‘Me say ‘Tara’ to me ‘Ma’ instead of ‘Bye Mummy Dear’?’
Mary shows how the words that are said that are intended in the same way but are different can change someone’s view point and their ‘Class’.
She doesn’t care about how negative it all is because it shows her. The sort of things that would make us understand someone’s class are: the words they use; they way they speak; their cost of living; what and how they eat; how they write; their jobs; what they wear; their behaviour and attitudes; their punctuality; their posture and also by who they are surrounded with etc. She doesn’t care how embarrassing it is.
‘Well, mate! A cleaner is me mother. A docker is me brother’
Mary tells her families jobs and she knows that they are not well educated or rich jobs but she says it in pride to show that even though other people care about and can tell what class she’s from, she doesn’t care because she’s proud of it.
‘How can you tell what class I’m from?’
‘Why do you care what class I’m from?’
‘And I’m proud of the class that I come from.’
She uses many poetic devices such as repetition when saying ‘How can you tell what class I’m from?’ This makes the point clear that she is exploring class differences and their attitudes. She also uses imagery: ‘Does it stick in your gullet like a sour plum?’ This gives us an unpleasing image of a sour plum stuck in your stomach just like caring and making a big deal out of her class.
John Agard’s ‘Half-Caste’ shows us how ridicule people are to think that if you are mixed of things then you are half made: ‘Standing on one leg. I’m half-caste’ He makes this point because he was born in Guyana and is mixed nationality, his mother was Portuguese but born in Guyana and his father was black. He demonstrates the attitude of the kind of people that consider people of mixed things are inferior to themselves. The first stanza is only three lines, and in those three lines he is putting himself across. He gets our attention in the first line: ‘Excuse me’. This is because when someone says ‘Excuse me’ it gets our attention. This gets our attention because we know that they are talking straight at us. So John is doing the same. He is getting our attention which makes us understand that this topic is quite important. John addresses the reader directly making it seem as if the reader is one of the people who look down on those of mixed nationality.
In the next stanza, which is 27 lines long, John explains that there are many great things in this world that are great because they are made of mixed things. In the first line of that stanza he says: ‘Explain yuself’ he does that to make the reader feel bad and guilty. This makes the text more effective.
The examples of the great things that can mix but stay great that he uses are: ‘yu mean when Picasso. Mix red an green. Is a half-caste canvas’; ‘yu mean when light an shadow. Mix in the sky. Is a half-caste weather’; ’sit down at dah piano. An mix a black key wid a white key. Is a half-caste symphony.’ This makes the reader and all the sorts of people who look down on the mixed nationality people guilty because they are great and amazing by all the mixed things and without them, it wouldn’t be great and amazing.
In stanza three, he explains how the idea of being different because you’re mixed like half-caste is stupid and ridicule. He makes fun of the thought of being half a person. He is showing it all by using examples that relate to his own body. ‘Ah listening to yu wid de keen half of mih ear’; ‘Ah looking at yu wid de keen half of mih eye’; ‘an when I sleep at night I close half-a-eye’ He is making fun of that idea but at the same time h is angry and uses an aggressive tone.
‘but yu must come back tomorrow
Wid de whole of yu eye
An de whole of yu ear
An de whole of yu mind’
John Agard is asking the reader to return tomorrow with the 'whole' of their eye, ear and mind. By this he means that the reader must open up their minds to a new way of thinking. He makes it seem as if they are the ‘half-caste’ because they only have one eye, one ear and half of their brain is working.
He doesn’t write the poem in correct spellings and doesn’t add punctuation which makes the reader understand part of his point. John is not proper English and is writing in non-standard English. He spells his words the way he hears it.
