Identity and belonging — Leave Taking — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Identity and belonging
Themes
What you need to know
How Pinnock explores identity and belonging for parents born in Jamaica and daughters born in London, caught between two countries across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'These girls ain't English like them newsreader', 'English stamp on them like the letters on a stick a rock', 'She know who she is. Tell him who you are', 'Things I feel they haven't got words for', 'run with a crowd who make you feel like you belong', 'Breathing English air', 'I'm never there'.
Parents and daughters: Enid holding on to old ways while insisting she is English, and London-born daughters who feel neither Jamaican nor welcome as British.
How Viv and Del find their own answers: Black Studies for Viv, and Del's place as Mai's successor.
OCR's specimen questions paired the play with another play on people as outsiders.
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.
