This definitions covers 📖 Key Terms within Checking Out Me History (Agard) for GCSE English Literature. Revise Checking Out Me History (Agard) in Power and Conflict Poetry for GCSE English Literature with 10 exam-style questions and 15 flashcards. This is a high-frequency topic, so it is worth revising until the explanation feels precise and repeatable. It is section 13 of 19 in this topic. Make sure you can use the exact wording confidently, because definition marks are often lost through vague language.
📖 Key Terms
- Anaphora
- The repetition of a phrase at the start of successive lines or sentences. Agard’s “Dem tell me” repeating through the poem is anaphora — it accumulates the weight of the imposed curriculum with each repetition.
- Creole dialect
- A language variety that developed from the contact between European colonial languages and the languages of enslaved and colonised people. Agard writes in Guyanese Creole — a form of English shaped by the Caribbean experience. Its use in the poem is a political and artistic choice, not an error.
- Bathos
- A sudden drop from something grand or serious to something trivial. Agard uses bathos when placing nursery-rhyme figures (Dick Whittington, the cow that jumped over the moon) alongside dates like 1066 — suggesting the curriculum mixed trivial myths with “official” history to fill the space where Black and Caribbean history should have been.
- Volta
- The “turn” in a poem where the argument or tone shifts. In this poem, the word “But” before the final lines functions as a volta — the speaker moves from protest to active assertion.
- Semantic field
- A cluster of words drawn from the same area of meaning. The semantic field of construction in the final lines — “checking out”, “carving” — presents identity as something built by active effort, not received passively.
Practice questions for Checking Out Me History (Agard)
In 'Checking Out Me History', Agard writes 'Dem tell me' rather than 'They told me'. What does this choice of language represent?
How does Agard use the poem's alternating structure to challenge colonial education? [2 marks]