Papa-T — Fred D'Aguiar
Papa-T — Fred D’Aguiar
The title of this poem fuses two men into one name. “Papa-T” is D’Aguiar’s own grandfather, and at the same time it is his private nickname for Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the Victorian Poet Laureate. The poem’s speaker remembers being a boy in Guyana, listening to his grandfather perform Tennyson’s poem about a cavalry charge aloud, so that two very different histories of conflict — a Victorian battlefield and a Guyanese childhood — blur together in a single memory.
Fred D’Aguiar was born in London but spent his early childhood in Guyana, raised by his grandmother while his parents worked in England. His first collection gave voice to “Mama Dot”, a grandmother figure, and he has always blended standard English with Nation Language. He has written novels and plays exploring slavery and exploitation in Guyana, and he now teaches creative writing in the UK and the USA. This background — a childhood split between two places and two languages — shapes every choice in “Papa-T”.
“Papa-T” names two people at once: D’Aguiar’s grandfather and Tennyson. The poem remembers the grandfather performing Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” aloud in Guyana, so a Victorian imperial battle and a Caribbean childhood memory collide in the same lines. This use of one text inside another is called intertextuality.
Conflict Themes in Papa-T
The poem explores several ideas from within the Conflict cluster: the legacy of empire, how a colonised family inherits and reshapes an imperial poem, the passing of memory between generations, and the tension between obedience and disobedience. Tennyson’s soldiers follow orders without question. D’Aguiar’s poem sets up a different relationship to instruction — the grandson listens to his grandfather’s stories, but listening does not mean submitting to them unchanged.
The grandfather is remembered performing his “no-nonsense recitals”, and he threatens the children with a “good lickin” if they will not listen. The discipline of empire is folded into the discipline of a loving grandfather — the threat is affectionate rather than frightening, which keeps the poem’s tone warm even while it deals with imperial violence.
Form and Structure
Tennyson’s poem uses insistent rhyme and a driving metre to dramatise the cavalry charge as public, patriotic spectacle. D’Aguiar makes the opposite choice: his poem is written in free verse, without rhyme, which separates his quieter, reflective memory from Tennyson’s declamatory public voice. The poem traces a memory rather than a battle. Its first stanza evokes the sights and sounds of historical battle through a child’s imagination — the boy imagines men “tin-soldiering” the action of Tennyson’s poem, turning real slaughter into a game a child could play with toy soldiers. A mistake in the third stanza forms a further allusion to Tennyson, showing how memory and error get folded into any retelling of an inherited story.
Language and Imagery
The grandfather’s storytelling is remembered as larger than life. He is addressed as “our sweet seasalter”, an image that roots him in a specific Guyanese place, full of taste and texture, rather than in Tennyson’s England. His “no-nonsense recitals” carry a fierce, disciplined energy that echoes the seriousness of the original poem even as the setting has shifted continents.
The poem’s most important turn is its refusal of blind obedience. D’Aguiar’s poem recalls Tennyson’s cavalrymen as men who simply “do and die”, following orders without question. D’Aguiar’s poem insists on a different relationship to instruction: for him, “to hear” is “to disobey” — hearing his grandfather’s story does not produce obedience, but a poet’s independence. That independence is carried by “that tongue”, the echo of the grandfather’s Guyanese voice and accent, which unsettles and remakes Tennyson’s very English poem from within.
D’Aguiar does not simply reject Tennyson’s poem — he absorbs it and answers it. The grandfather’s dialect voice, “that tongue”, physically changes the sound of the imperial poem when it is spoken aloud in Guyana. The grandson, startled at first by a blank page when he comes to write his own poem, finds that his grandfather’s recitals become his inspiration rather than a set of orders to copy. The poem argues that other cultures have their own version of the tradition of writing about the imperial past — and that inheriting a story is not the same as repeating it.
Comparison Partners
“Papa-T” connects to several other poems in the cluster. Compared with ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’, both poems retell an old story of conflict from a distance, but Byron’s speaker stays outside the action while D’Aguiar’s speaker inherits the story through family performance. Compared with ‘Colonization in Reverse’, both poets use a distinctive Caribbean voice and dialect to seize control of imperial history, turning a colonial narrative back on itself rather than accepting it unchanged. Compared with ‘Flag’, both poems examine West Indian responses to patriotism and the symbols of empire, though Agard questions a flag directly while D’Aguiar questions an inherited poem. Compared with ‘Boat Stealing’, both poems build an argument out of a single childhood memory, but Wordsworth’s memory is solitary and frightening while D’Aguiar’s is communal and affectionate.
Using Papa-T in the Exam
If “Papa-T” is the printed poem in the comparison task, look for an unseen poem that also deals with inherited memory or family responses to conflict, and compare attitudes to obedience, voice and history rather than just subject matter. If you choose “Papa-T” for part b), where you write in detail on one other anthology poem of your own choice and the poem is not printed on the paper, the highest-value short quotations to learn by heart are “no-nonsense recitals”, “good lickin”, “to hear” and “to disobey”, and “that tongue” — each one carries a precise idea about discipline, voice or resistance that you can build a paragraph around from memory.