Grade 9 Conflict AQA Essay Comparison

Ever wondered what a Grade 9 poetry comparison looks like?

Here’s a Grade 9 essay on ‘Checking Out Me History’ with ‘The Emigree’ that explores the poems in greater depth than most of what you’ll find on the internet.

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Question: Compare how poets present ideas about power in ‘Checking Out Me History’ and in one other poem from ‘Power and Conflict’. [30 marks]

Both Agard and Rumens use poetry’s power to protect them from cultural displacement. However, whereas Agard finds power by fighting against colonial education’s distortion of his history, Rumens’ speaker finds power in distortion, leaning into her nostalgic but perhaps idealised memories to protect her view of home.

Both Agard and Rumens explore the powerful forces that distort people’s connection to their culture. However, Agard is dismayed by this distortive power. Heseeksto fight back against the whitewashed education of colonial Guyana. Agard’s metaphor comparing colonial education to a ‘bandage’ that leaves him ‘blind’ to his ‘own identity’ shows the power of British imperialist education to obscure. ‘Bandage’ suggests colonial education has a darker power than just blinding: wounding, by removing black people’s connection to their history. Agard’s alliterative plosives in ‘bandage’ and ‘blind’ enhance this defiant tone by creating a confident voice that powerfully fights against black history’s oppression. This voice is also created by the repeated monosyllabic possessives ‘me own’. This both suggests Agard’s powerful feeling of ownership over his cultural history, hidden from him, but contributes to Agard’s larger use of a calypso rhythm, historically used by slaves seeking emancipation. The calypso rhythm implies Agard’s powerful resistance to Eurocentric history and colonial education. This is because it implies that Agard’s suppressed cultural history will also be freed, just like the slaves singing in calypso rhythms were.

In direct contrast, Rumens’ poem doesn’t fight distortion, but rather finds a protective power in nostalgia’s distortion of her homeland’s truth. This allows Rumens’ poem to empathise with the collective migrant desire to protect memories of home before it became war torn — powerful because the poem isn’t linked to any particular immigrant experience, but a stand-in for all migrant experiences. Rumens’ speaker’s repeated reference to ‘sunlight’ in each stanza’s refrain floods the poem with light that symbolises this protective, positive recollection of home, presenting it as a glowing dream world. More deeply, however, this flood of light imagery also has the power to obscure, to blind similarly to Agard’s ‘bandage’. Yet in Rumens’ poem what seems to be obscured is the tragic present day reality of the speaker’s home, suggested by the speaker’s assertion that even if it ‘may be at war’ or ‘sick with tyrants’, she is ‘branded by an impression of sunlight’. ‘Branded’ implies a glowing mark that can never be erased, implying nostalgia’s power to protect her from her home’s political reality. And whereas Agard uses plosives to create a confident, firm voice to fight against his culture’s distortion, Rumens’ speaker’s liquids in ‘left’, ‘child’ and ‘light’ create a dreamy voice of someone welcoming nostalgia’s power to distort her home’s present day reality.

However, Agard and Rumens are similar in that they both suggest someone’s first language holds power. Agard does this through his poem’s use of creole throughout, which implicitly resists Eurocentric education’s power by rejecting the standard English taught as correct in colonial classrooms. Creole’spower can be seen in Agard’s anaphoric repetition of ‘dem tell me’ where the creoleasserts his Caribbean identity even while he describes being forced to learn Eurocentric history. As well as showing the power of creole, Agard finds power in black history’s stories, that are juxtaposed with white history that seems stale, even immature, in comparison. For example, Agard describes Haitian general Touissant L’Ouverture to be a legendary figure with the heroic epithet ‘Touissaint de beacon’. This presents L’Ouverture as a legendary hero like those found in epic poems like Homer’s Odyssey where similar heroic epithets are used, while ‘beacon’ suggests L’Ouverture’s power to lead Haitians out of the dark waters of slavery. By contrast, the Eurocentric, colonial historical example Agard gives is the nursery rhyme of ‘de cow that jump over the moon’, implying how childish, even nonsensical, his colonial education could be. This sense of colonial history being childish continues elsewhere in the poem: it is notable that Agard uses nursery-rhyme like couplets for colonial history to mock it as inane in contrast to the powerful figures he glorifies from black history’s stories. By using his poem to showcase black historical figures in his own language, Agard’s speaker is able to ‘carve out’ his ‘own identity’, finding himself in the wider story of his people through the ages. This shows the immense power of teaching people in post-colonial societies their own histories.

