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John Agard’s Lifetime Achievement
John Agard has been presented with the BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award for his outstanding contribution to children’s literature. The judges highlighted John’s persistence and creativity in championing and challenging the language norms that too often dominate literature and the curriculum and we reproduce here Darren Chetty’s tribute to John and the impact of his poetry.
It’s an absolute honour to be asked to give a short speech in tribute of John Agard this afternoon. I have two minutes – and I couldn’t possibly do justice to the breadth, depth and dazzling originality of the work John has produced, in so short a time.
So instead let me focus my comments on one book, I Din Do Nuttin and Other Poems. This was John’s first UK-published book in 1983.
The book’s title captures the Guyanese patois that John regularly draws on in his work. More than that, it puts it centre-stage from the start, making the book as relevant now – at a time when some schools are listing words banned for classroom usage – as it was at the time of publication.
For many of my twenty years as a primary school teacher it was one of the only books to show Black, brown and white children – and a rabbit – together on the cover. In other words, it was one of the only covers to resemble the classes I was teaching in East London. But inside the covers, John’s poetry delves deeper than depictions of casual multiculturalism.
For instance, Dilroy’s eighth birthday is a happy occasion, he’s got a pair of skates he wanted for a long, long time.
Yet the final verse poses a question for young readers (and their parents and teachers):
My birthday cards say,
Happy Birthday, Dilroy!
But, Mummy, tell me why
They don’t put a little boy
That looks a bit like me.
Why the boy on the card so white?
It is a question that can only truly be answered if we check out our history – and in some quarters at least, there are signs of schools and publishers beginning to step up to that responsibility.
And this issue is being raised – and indeed addressed by John – almost thirty-five years before the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education launched the Reflecting Realties research.
John demonstrates how employing accessible language need not mean a lack of depth to literary work. In My Telly, the final poem in the book, ‘My Telly eats people especially on the news,’ might be read by some young readers as a surreal, comic verse, by others as commentary on the famines in Ethiopia happening at the time the book was written.
The back cover of I Din Do Nuttin describes it as a collection about ‘lively children in the West Indies and Britain’. But John offers us a collection of poems that cannot be neatly categorised as from ‘here’ or ‘there’. As he has gone on to show, we can make ourselves at home anywhere – in the world of Dante or Shakespeare; in the languages of our friends on the street, and our distant ancestors. The writing is not framed as tales from a faraway exotic land nor are we implicitly told that Black children in Britain should focus on their Britishness above all. Indeed, John’s poetry pushes against boundaries, sometimes it just dances over them as if they were not there in the first place – at other times it mocks their very construction as in the case of ‘Half-caste’ which remains popular despite its inclusion in GCSEs examinations.
Its inclusion is due to its literary merits, not any sense of compromise in the work. And, of course, the same is true for John’s award today. Today he becomes the first poet and also the first Caribbean born writer, the first Black writer, the first writer of colour to win this award.
But not, I hope, the last. Indeed, I’m struck by how many of the new generation of writers whose family came from faraway lands who have spoken of the enormous impact of encountering John’s work, and in some cases of receiving advice and support from him. Dean Atta, Raymond Antrobus, and Sita Brahmarchari, all of them prize-winning writers in their own right, are just a few examples that come to mind.
Like the child in the title poem, over the past forty-odd years John Agard really has done something – something remarkable as a writer, performer, poet, storyteller, mentor and an inspiration to so many of us.
It is my pleasure to present him with the BookTrust Lifetime Achievement Award.
Darren Chetty is Teaching Fellow at UCL Institute of Education and writes the Beyond the Secret Garden features for Books for Keeps with Karen Sands-O’Connor.