The poems

The poems, ‘Half-Caste’, by John Agard and ‘Search for my Tongue’ by Sujata Bhatt main purpose is directed in entertaining the reader. Both poems follow the common themes of culture and identity and use non-standard English within their writing to portray strong and empowering messages. In ‘Half-Caste’, Agard uses non-standard English to prove to the reader that having mixed languages between English and Caribbean is a good thing, rather than making the person incomplete or simply being ‘half’. Agard incorporates the idea of a multi-cultural society with English and Caribbean to create a sense of incompleteness. Agard fuses the English language with the Caribbean dialect to create something new because he wants to create a new identity for himself by mixing his accent with his language. By doing so he creates an element of humour for the reader therefore creating something positive out of mixing English and Caribbea, so Agard is implying that the term, ‘Half-Caste’, is not negative as people make it out to be but in fact a positive.