How Pinnock presents Mai, and how the character develops across the text: the obeah woman of Deptford, funny, sharp and alone, estranged from her son, who listens where doctors do not, takes Del in and passes her gift and notebook to her as her heart fails.
The key quotations for this character and how to analyse them, with the context that shapes them.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Plenty black woman over here does come see me 'bout man', 'They think I can work miracles', 'So, she go out with she friends. Nothing wrong with that', 'leave her to do what she want', 'You take all the time you want', 'You should be helping each other to survive', 'I didn't hate him. I was trying to save him', 'invest in their own healing', 'some kinda curse that condemn our people to wander the earth', 'It's time. You ready'.
Mai as healer and counsellor: a whole-person approach for women who will not go to doctors, humour and sharp insight, her failing heart, and her estranged son.
Pinnock calls her 'an enigmatic figure' who 'comes to have a powerful influence on all of them'.
Context: the obeah woman as a mother figure in Caribbean communities, and the gift handed down the female line.
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.
