A detailed analysis of the poem ‘Half-Caste by John Agard, tailored towards GCSE / IGCSE (Edexcel and CIE/Cambridge) students but also useful for those studying at a higher level.
Includes:
VOCABULARY
STORY/SUMMARY
SPEAKER/VOICE
LANGUAGE
STRUCTURE/FORM
ATTITUDES
CONTEXT
THEMES
“Explain yuself
wha yu mean
when yu say half-caste”
(Full poem unable to be reproduced due to copyright)
VOCABULARY
Half caste - a person whose parents come from two different racial backgrounds
(see ‘language’ for more analysis of this term)
Picasso - Pablo Picasso, a famous modernist painter
Overcast - when the sky gets covered by a dull grey cloud
Tchaikovsky - a famous Russian musical composer (often of music for ballet)
Words that appear in Guyananese Creole (an English-based language that people
speak in Guyana in the Caribbean):
Yuself - yourself
De - the
Yu - you or your
Wha - what
Wid - with
An - and
Ah - I / I’m
Mih - my
Dat - that
STORY/SUMMARY
Stanza 1: The speaker asks us to forgive him for standing on one leg, he explains that
he is ‘half-caste’.
Stanza 2: The speaker then accuses the reader, commanding us to explain ourselves
further - what do we mean when we say ‘half caste’? He asks us if when the painter
, Picasso mixes red and green on a canvas we would call it ‘half caste’. If the sunlight
mixes with shadows in the sky, would we consider that to be ‘half caste’? He then
moans about English weather, saying there are so many clouds that it is almost always
half cast, or overcast. He gives us a final analogy - when the famous musical composer
Tchaikovsky mixes white and black keys on a piano, would we say that this creates
‘half caste’ music?
Stanza 3: The speaker repeats the command, saying he’s using the ‘keen half’ of his
ear and eye to look at and listen to us. He says that when he’s introduced to us, we
should understand why he offers only half a hand, closes half an eye when he sleeps
or dreams half a dream. In the moonlight, he only casts half a shadow because he
himself is ‘half-caste’. The final few lines in this stanza use a volta (turning point) to
shift our perspective: the speaker says that if we meet him again tomorrow and
approach him with our whole mind…
Stanza 4: … he will tell us the other half of his story. We realise in this final section that
is it our judgement that has made us assume he is half a person, rather than that being
the reality, and that if we change ourselves and our own attitude, then we can start to
see ‘half-caste’ individuals as whole people, as they truly are.
SPEAKER/VOICE
The speaker has a playful but provocative tone, where he aims his questioning at
British society and the values that British people are taught and uphold throughout
their lives. His audience is a Western audience, and the poem is aimed at getting
people to think more deeply about how they treat people from other cultures, or
multicultural ethnic backgrounds.
LANGUAGE
Guyanese dialect - The poem is written not just in English, but in Guyanese Creole - a
language that is spoken in Guyana, which is influenced by English but also has its own
distinctive sounds and grammatical constructions. The effect is that the poet forces us
to engage with his language and his voice on his own terms, we have to put the effort
in to understand what he is saying, even though the language is similar to ours it is
also unfamiliar, in the same way that a ‘half caste’ person from a dual heritage
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