™

Cambridge IGCSE

WORLD LITERATURE 0408/22

Paper 2 Unseen May/June 2020
1 hour 15 minutes

You must answer on the enclosed answer booklet.

You will need: Answer booklet (enclosed)

*6403880222*

INSTRUCTIONS
• Answer one question: either Question 1 or Question 2.
• Follow the instructions on the front cover of the answer booklet. If you need additional answer paper,
ask the invigilator for a continuation booklet.

INFORMATION
• The total mark for this paper is 25.
• All questions are worth equal marks.

This document has 8 pages. Blank pages are indicated.

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Answer either Question 1 or Question 2.

EITHER

1 Read carefully the poem on the opposite page.

How does the poet memorably convey feelings about people following their dreams?

To help you answer, you might consider:

• how the poet describes the geography teacher’s dreams

• the contrast between the teacher’s everyday life and his dreams
• the impact of the final lines (from ‘But a lesson he never ...’).

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Geography Lesson

Our teacher told us one day he would leave

And sail across a warm blue sea
To places he had only known from maps,
And all his life had longed to be.
The house he lived in was narrow and grey
But in his mind’s eye he could see
Sweet-scented jasmine clinging to the walls,
And green leaves burning on an orange tree.
He spoke of the lands he longed to visit,
Where it was never drab or cold.
I couldn’t understand why he never left,
And shook off the school’s stranglehold.
Then halfway through his final term
He took ill and never returned,
And he never got to that place on the map
Where the green leaves of the orange trees burned.
The maps were redrawn on the classroom wall;
His name was forgotten, it faded away.
But a lesson he never knew he taught
Is with me to this day.
I travel to where the green leaves burn
To where the ocean’s glass-clear and blue,
To all those places my teacher taught me to love
But which he never knew.

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OR

2 Read carefully the following extract about nine-year-old Benjamin’s memory of his father leaving
home to work in another city.

How does the writer vividly convey the impact of the father leaving home?

To help you answer, you might consider:

• the descriptions of the behaviour of the father and mother

• how the writer portrays the brothers’ reactions
• the ways in which the writer builds tension.

I remember the night Father returned home with his transfer letter; it was on a Friday. From that
Friday through to that Saturday, Father and Mother held whispering consultations like shrine priests.
1
By Sunday morning, Mother emerged a different being. She’d acquired the gait of a wet mouse,
averting her eyes as she went about the house. She did not go to church that day, but stayed home
and washed and ironed a stack of Father’s clothes, wearing an impenetrable gloom on her face.
Neither of them said a word to my brothers and me, and we did not ask. My brothers – Ikenna,
2
Boja, Obembe – and I had come to understand that when the two ventricles of our home – our
father and our mother – held silence as the ventricles of the heart retain blood, we could flood the
house if we poked them. So, at times like these, we avoided the television in the eight-columned
shelf in our sitting room. We sat in our rooms, studying or feigning to study, anxious but not asking
any questions. While there, we stuck out our antennae to gather whatever we could of the situation.
3
By nightfall on Sunday, crumbs of information began to fall from Mother’s soliloquy like
tots of feathers from a richly plumed bird: “What kind of job takes a man away from bringing up his
growing sons? Even if I were born with seven hands, how would I be able to care for these children
alone?”
Although these feverish questions were directed to no one in particular, they were certainly
intended for Father’s ears. He was seated alone on a lounge chair in the sitting room, his face
veiled with a copy of his favourite newspaper, the Guardian, half reading and half listening to Mother.
And although he heard everything she said, Father always turned deaf ears to words not directly
addressed to him, the kind he often referred to as “cowardly words.” He would simply read on,
sometimes breaking off to loudly rebuke something or applaud something he’d seen in the newspaper
– “If there is any justice in this world, Abacha should soon be mourned by his witch of a wife.” “Wow,
Fela is a God! Good gracious!” “Reuben Abati should be sacked!” – anything just to create the
impression that Mother’s lamentations were futile; whimpers to which no one was paying attention.
Before we slept that night, Ikenna, who was nearly fifteen and on whom we relied for the
interpretation of most things, had suggested that Father was being transferred. Boja, a year his
junior, who would have felt unwise if he didn’t appear to have any idea about the situation, had said
it must be that Father was travelling abroad to a “Western world” just as we often feared he someday
would. Obembe, who, at eleven, was two years my senior, did not have an opinion. Me neither.
But we did not have to wait much longer.
The answer came the following morning when Father suddenly appeared in the room I
shared with Obembe. He was dressed in a brown T-shirt. He placed his spectacles on the table, a
gesture requesting our attention. “I will start living in Yola from today onwards, and I don’t want you
boys to give your mother any troubles.” His face contorted when he said this, the way it did whenever
he wanted to drive the hounds of fear into us. He spoke slowly, his voice deeper and louder, every
word tacked nine inches deep into the beams of our minds. So that, if we went ahead and disobeyed,
he would make us conjure the exact moment he gave us the instruction in its complex detail with
the simple phrase “I told you.”

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4
“I will call her regularly, and if I hear any bad news” – he struck his forefinger aloft to fortify
5
his words – “I mean, any funny acts at all, I’ll give you the Guerdon for them.
He’d said the word “Guerdon” – a word with which he emphasised a warning or highlighted
the retribution for a wrong act – with so much vigour that veins bulged at both sides of his face.
This word, once pronounced, often completed the message. He brought out two twenty-naira notes
from the breast pocket of his coat and dropped them on our study table.
“For both of you,” he said, and left the room.
Obembe and I were still sitting in our bed trying to make sense of all that when we heard
Mother speaking to him outside the house in a voice so loud it seemed he was already far away.
“Eme, remember you have growing boys back here,” she’d said. “I’m telling you, oh.”
She was still speaking when Father started his Peugeot 504. At the sound of it, Obembe
and I hurried from our room, but Father was already driving out of the gate. He was gone.
1
gait: a particular way of walking
2
ventricles: the chambers of the heart that pump blood around the body
3
soliloquy: speaking thoughts aloud
4
aloft:into the air
5
Guerdon: a reward

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