Context — Leave Taking — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Context
Introduction
What you need to know
The contexts of Leave Taking: Pinnock's own family and the play's history from 1987 to the 2018 revival, migration from Jamaica after 1948,
Jamaica's colonial past, the church and obeah, life for Black Britons in the 1980s, and the Windrush scandal of 2018.
How to use this context in an answer: briefly, through the characters and moments it helps to explain.
Winsome Pinnock: the daughter of Jamaican parents of the Windrush years, raised in Islington by a single mother after their marriage broke up; her mother followed her husband-to-be from Jamaica in 1959, as Enid follows hers, and Pinnock wrote the play at twenty-three in the Royal Court Young Writers' Group.
The play's history: first staged at the Liverpool Playhouse Studio in 1987 with five characters and two sets, the first play by a Black British woman staged at the National Theatre, and revived at the Bush Theatre in 2018 as the Windrush scandal broke.
The Windrush migrants: Caribbean workers invited to fill Britain's post-war labour shortages from 1948 to the early 1970s, many of them cleaners, drivers and nurses, and the shock of poor housing, degrading jobs and 'No blacks' signs.
Jamaica: a British colony from 1655 to independence in 1962, and the colonial schooling that taught Pinnock's parents to admire all things British.
Parents and children: migrants who found support in the church and kept links with home, and their British-born children, who faced unemployment, policing and the unrest of the 1980s.
Obeah: Caribbean healing and spiritual traditions with African roots, outlawed in Jamaica in 1898, yet consulted by migrants like Pinnock's mother in times of crisis.
The Windrush scandal of 2018, and how Brod's fear of deportation, written thirty years earlier, foreshadows it.
Pinnock on her play: 'caught between worlds', 'haunted by memories of what she has left behind', 'this new breed of black British woman', 'the personal is political' and 'No blacks, no dogs, no Irish!'.
Using context in OCR's exam: in the comparison it comes from what the two extracts and their introductions show, and in the answer on another moment it earns credit only where it supports the analysis.
In OCR's exam, this background earns no marks of its own: part (a) credits the context you can infer from the two printed extracts and their introductions, and part (b) doesn't mark context. Know it to understand the text, and use it in an answer only where it explains a reading.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
