IB English A Lit Prose Non-fiction Questionbank

The following text is an excerpt from the memoir The Chimney Birds by Nuala Feenan. The adult narrator recalls a winter morning in childhood when a starling that had fallen down the chimney is trapped in the front room, and the family must decide how to free it.

The Chimney Birds

We were a house that birds fell into. It was the chimney that did it, a wide cold Victorian throat that swallowed the sky and now and then gave a piece of it back, and so my childhood is punctuated by mornings when we came down to find a starling loose in the front room, mad with the wrongness of walls.

I remember one in particular, the winter I was eight. It had come down in the night and beaten itself half senseless against the window, and by the time we found it the sill was dusted with the fine grey talc of its panic, and the bird itself sat in the corner of the curtain rail, tilted, one wing held wrong, watching us with an eye like a bead of black water.

My father wanted to open the window and let it find its own way. My mother wanted the cat shut in the kitchen and no fuss. I wanted, with the fierce and stupid love of a child, to hold it. To be the one it trusted. I had a picture of it sitting in my cupped hands, calmed, choosing me, and the picture was so bright in me that I climbed on a chair before anyone could stop me and reached up into the curtain.

What I learned, in the half second before it exploded past my face, was that a wild thing does not want your love and has no use for it. The bird went off like a wet firework. It was all around the room at once, a grey panic with a heartbeat, and it hit the glass, and hit it again, and something in me that had wanted to possess it broke open into something better, which was the simple animal wish for it to be all right.

My father opened the window. The cold came in like a held breath let go. And the bird found the gap almost before we saw it move, out over the frosted gardens, a dark stitch pulled quickly through the white morning and lost.

I have thought about that starling for forty years. I think it taught me the first true thing I ever knew about love, which is that the creatures we love most are precisely the ones we cannot keep, that wildness is not a fault in a thing to be corrected but the very part of it we have no right to, and that the kindest hands we own are the ones we learn, against everything in us, to open.

This extract is taken from the essay collection On Being Legible by Amara Osei.

On Being Legible (extract)

There is a particular violence in being misread, and it is not the violence of malice. Malice, at least, requires you. The violence of misreading is impersonal: you are replaced by an idea, and the idea does not require your presence to be maintained.

I have been replaced many times. I have been, in the reading of others, a representative 5 of a country I have not lived in since I was six. I have been the embodiment of a cause I support but did not choose to represent. I have been an exception (to what rule, no one says) and I have been evidence (of what thesis, again, unclear). The most well-meaning of these replacements carried the most weight.

We speak of representation as if it were always a gift. And sometimes it is. To see 10 yourself in a story is to understand that your existence was always imaginable, even in the years when it was not imagined. But to be made into a symbol is to be made into a surface: reflective, useful, and two-dimensional. Surfaces do not have interiors. They catch light, and they are used.

I am interested in the question of who gets to be legible on their own terms, and who 15 is legible only as data. The answer, when you trace it, follows the usual fault lines. This is an essay about language. It is also an essay about power. These two things have never, in my experience, been separate subjects.

The following are two previously unseen literary passages, from two different literary forms. Write a guided analysis of each passage.

Text 1 is an excerpt from the novel The Coat Room by Priya Ansel. On the night their grandmother comes to live with them, the narrator and their younger brother Theo clear a small coat room and open an old trunk.

The Coat Room

The night our grandmother arrived to live with us, Theo and I were sent to clear the coat room so she could sleep there. We did not call it that because it held coats. We called it that because our father had grown up hanging his hopes in it, or so he said whenever he wanted us to be careful with the door.

The room was the size of a held breath. It smelled of wax jackets and the particular dust that gathers only in houses that keep things. Theo, who was nine and believed that all problems could be solved by moving furniture, began to drag the trunk toward the hall.

"Leave it," I said. "She might want it."

"She won't want a trunk." He said it the way he said everything then, as if the world had already agreed with him and I was the last to be told.

But I had opened the trunk while he was measuring the wall with his arms, and inside were the coats no one wore: a child's duffel with a missing toggle, a raincoat the colour of weak tea, a fur that had gone bald at the collar like an animal that had worried at itself. Under them was a photograph of a woman I did not know standing at a gate I did not know, holding a baby who might have been my father or might have been anyone. On the back, in pencil so faint it seemed to be thinking about disappearing, someone had written a name and then crossed it out.

I did not show Theo. I have thought since that this was the first secret I ever chose, as opposed to the ones that are simply given to a child to carry. I closed the trunk. When our grandmother came up the stairs that evening, slow as weather, she stopped in the doorway of the coat room and looked at it for a long time.

The following are two previously unseen literary passages, from two different literary forms. Write a guided analysis of each passage.

Text 1 is an excerpt from the novel The Ledger of Names by Rosa Whitcombe. In a library, Ada, a librarian of fifty years, greets a man who has returned decades after his boyhood visits and looks up his old membership record.

The Ledger of Names

The man came in out of the rain the way everyone did, apologising to the door.

Ada did not look up at once. She had learned, over fifty years behind the desk, that a person needs a moment to become a reader again, to shed the street. She let the stamp fall twice on the returns before she raised her eyes.

"You've kept it," he said. He was looking at the long oak counter, at the brass lamp, at the card index that still breathed its faint smell of pencil and dust.

"Things that work do not need replacing," Ada said. "Membership?"

"You won't have me. It was a long time ago."

She turned the ledger toward the light without hurry. Her hands were spotted now, but they moved the way they always had, sure as swallows. "We do not throw the old books out," she said. "Name."

He told her. She turned back through the years, page over page, decade over decade, until the paper grew softer under her thumb, and there it was, a boy's careful signature, the letters too big, the date some forty summers gone.

"You sat at the third table," she said. "You read the atlases and never the novels. You were saving the world for later."

He laughed, and the laugh cracked in the middle, and she understood that later had arrived for him, that he had come back the way people come back, to see whether a small fixed thing had held its place while they had gone soft and grey and far.

"You haven't changed," he said, which was a kindness and a lie.

The following text is an excerpt from the memoir What the Photograph Won't Say by Adaeze Okonkwo. The narrator studies the single surviving photograph of her grandmother as a young woman, who stands squinting outside an unknown building with one hand raised against the sun.

What the Photograph Won't Say (excerpt)

There is one photograph of my grandmother as a young woman, and I have looked at it so often that I have almost worn the person out of it. She is standing outside a building I cannot identify, in a dress whose colour I will never know, squinting slightly, one hand raised to her brow against a sun that set for good sixty years ago. She is not smiling. This used to trouble me, until my mother explained that you did not smile for a photograph then; a photograph was an expense and an occasion, and you met it the way you met a doctor or a priest, with your face arranged into its most permanent version.

So the photograph tells me almost nothing, and I have spent years mistaking that nothing for depth. I have read patience into the set of her mouth, and defiance, and a kind of tiredness I wanted her to have felt so that I could feel it with her. But the truth is that I am looking at a quarter of a second in 1961, and the woman in it did not yet know she would become anyone's grandmother, did not know me, could not have picked my face out of a crowd of the unborn.

What I love, I have come to think, is not the photograph but the squint: that one involuntary thing, the sun getting into her eyes, the body doing what bodies do regardless of occasion. Everything else in the image is composed. The squint is the only part of her that is not posing, and so it is the only part I can trust, the single honest accident in a made thing, the place where the real woman leaks through the portrait she was asked to be.