Style
The poem is written in a mixture of English dialects; Standard English, Caribbean and Creole forms are all used. The "yu" that runs throughout the poem appears to be directed at the reader, whose assumed prejudices towards people of mixed-race descent, and in particular the belief that "purity" is superior to heterogeneity, are critiqued and ultimately shown to be fallacious. Agard explores this idea through a series of apparently light-hearted images, all of which in some way appeal to the cultural pretensions of a (white) reader who views a "half-caste" person as in some way inferior to themselves. The poet offers, for example, the analogy of English weather, a Tchaikovsky symphony and paintings by Picasso. In all three cases he argues that it is the heterogeneity of the images that lend them their peculiar force and cultural resonance.
In the second half of the poem Agard turns the "half" around to focus on the reader and how he, Agard, has been perceived in the past. His argument is, essentially, that people have only used part of their perceptive faculties, and, as such, he can only extend "half a hand" to them. It is, Agard believes, up to the reader to extend their own mode of seeing to be able to comprehend the meaning of a "half-caste" person, and only then will he "tell yu / de other half / of my story."
Read more about this topic: Half Caste (poem)
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“We are often struck by the force and precision of style to which hard-working men, unpracticed in writing, easily attain when required to make the effort. As if plainness and vigor and sincerity, the ornaments of style, were better learned on the farm and in the workshop than in the schools. The sentences written by such rude hands are nervous and tough, like hardened thongs, the sinews of the deer, or the roots of the pine.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We think it is the richest prose style we know of.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Style is the dress of thoughts; and let them be ever so just, if your style is homely, coarse, and vulgar, they will appear to as much disadvantage, and be as ill received, as your person, though ever so well-proportioned, would if dressed in rags, dirt, and tatters.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)