Tea With Our Grandmothers — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Tea With Our Grandmothers
The poems
What you need to know
Addressed to a friend, the poem remembers both their grandmothers, from Somalia to Wales, through their tea, their cooking, their languages and the lives they survived, and the moment one of them died.
How Shire's portraits, words from the grandmothers' own languages, rich sensory images and run-on lines honour older women's strength, survival and influence on the young.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'a tally of surviving', 'habooba', 'ayeeyo'.
Form: free verse in stanzas built around portraits of each grandmother, with run-on lines through the first three stanzas, similes of food, spice and tea, and words from the languages the grandmothers spoke.
Context: Warsan Shire (born 1988 in Kenya to Somali parents), who came to London as a refugee at the age of one, became London's first Young Poet Laureate, and whose poetry featured in Beyoncé's film Lemonade (2016); her aim to use poetry to explore memory and voice and to heal trauma; and the poem's address to her friend Basil, honouring both their grandmothers in words from Arabic, Swahili and Welsh.
In part (b), suggested for sad thoughts (2025), where OCR finds a balance between grateful tribute ('a tally of surviving') and a family's suffering, carried by the run-on lines of its first three stanzas.
Links within the cluster: Equilibrium (mourning an older relative), Prayer (family, faith and loss), Cold Knap Lake (older family members as heroic figures) and Theme for English B (identity and heritage).
Beside an unseen poem: a poem about grandparents, family heritage, food or migration.
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.
