Question 10
What role does song play in Sesay’s The Song of the Women of my Land?
Observation
This was a popular question. Quite a number of candidates attempted it.
Candidates are expected to discuss the following:
- Identify the central theme of theme of survival: though the women are long dead, their songs, reduced to tunes over time, survive and keep their memory alive.
- Song defined their lives in times of bondage; It enabled them to keep hope alive.
- Song was their inheritance; it kept them close to their past.
- Song was what they bequeathed to posterity.
- Poetry immortalises what is left of their songs – the tunes.
Candidates’ performance in the question was good.