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2020 NECO LITERATURE DRAMA POETRY QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
NECO-LITERATURE-ANSWERS
SECTION I
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Role and character of WARA
wara was in love with kindo. wara is a stranger in mandoland too but has lived there long enough to detest being called stranger, and She is also in love with Kindo, She not born in Mandoland,her mother was taken prisoner by one of mando’s warriors during the war; her mother ran away after giving birth to her. Wara cautions kindo form doing anything which will anger the spirit, Wara is the only Kindo’s woman that will be sexually assaulted by Whitehead. Maligu and soko lot abduction into a sack and then take to whitehead’s compound. she fortunately escapes. For her love for Kindo, she is ready to risk anything to be with him, likes to follow him everywhere and Kindo is not comfortable with that as a warrior. Her love for Kindo is so intense that she refuses to leave with her grandfather to their homeland but remains in Mandoland in order to be with Kindo. In a way, her mother is seen as a slave ofthe Mando people. This reality poses a great threat to her relationship with Kindo. This is why Kindo cannot take her to the palace.
Even though she has absolute faith in Kindo, she is still very mindful of her integrity as a woman and also respects the customary norms of her society. This is one of the reasons she resists Kindo having her just anywhere and pushes to be taken to the palace. Wara’s steadfastness in preventing Whitehead from raping her is indicative of the resilience of the bloggingAfrican space to Western plundering schemes. In other words she looks up to kindo’s only woman should look up to a man, does not doubt him and never ask too many questions.
She is Kindo’s only woman that sexually assaulted by whitehead. maligu and soko plot her abduction into a sack and then take to whitehrad’s compound. She fortunately escapes.
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SECTION II
(8)
Role And Character Of Ruth.
Walter’s wife and Travis’s mother. Ruth takes care of the Youngers’ small apartment. Her marriage to Walter has problems, but she hopes to rekindle their love. She is about thirty, but her weariness makes her seem older. Constantly fighting poverty and domestic troubles, she continues to be an emotionally strong woman. Ruth is in some ways like a typical housewife of the 1950s. She makes breakfast, cleans the house, supports her husband, and keeps her own desires to herself. Unlike the stereotypical 1950s housewife, though, she also goes out into the world and works her butt off. Not only does she struggle to maintain her own household, she goes out to work in the households of rich white people as well. Ruth is a “soft” personality type. She is not aggressive; she just lets life “happen” to her. She is the “worn-out wife” with a tedious, routine lifestyle. Hansberry describes Ruth as being “about thirty” but “in a few years, she will be known among her people as a “settled woman”. Ruth has only simple dreams and would be content to live out her life being moderately comfortable. Her biggest dream blossoms only after Mama’s news of the possibility of their moving to a better neighbourhood. Ruth is easily embarrassed and tries too hard to please others. When George Murchison arrives in the middle of Walter and Beneatha’s frenzied African dance, Ruth is overly apologetic to George about their behaviour. When Walter and Beneatha argue, Ruth asks Walter not to bring her into their conflict. And even though Ruth is annoyed by Lena’s (Mama’s) meddling, she still allows her mother-in-law to influence her at times about the correct way to raise Travis. Very low key, Ruth reveals the most emotion when Mama tells her that they may not be able to move; it is only then that Ruth assertively expresses her views. Lacking education and sophistication, Ruth relies upon the suggestions, advice, and even what she thinks might be the wishes of others. Her husband Walter is incredibly dissatisfied with his life, and he constantly takes it out on her. Ruth is far from a doormat and tells her husband off when he starts acting like a jerk. However, it is clear in the play that the turmoil in her marriage is taking a real toll on Ruth. She often seems irritable, depressed, and at times sinks into despair. This all comes to a head for Ruth, when she finds out she is pregnant and considers an abortion. In the ’50s, an abortion would have been (i) illegal and (ii) dangerous. But according to Mama: “When the world gets ugly enough – a woman will do anything for her family. The part that’s already living.” Though Ruth hates the idea of aborting her child, she feels it’s the best decision for her financially strapped family. In the end, though, Ruth chooses to keep her child. She finds hope in the fact that the younger family will soon be moving out of their cramped, roach-infested apartment and into a new house. She’ll still have to work to help pay the mortgage, and they’ll all have to deal with the racist backlash of living in a white neighbourhood.
