Literature in English JAMB, WAEC, NECO AND NABTEB Official Past Questions

A narrative poem must

The plot of a novel is best described as

One of the following writers is better known as a playwright than as a novelist

In those days
When civilization kicked us in the face
When holy water slapped our cringing brows
The vultures built in the shadow of their talons
The blood stained monument of tutelage
In those days
There was painful laughter on the metallic hell
of the roads
And the monotonous rythm of the paternoster
Drowned the howling of the plantations
Of the bitter memories of the extorted kisses
Of promises broken at the point of a gun
Of foriegners who did not seem human
You who knew all the books but knew not love
Nor our hands which fertilize the womb of the earth
Hands instinct of the root with revolt
Inspite of your songs of pride in the charnel houses
Inspite of the desolate villages of Africa torn apart
Hope lived in us like a citadel
And from Swaziland’s mines to the sweltering sweat
of Europe’s factories
Spring will be reborn under our bright steps.
(‘The Vultures’,by David Diop)
The theme of the poem is

The Concubine by Elechi Amadi
The title of this novel is justified because

Gabriel Okara’s ‘The Call of the River Nun’,treats

From the West
Clouds come hurrying with the wind
Turning
Sharply
Here and there
Like a plague of locusts
Whirling
Tossing up things on its tail
Like a madman chasing nothing

Pregnant clouds
Ride stately on its back
Gathering to perch on hills
Like dark sinister wings:
The wind whistles by
And trees bend to let it pass

In the village
Screams of delighted children
Toss and turn
In the dim of whirling wind
Women-
Babies clinging to their backs-
Dart about
In and out
Madly
The wind whistles by
Whilst trees bend to let it pass.
(From ‘An African Thunderstorm’ by David Rubadiri)
The poet varies the lengths of the lines skillfully

‘The seas eats our lands’ by Kwesi Brew
Here stood our ancestral home:
The crumbling wall marks the spot.
Here a sheep was led to the slaughter
To appease the gods and atone
For faults which our destiny
Has blossomed into crimes
There my cursed father once stood
And shouted to us,his children,
To come back from our play
To our evening meal and sleep
The clouds were thickening in the red sky
And night had charmed
A black power into the pounding waves.

Here once lay Keta
Now her golden girls
Erode into the arms
of strange towns.

In this poem,

Your hand is heavy,upon my brow
I bear no heart mercuric like the clouds,to dare
Exacerbation from your subtle plough.

Woman as a clam,on the sea’s crescent
I saw your jealous eye quench the sea’s
Fluorescence,dance on the pulse incessant

Of the waves.And i stood,drained
Submitting like the sands,blood and brine
coursing to the roots.Night,you rained

Serrated shadows through dank leaves
Till,bathed in warm suffusion of your dappled calls
Sensations pained me,faceless,silent as night thieves.
Hide me now,when night children haunt the earth
i must hear none!These misted calls will yet
Undo me;naked,unbidden,at night’s muted birth
(‘Night’ by Wole Soyinka)
in the poem above,Soyinka,

‘All’s over,Sweet’,he cried
To the wife,thus guise;for the young page was she
‘Tis as we hoped and said’t would be.
He never guessed…we mount and ride
To where our love can reign uneyed
He’s clay,and we are free.
From Thomas Hardy’s,The Duel)
The theme of this poem is

In the fiction No Longer At Ease by Chinua Achebe,Obuajulu Okonkwo’s fall can be traced to the fact that

New Year’s Eve Midnight
Now the bells are tolling-
A year is dead.
And my heart is slowly beating
the Nunc Dimittis
to all my hopes and mute
yewnings of a year
and ghosts hover round
dream beyond dream

Dream beyond dream
mingling with the dying
bell-sounds fading
into memories
like rain drops
falling into a river.

And now the bells are chimming-
A year is born.
And my heart-bell is ringing
in dawn
But it’s shrouded things i see
dimly stride
on heart-canopied paths
to a riverside
The mood of the above poem is

Maria:If you desire the spleen,and will laugh
yourself into stitches,follow me.yond gull
Malvolio is turned heathen,a very renegado;
saved by believing rightly,can never believe
such impossible passages of grossness.
He’s in yellow stockings.
Sir Toby:And cross-gartered?
Maria:Most villainously;like a pendant that keeps
a school in church.i have dogged him:
like his murderer.He does obey every point
of the letter that i dropped to betray him:
he does smile his face into more lines than
is in the new map with the augmentation of
the indies:you have not seen such a thing as
’tis.I can hardly forbear hurling things at
him:if she do,he’ll smile and take it for
a great favour.
(Twelfth Night)
Which of the following statements reflects best the situation revealed above

Romeo and Juliet
Juliet:O serpent heart,hid with a flowering face!
Did ever dragon keep so fair a cave
Beautiful tyrant:Fiend angelical
Dove-feathered raven!wolfish-ravening lamb
Despised substance of divinest show!
A damned saint,an honorable villain!
(From Romeo and Juliet)
Juliet is referring in the above passage to

Wole Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’ is

Mr Johnson,by Joyce Cary,is an interesting novel for the reason that

All this was a long time ago,i remember
And i would do it again,but set down
This set down
This:were we led all that way for
Birth and Death?There was a Birth,certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different;this birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us,like Death,our death
We returned to our places,these kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here,in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.
(From T.S Elliott’s ‘Journey Of The Magi’)
The Magi are no longer at ease because

The casualties referred to in ‘Casualties’ are

‘And Your laughter like a flame piercing the shadows Has revealed Africa to me beyond the snows of yesterday’.’Shadows’ in the above quotation means

In Wole Soyinka’s poem,’I Think It Rains’ rain symbolizes

Achebe’s language and style in No Longer At Ease is remarkable