Tradition, faith and obeah — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Tradition, faith and obeah
Themes
What you need to know
How Pinnock explores faith and tradition, the church, obeah and the knowledge passed down from mother to daughter 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: 'What they know about a black woman soul?', 'Just give you pills to sick you stomach', 'you doing the obeah', 'I don't deal in numbers', 'I don't have a daughter to pass them on to'.
Enid's church: her efforts to impress the pastor, and her sense that only God listens to her, against Brod's lost faith and the daughters who stay away.
Obeah: Del's scorn turning into belief, Mai's tests and notebook, and the gift passed from woman to woman.
Context: obeah's African roots and its ban in Jamaica, the church as a link with home for migrants, and Caribbean storytelling.
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.