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SECTION III
(9i)
Repetition; The poet uses repetition even though this is subtly done in some cases. The “sudden throb of pain” in lines 10 and 11 is a subtle repetition of the panic’ which could be a painful throb. Again “nothing to show” (1.12), “Nothing to show the world” (1. 20), ‘No/specialist’s effort there” (1. 23-24) and “Hope/ is not a grain of sand” (1. 27-28) are repetitions of the same idea, namely that of a sense of futility.
(9ii)
Metaphor; When a writer or speaker asserts that something is or is equivalent to something else which may not really be like it, the figure used there is a metaphor. Peters uses a few of such a figure of speech in his poem.
i. “Panic” is equated with “fluttering wings” (I. 1 and 3)
ii. At the age of twenty, life is “stilled by hope” (1.6).
iii. At the age of thirty, life is again “a sudden throb of pain” (1. 10 & 11).
iv. The “sudden leaps/at the moon” depicts agility and liveliness.
v. “Copybook” is a record of life which in the case of Peters” poem is fitted with “red ink”. Red ink is a metaphor for failure grades.
vi. “Hope/is not a grain of sand” is metaphorical, depicting what hope is not.
vii. The phrase “blades of expectation” (1. 31) is a metaphor for a blend of what one looks out for in life as one ages.
(9iii)
Imagery; The imagery which is prominent in the poem is that of engulfment, of shrinkage as age mounts. The panic of growing older like a bird’s wings spreads and engulfs the human person as he/she gains in age. There is a flowering of optimism at twenty and thirty, and shortly after that legs begin to lose their agility. The ‘copybook of life is filled with failure marks, and one has little to show for all the years. Even inner satisfaction shrinks to a point of dissatisfaction as expectation has not been met.
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SECTION IV
(11)
“The Schoolboy” is a Romantic poem. The Romantic era was marked by a celebration of nature as the embodiment of perfection. Apart from Williams Blake, other notable Romantic poets include John keats, Percy B Shelley, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. English poets who have their writings categorized as Romantic poems unambiguously display their love for nature and peace that nature embodied.
In “The Schoolboy”, nature becomes a means of facilitating healing at different levels of life. Romantic poets believed in the use of their imagination to explore literary creativity as a means of deifying nature. They subscribe to the idea that the only way to achieve satisfaction for the soul is to have a profound power of imagination and to also be radical and non-conformists, hence they are perceived to be irrational and daring as they aspire to do things differently. Romantic poets idolize nature and regard it as a great source of inspiration or muse. Romanticists believe that the Industrial Revolution made the world artificial and sterile, making it lose its humanity and humaneness in the process. They found solace in escaping in the beautiful world of nature. Intensive formal education was one of the fallouts of the Industrial Revolution and as seen in the poem, Blake maintains that education takes away the individual’s sense of fulfilment and quest for adventure. As a romantic poem, “The Schoolboy” celebrates and appreciates and condemns every form of human and societal restriction placed on it. It also critiques the destruction of childhood innocence as a result of the emphasis placed on the importance of classroom education. in other words the poetic persona is a young boy who is happy when he wakes up to see the dawn of a new and delightful summer morning. Summer, for the Romanticists, was the season of beauty and unparalleled bliss and joy. The boy is amused by the chirping of the birds announcing a new dawn, he is also fascinated by the melodious sounds coming from the hunter’s horn, sounding from a distant field and the mellow tunes from the skylark bird. All these experiences from the natural world attract the boy to the extent that he exclaims “Oh what sweet company!”. The boy, in search of a practical solution to his predicament, makes an appeal to his parents. It is apparent in his Iamentation that he is of the view that if a promising child like him, is removed from the source of his happiness and joy, nature, he would not be able to flourish.
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