Scenes 5 and 6: Del at Mai's and Viv's rebellion — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Scenes 5 and 6: Del at Mai's and Viv's rebellion
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Weeks later: Del living at Mai's in her son's old room, Mai's reading of Del's palm, Viv's visit with Enid's money and news of the exam
she walked out of, and Del throwing her out; then Enid's reading with Mai, her guilt over Mooma and her worry for Del, her howl of grief,
and Mai telling Del to go home to her mother.
Key quotations: 'when you read words run across the page like black ants', 'He had no choice', 'I'm finished with men', 'You're such a good girl', 'I'm not as good as you think', 'I need another language to express myself', 'Don't turn your back on me, girl!', 'It not easy to turn you back on one country and start fresh in foreign', 'What they know about a black woman's soul?', 'a howl of pain', 'She hates me. Always has', 'I was hard on my boy'.
Structure: the end of Scene 5, where Del pushes Viv out and Viv pounds on the closed door, and the stage directions that turn Enid's grief into a silent scream before the sound comes.
OCR set Viv's visit to Del in June 2024, on sisters meeting; in 2024 and 2025 its examiners found Del's furious answer to Viv's walked-out exam the most popular other moment, best used to show her care for her sister's future.
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.
