In half-caste, the tone is quite angry and harsh. I feel that the tone is displayed in this way because he is angry with others for judging him for being mixed race, and the prejudices that everybody has towards others. For even though in the poem it just confronts the prejudice at half-caste people, there is always prejudice towards everybody, not just half-caste people. So in this poem he is challenging the fact that prejudice is wrong and unfair, and hurts people because they are being judged before people know them properly as a person. Some of this aggressive confrontational work is evident by the line:
“So spiteful dem don’t want de sun pass.”
This shows that prejudice people are so “spiteful” that they don’t think half-caste should be able to walk past them in the street. This shows that people can be severely hurt by a label, and that because of the way peoples minds have been brought up, they believe they are superior to so called “half-castes”, and believe the “half-castes” not worthy enough to even walk the same streets as the superior people.
In search, the tone is quite confused and lonely, and is unsure of who she is as a person. For her original identity was gujarati, but having had convert to a foreign language she feels that she has lost her original identity, and has been forced to take on a different identity because of the different language she has to communicate to others in the place she lives in now. For she says:
“You could not use them both, even if you thought that way.”
This shows that she feels she is losing her sense of identity, and feels she has to choose between the life she lives now and her original identity. She feels that the new language is pushing the other one away, and dominating her life so much that she forgets how her life used to be before it was controlled by the foreign language.
In half-caste Agard rejects the conventional punctuation, for there isn’t a single comma or full stop in the whole of the poem. Also, he misspells half of the words in his poem purposely to help get his message across to the reader. The lack of punctuation and misspelling is all for the purpose of the poem. As people think that he is half-caste, they believe him to be incapable of any proper thoughts, feelings or being capable to produce something that could make an impact on somebody else’s life. It is also used to strike the audience hard with his message of how everybody is equal no matter what their ethnic background is. For he says:
“Wid de whole of yu eye an de whole of yu ear an the whole of yu mind.”
This shows that he feels that those who mock him are the whole who considered themselves to be perfect and have no faults of their own, and are known to be the superior race. It shows that he knows that they like downgrading him by saying he’s half-caste, and has only “half a mind”, showing that they think he is incapable of proper thoughts, or proper feelings.
In Search, the punctuation is consistent, but the poem structure is always different. The line lengths are all different, and there are no stanzas to separate the poem out – it is all just one long stanza. In Half-caste, there is 3 stanzas of various lengths, to help get the meaning of the poem across better to the audience and the poems lines are all of similar lengths, to keep it sharp and continuous.
The layout of search, with its punctuation and line lengths shows that she is trying to find some consistency in her life – she is trying to find what she knows in life to find in the end that she can, in her dreams. The fact that she also includes both English and Gujarati in her poem shows that even though she does use the English language, Gujarati is still an important part of her life, as it makes up part of who she is as a person. For she says:
“Everytime I think I’ve forgotten…it blossoms out of my mouth.”
This shows that even if she forgets, or is so used to using the foreign language, she cannot forget her native language even if she tried. This is because it has been a part of her culture and identity for so long, she cannot part from it, no matter what she is faced with or what ever happens to her.
So the identity that is portrayed in half-caste is no matter what ethnic background you come from, no matter what you look like as an individual, we are all equal human beings and all deserve the right to be able to live our lives to the full.
The identity that is portrayed in search is one that suggests that you cannot lose who you are as a person, no matter what you are faced with, even if you have to change your language or move somewhere else, you cannot change who you truly are as a person.
