⚙️ How Agard Builds the Argument

⚙️ How Agard Builds the Argument

The poem’s central structural strategy is contrast — but contrast made visible at the level of typography, rhythm, and language register simultaneously.

Structural contrast: The stanzas about imposed history are short, staccato, list-like. The italicised stanzas celebrating the erased heroes are longer, lyrical, free-flowing. Agard encodes his argument in the shape of the poem on the page: cramped columns of received education vs. open celebration of recovered knowledge.

Dialect as resistance: Throughout the imposed-history stanzas, Agard writes in Guyanese Creole spelling (“Dem”, “dat”, “wha”, “de”). This is not ornament — the dialect was precisely what standard British education was designed to eliminate. By writing the protest in the voice that was policed, Agard makes every non-standard spelling an act of the defiance the final lines name explicitly.

Repetition as accumulation: “Dem tell me” recurs throughout the poem, each repetition adding another fragment of the imposed curriculum. By the time the poem turns to the erased heroes, the weight of accumulated repetition makes the contrast sharper — the reader has felt the insistence of the imposed version before encountering the alternative.

The turn to “But”: The final movement of the poem begins with the adversative conjunction “But” — a hinge that formally marks the shift from imposed history to claimed identity. Agard positions this “But” as the poem’s own volta: the moment of refusal becoming assertion.