🌎 The History They Gave Me, and the History They Buried
🌎 The History They Gave Me, and the History They Buried
Dick Whittington. 1066. The cow that jumped over the moon. This, John Agard tells us, is what British education handed him: nursery rhymes and conquest dates. Meanwhile, Toussaint L’Ouverture — a man who led the only successful slave revolution in history — went unmentioned. So did Nanny de Maroon, who fought British colonisers in Jamaica. So did Mary Seacole, who nursed soldiers in the Crimean War while Florence Nightingale got all the credit. Agard’s poem is a refusal: to accept that history, to write in the dialect that was policed out of him, and to reclaim what was taken.
Agard opens with a drumbeat of repetition: “Dem tell me / Dem tell me / Wha dem want to tell me”. The pronoun “Dem” is not named — it refers to the system of British education, a collective authority that speaks but does not listen. Agard’s choice of Creole spelling throughout the st
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🧠 Memory Aid — The CLAIM Arc
Remember Agard’s argument through CLAIM:
- C — Curriculum imposed: “Dem tell me” — Dick Whittington, 1066, nursery rhymes
- L — Lost figures erased: Toussaint, Nanny, Seacole — absent from what they were taught
- A — Argument in italics: the celebratory stanzas have a different shape, a different voice
- I — Identity in Creole: the dialect IS the resistance — form and content are the same act
- M — “Me own history”: the defiant conclusion — “I carving out me identity”
Each letter follows the poem’s trajectory: imposed curriculum — erased heroes — structural argument — dialect as form — defiant assertion. Cover all five and you have a Level 5+ response.
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Quiz · Question 1 of 10
In 'Checking Out Me History', Agard writes 'Dem tell me' rather than 'They told me'. What does this choice of language represent?
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