The net stanza is a little bit unexpectedly, it is camel-skin lamp in her parent’s room, and this lamp has been distorted from a camel to a lamp. She likes the lamp and its colours a lot but she feels confused about it and thinks it’s cruel to transform a beautiful natural creature into a manmade invention.
The forth stanza gets back to the girls life a bit more and is about the clothes and jewellery that her mother loved. The Indian jewellery has a lot more detail on it than the kind of jewellery that is made England ‘Indian gold, dangling, filigree’.
Is how she describes her mother’s ‘cherished’ jewellery, this sentence ends with a bang when all of a sudden she says ‘but it was stolen from our car’ which might suggest that she lives in an unpleasant nabourhood. In her wardrobe were her ‘radiant’ clothes meaning they were bright, war and glowing. It’s not only that she is curious about what culture she is in but also her Aunts are curious about English clothes as they requested a cardigan from Marks & Spencers, which to us is utterly ordinary.
Here she looks at objects to show the difference, others use language. Her school friend didn’t like the clothes her Aunt gave her and asked to see her week-end clothes, it made her feel completely out of place. Her clothes had small mirrors on them, which she likes looking at herself in, ‘But often I admired the mirror-work, tried to glimpse myself in the miniature glass circles’. She ended up feeling alone with only a tin boat to play with.
Looking at photographs she imagined herself being in the pictures where she was born. ‘Fractured’ a strong word meaning broken, her land was broken. She sometimes imagined seeing Lahore a city in Pakistan ‘I saw Lahore my Aunts in shaded rooms screened from male visitors’ in Pakistan women were allowed no attention from men. ‘I was there of no fixed nationality’ she was in India but still with no real nationality meaning where ever she goes she will never be a ‘normal’ person, as she stares through the fence in to the Shalimar Gardens, beautiful gardens in Lahore, as she longs to go in.
‘Half Caste’ is my favourite of the two; it is more suited for me and is what I love to read.
‘Excuse me
standing on one leg
I’m half-caste’ this first sentence is extremely strange and is good because it makes you think, What is this about? I don’t understand it. Has he got one leg? This sentence basically means he has been called a half-caste and doesn’t like being called one and so he answers back very aggressively by being very sarcastic.
The next part of the poem is written fanatically ‘yu’ meaning ‘you’, ‘wha’ means ‘what’ ‘dem’ meaning them etc. This very clever I think and also indicates that the author has a very good idea of this and has most likely gone through something similar himself. The author mentions a very famous artist, Picasso, and is disrespectful by using a small letter ‘p’. He uses Picasso as an example of someone who uses different colours and mixes them together. ‘yu mean when Picasso mix red an green is a half-caste canvas’ he is using a well respected person as someone who mixes different colours together. The author is challenging the reader, saying ‘Explain yuself’. Agard uses another example of mixing colours by saying the sky mixes light and shadow, it isn’t called halfe-caste weather is it? He is using this poem to get his message across clearly. Once again he uses a small letter ‘e’ for England, being disrespectful to the persons country. ‘Ah rass’ mild displeasure, the poet is patronizing the reader by using a gentle swear word. After this there is a dash ‘/’ this means a pause, the author wants the reader to pause and think about what he is saying. In the next part of the stanza he is again patronising him and using another well known respected person who mixes different coloured piano keys to create the beautiful music that he does, ‘yu mean Tchaikovsky sit down at da piano and mix blak key wid a white key is a half-caste symphony?’
This last part of the poem is gong back to what he was saying at the beginning. Being sarcastic and using the body ‘ear’, ‘eye’, and ‘hand’. He’s saying I’m listening to you with the half of my ear and I’m looking at you with one eye, and when I’m introduced to you and ill offer you half a hand. He’s trying to get the point across that by the man calling him half-caste makes him sound like he is only half a person.
Towards the end he calms down a little bit when he talks about his dreams and that he will only dream half a dream, but then saying I can’t rest properly because I have to be alert all the time, quoting Martin Luther King, he tried to get black people and white people to mix.
The last three lines leave you on a bit of a cliff hanger as he says ‘an I will tell yu de other half of my story’
The clear difference between both of these poems are that ‘Presents from my Aunts’ uses good standard English and the author must have adjusted well and was very confident with her English, whereas ‘Half-Caste’ uses poor English and has no punctuation in it what so ever, it is written more like a speech. Agard has written it as a Caribbean person would pronounce it. The other visible difference is the way they are both set out on the page, ‘Half-Caste’ is set out with very short lines and very snappy, however ‘Presents from my Aunts’ is scattered about and ‘fractured’.
In my opinion my favourite is ‘Half-Caste’ because it is more interesting and has much stronger points about it, ‘Presents from my Aunts’ is mostly about what kind of clothes she likes to wear and I don’t really think the way people dress is who they really are. People should not have to be judged just because of their different skin colours.
They were both interesting poems to read and they do teach you a lot about the way some people can treat other people who may not ‘look’ the same on the outside, even though they may be wonderful caring people on the inside.
