Colonization in Reverse — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Colonization in Reverse
The poems
What you need to know
Miss Lou tells her friend Miss Mattie the joyful news that Jamaicans are leaving in their thousands to settle in England, the mother country, turning colonisation upside down, and wonders how the English will stand it.
How Bennett's Jamaican Creole, rhyming quatrains, the persona of Miss Lou, exclamations and irony turn the history of empire into comedy while hinting at conflicts to come.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'Miss Mattie', 'de motherlan', 'Jamaica is Englan boun', 'bag an baggage', 'tun history upside dung', 'face war an brave de worse'.
Form: rhyming quatrains with a lively beat, spoken by the persona Miss Lou to her friend, in Jamaican Creole, with pairs of words, exclamations and an ending that turns from celebration to a hint of worry.
Context: Louise Bennett (1919–2006), Miss Lou, the Jamaican poet and performer who championed Jamaican Creole as a language for poetry and comedy, trained as an actor in London and worked in radio and theatre in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s; Jamaica Labrish (1966), one of her best-known collections; and the Windrush years from 1948, when people from the Caribbean, as British citizens, came to fill Britain's post-war shortage of workers.
Links within the cluster: Papa-T (the Caribbean and the mother country), Flag (identity and loyalty), Thirteen (migrant lives in London) and We Lived Happily during the War (irony about conflict).
An unseen poem paired with it might share migration, empire seen from the other side, or humour used to make a serious point.
OCR suggested it for 2025's question on the changes conflict brings: the mark scheme reads its Creole as using comedy to turn the old story of empire around.
OCR's question on this cluster has two parts. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a named poem from the cluster, printed on the paper, with an unseen poem on a linked theme, and rewards analysis of language, form and structure (AO2) most, then your response (AO1); an answer on only one of the two poems cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores one other poem from the same cluster that you choose, from memory, with AO1 and AO2 equally weighted; a poem from a different cluster means only the higher of your two marks counts. Neither part marks context: use it only where it explains a reading. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