Contrastingly to Agard whose poem is told in his first language, Rumens’ speaker remembers little of her home country’s language — but the few words she remembers still have power. This power is shown in the speaker’s claim that her doll ‘spills a grammar’ that  will allow her to have ‘every coloured molecule’ of her home. ‘Grammar’ implies the speaker doesn’t even have words, just the basic system that structures them. This might suggest she lacks the power of a home language, so strikingly exemplified by Agard’s poem, as she’s almost completely forgotten it. The singular ‘a’ suggests she doesn’t even remember her languages full grammar, just a single piece of it. However, Rumens suggests that even a limited memory of her home language is extremely powerful,implied by the ‘coloured molecules’ it gives her access to. This image implies that immigrants have a power to vividly re-create their lost homes through their imagination, even if in a way that’s inaccurate to their present day reality. ‘Molecules’ suggests their imagined recreation seems so real it’s almost physical. This wondrous power immigrants have to somehow recreate their lost home is implied by one of the poem’s last images, where the speaker personifies her city as ‘lying down’ in ‘front of’ her’, ‘docile as paper’. This implies a remarkable proximity to a home that was supposed to be lost, now lying on the speaker’s desk. ‘Paper’ implies that what brings the speaker’s home so close again is that she recreates it in writing and poetry, Rumens therefore suggesting that the act of writing a poem has the power to bring back an immigrant’s lost home, emphasising — like Agard — the tremendous power of words.

What a comparison between Agard’s and Rumens’ poems reveals is that people’s cultures are vulnerable topowerfulforces that seek to suppress it. Yet though these poems describe this suppression (suppression of cultural history in Agard and the destruction of a homeland in Rumens), both authors ultimately end by suggesting people’s cultures have the power to endure, inspiring their readership with the message that their culture survives through the very people who are part of it, which is a deeply powerful message for readers of colour or immigrant readers who face Eurocentric pressures.

What general principles can I learn from this essay?

1. Look how much that central word, ‘power’, repeats. It is essential to use the question’s key word constantly — more than you think. It’s the easiest thing to forget.

2. There’s a high number of words that force you to analyse (colour coded in red). The most versatile and important of these are ‘suggests’, ‘implies’ and ‘shows’. But you can also make use of others from time to time: critiques, mocks, rejects, creates, explores etc.

3. Context in this essay isn’t tagged on at the end, it is often in the 2nd sentence of each paragraph (colonial Guyana, creole, Rumens poem as a collective experience).

4. Crucially, context is linked to the author’s intentions, what message or big idea they want to convey to the reader. Agard’s poem’s intention is to ‘fight back’, Rumens intention is to ‘empathise with the collective migrant’ experience and act as a ‘stand in ‘ for all of them. The answer thinks about how an author’s intention is shaped by their context (so not just what an author wants to say, but why they’re saying it based on their socio-political factors, and which particular readers it’s intended for. Reflect on this: is Agard’s poem written for white readers learning about colonialism (meaning it has a more educational purpose)? Or fellow people of his race (thus it has a more empowering purpose)? Try and use words like ‘message’, ‘purpose’ and ‘intention’ frequently in your analysis: it will force you to write on author intention.

5. The essay understands that these are poems, and so talks about devices often native to poetry: refrains/ repetition, rhyme schemes, couplets, rhythm, even words for sounds like plosives and liquids — remember poetry is a highly aural form. So when you write a poetry essay, try and ensure you write something on poetry-specific devices. The simplest way to do this is toconsider structural devices: poetry is packed with them.

6. The essay focuses on multiple conceptual ideas found in each poem — big general ideas that apply to everyone. Literature might ask you to zoom in for techniques, but remember to zoom out to consider the broader significance of the text! Why should we care? What’s the message for everyone? Start off forcing conceptual ideas by using phrases like ‘the concept of…’ ‘the idea of…’, ‘a sense of….’ If you can’t spot the conceptual ideas in this essay, here are some below so you know what sort of thing to aim for:

   1. The idea home languages and first languages have power

   2. The idea that nostalgia is protective

   3. The idea that colonial education suppresses a culture’s history

   4. The idea lost homes can be re-created through imagination and writing a poem

7. The essay uses a sophisticated vocabulary. I wish this didn’t matter as much, but it does at GCSE. Steal some new words and try to use them in your own writing.