This deep dive covers 🔍 Stage 2 — The Erased Figures: Celebration in Italics 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 3 of 19 in this topic. Use this deep dive to connect the idea to the wider topic before moving on to questions and flashcards.
🔍 Stage 2 — The Erased Figures: Celebration in Italics
The structural turning point of the poem is its use of two distinct visual and typographic worlds. The stanzas about imposed history are set in regular type, their lines cramped and list-like. The stanzas celebrating the erased heroes — Toussaint L’Ouverture, Nanny de Maroon, Mary Seacole — appear in italics, with a freer, more expansive rhythm. Agard’s structural contrast is the argument: the italicised stanzas do not look like the rest of the poem because they occupy a different imaginative space. These are not facts delivered by an education system; they are Agard’s own act of recovery.
Each hero receives a compressed but vivid portrait. Toussaint L’Ouverture is described as “a slave / with vision” — the line break separates his condition from his capacity, enacting the gap between what the world reduced him to and what he was. Mary Seacole becomes “a healing star”, the metaphor giving her a cosmic permanence that the curriculum denied her in life. Nanny de Maroon is presented as a figure of resistance: she “see freedom” in the future. Agard positions each of these figures not as biographical footnotes but as people whose stories carry the weight of an entire suppressed inheritance.
Quick Check: What is the effect of Agard printing the stanzas about Toussaint, Nanny, and Mary Seacole in italics rather than regular type?
Agard uses the visual contrast between regular and italic type to create a structural argument about two different kinds of history. The regular-type stanzas about imposed learning are compressed and repetitive; the italicised stanzas breathe more freely, with longer rhythms and lyrical imagery. Agard positions the italicised sections as a distinct imaginative space — one the poet has created himself, not received from an institution. In essays: “Agard’s structural contrast between the cramped, repetitive stanzas of imposed history and the freer, italicised stanzas of recovery enacts his argument that reclaiming one’s own history requires a different kind of language.”
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]