LITERATURE V: IDENTITY

What does it mean when people judge you, class?

When I was a kid, I didn’t read all that much. I spent my time playing with toys and running around using up as much energy as I possibly could. It was only once I got to secondary school that I started really reading.

Why?

I could no longer play with my toys or run around and use up my energy. I was too old, and so were those around me. Old enough that they noticed the colour of my skin and old enough to ostracise me for it. Where I might have once played football, now I sat alone with a book.

I was lost. I was mentally exhausted from the complete shift in attitude from those who had been my friends, but as I had never really read much, I had no idea where to turn. I read the books in the best seller list at the supermarket because that’s all I could think to do.

My teacher at the time, Miss Greene, found me alone one lunchtime and asked me if I was okay. I told her how I was feeling and that I didn’t know what to do. She smiled and told me she had just the book for me. She took me to her classroom and handed me a big book of poetry. It must have been a thousand pages long, I told her, I couldn’t read all of that.

But she didn’t want me to read all of it. Just one poem.

Half-Caste by John Agard.

So, I read it. Then I read it again. Then she photocopied it for me, and I read it over and over after school that day.

The following day I smiled. The following week I joined in with the others at school whether they wanted me to or not. The following month my skin colour no longer mattered, because I had stopped letting others define me by it.

The poem changed me, because it describes John’s own battle with his identity through the eyes of others. They call him half-caste as though he is half a man because of his mixed-race heritage. He brilliantly picks them apart by asking if Picasso’s paintings are incomplete because he mixes his colours, whether a piano symphony is incomplete if both black and white keys form part of its call.

When I read it, I understood, and wanted others to understand too. That’s why I became a teacher. Now I must teach this lesson to The Outcasts.

People see them as different because they don’t look or act the same as everyone around them. That’s not a bad thing. Every new painting or song is different to the last. Being unique just makes you who you are.

So, embrace your differences, hold up your name as Outcasts as a shining beacon of hope for those of us who felt different, and prove me wrong. Show me what you’ve got, and I will gladly extend my hand to you.

Teach ME a lesson, and I will judge you no more.