of his poems studied for GCSE, Half-Caste, uses the same refusal of standard spelling and punctuation to make a related argument about language and identity.

• Casa de las Américas Prize
• Paul Hamlyn Award for Poetry
• Cholmondeley Award
• Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry

Hearing Agard perform the poem

Agard's recording of the poem at the Poetry Archive is tagged there under Rhythm, Dialect and Rap, and the Archive's note on the poet describes an Anglo-Caribbean accent that draws listeners in. Those labels point to features the text sets up: the chanted "Dem tell me" refrain, the rhymes closing the plain stanzas ("balloon", "moon", "spoon", "maroon") and spellings such as "de" and "wha" that tell the reader how each word should sound.

The printed layout marks the same contrast on the page. Plain-text stanzas carry the "Dem tell me" lines and end on a rhyme, whilst the italic stanzas about Toussaint and Nanny break into separate short lines such as "a slave" and "with vision" or "see-far woman" and "of mountain dream", giving each phrase a line of its own. Reading aloud with that change of pace, brisk through the taught lists and measured through the italics, is a quick way to feel the move from being told to telling.

Kamikaze, also in the Power and Conflict cluster, sets identity and memory in a different cultural setting, as theKamikaze poem analysisexplains.

A comparison with a poem about whose record of the past survives is developed in theOzymandias poem analysis.

Annotated quotations from Checking Out Me History

Ten short phrases cover the poem from first line to last, each pairing a technique with the effect worth naming in an AO2 point, and each short enough to recall in a closed-book paper. Choosing one phrase from the opening, one from an italic stanza and the closing line gives a point on language, form and context in the order the poem delivers them, and the technique labels can be lifted straight into a sentence.

• "Dem tell me" | repetition | a chant-like refrain that presents schooling as something delivered to the speaker.
• "Bandage up me eye with me own history" | metaphor | schooling becomes a dressing that covers his sight.
• "Blind me to me own identity" | metaphor | the blindness image continues, linking the curriculum to a lost sense of self.
• "no dem never tell me bout dat" | negation | the double negative in Creole names the absence of Toussaint L'Ouverture directly.
• "Toussaint de beacon" | metaphor | a light that guides, casting the revolution leader as a signal to others.
• "see-far woman" | compound noun | gives Nanny foresight as a defining quality.
• "fire-woman struggle" | compound noun, elemental imagery | joins her to fire so that resistance reads as a force of nature.
• "what happen to de Caribs and de Arawaks too" | juxtaposition | set against Columbus, it widens the gap from a missing leader to missing peoples.
• "a healing star" | metaphor, light imagery | lifts Mary Seacole's care for the wounded into heroism.
• "I carving out me identity" | metaphor, present continuous | identity becomes something built by hand, answering the earlier bandage and blindness.

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