Six Second Summary
Stimulus Booklet:
Text One (Painting) - Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Caspar David Friedrich)
Text Two (Travel Story) - Just Back: a heavenly walk in Italy (Janet Rogers)
Nino, our walking guide, promised to take us to the best restaurant in Italy for lunch, but how he would manage to combine fine dining with a remote mountain walk, I wasn’t sure.
We were to walk the Path of the Gods, a high and heavenly way above the Amalfi Coast in Italy, across wild and precipitous terrain.
We took the local train to Castellammare di Stabia, then a bus, which wound up mountain roads past lemon groves and olive trees and meadows of yellow flowers.
At Bomerano, the village where the Path of the Gods begins, we stopped for coffee in a family-run café and Nino chatted to the owners. We admired, but resisted, the St Joseph’s Day cakes in the large glass cabinet: big iced balls, like profiteroles, full of cream with soft icing and a cherry on top. Then we set off in thick mist down stone steps out of the village. We knew the sea was somewhere below us, but we couldn’t see it. It was actually 1,800ft down and in places the rocky drop was almost vertical.
The path is an ancient track above the Mediterranean. For centuries it was the only route for local people and travellers. Farmers still work the narrow terraces. A man planting potatoes greeted us as we emerged from the mist. We could hear the clanging of goat bells high in the mountain, but we could not see the animals themselves.
Nino stopped to point out wild violets growing in rocky crevices and he picked a tiny white flower so we could smell its honey scent. We saw mint and wild thyme and high bushes of white heather. Then, as if we had stepped into the past, a man on a mule came towards us; the mule picking its way carefully over the rocky ground.
The mist cleared a little and we looked down on the village of Priano and the Convent of St Domenica with its neatly tilled terraces and vineyards.
At times Nino strode ahead, nimbly picking his way like the mule we had seen. At other times he walked with us, pointing out emerald euphorbia and lapillo, a white, light volcanic rock.
At midday we rounded a rocky corner. Nino had found a picnic bench on a precipice and he’d laid out a crusty loaf, sweet tomatoes, fat olives and a local cheese, caciocavallo, which looked like a giant pear.
As we sat, the mist lifted, the sun came out and the sea shone like tinsel. The bells in the church tower in the village below chimed midday and the sound echoed around the mountain. Bees buzzed in the purple rosemary. It was, without doubt, the best restaurant in Italy.
Text Two (Poem) - The Dungay Creek Postman (Richard Hillman)
never imagined I’d be delivering mailbut they needed a postman on short noticefor thepre-xmas parcel and card rush
three hundred kilometres of bush roadpotholes the shape of small creeks anddust turning to mud in sun showers
now my tyres slide on loose shale surfaceeyes drawn to dancing branches that droplike stone falls in freak midday storms
i follow the dungay creek postman’s tracksrecall how his body wasn’t found for hoursafter trees rained down upon his car
on the road out to eight mile creekpost boxes stand silent and someone has laida wreath and a wooden cross by the way
twenty-four years on the job something keptcalling him back, not this wildflower wreathamid a wreck of torn trees and crushed rock
from broken gravel to peach-cheeked pebbleshadows in post-rain snapshot move aboutas if what came here never meant to stay
for me, the sky is never blue nor greyconstantly it is becoming something elsea summons, a demand, a need
small things mirror the large, reflectan intense need to hold in placea country split from ear to ear
i search in every image of devotionin every nuance of shade and lightfor the sirens and shapes that beckon
rusted number boxes and plastic containerscollect in roadside undergrowth nailed toposts or wedged into tree forks like koalas
occasional rock to hold things downsnakes curled upon unclaimed lettersheavy spider shapes just out of reach
corroded wire and wasted stone faceswattle bird’s spray of wing wrappedin scratching walls of weathered leaf
a presence in this place won’t let go,like the hand of a dying manit will not release the hand it holds
with every mile travelled and with eachletter delivered, i prise the fingers backonly to see what he holds in his hand.
Text Four (Prose Extract with Illustration) - Birdsong (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)
The woman, a stranger, was looking at me. In the glare of the hot afternoon, in the swirl of motorcycles and hawkers, she was looking down at me from the back seat of her jeep. Her stare was too direct, not sufficiently vacant. She was not merely resting her eyes on the car next to hers, as people often do in Lagos traffic; she was looking at me. At first, I glanced away, but then I stared back, at the haughty silkiness of the weave that fell to her shoulders in loose curls, the kind of extension called Brazilian Hair and paid for in dollars at Victoria Island hair salons; at her fair skin, which had the plastic sheen that comes from expensive creams; and at her hand, forefinger bejewelled, which she raised to wave a magazine hawker away, with the ease of a person used to waving people away. She was beautiful, or perhaps she was just so unusual-looking, with wide-set eyes sunk deep in her face, that “beautiful” was the easiest way of describing her. She was the kind of woman I imagined my lover’s wife was, a woman for whom things were done.
My lover. It sounds a little melodramatic, but I never knew how to refer to him. “Boyfriend” seemed wrong for an urbane man of forty-five who carefully slipped off his wedding ring before he touched me. Chikwado called him “your man,” with a faintly sneering smile, as though we were both in on the joke: he was not, of course, mine. “Ah, you are always rushing to leave because of this your man,” she would say, leaning back in her chair and smacking her head with her hand, over and over. Her scalp was itchy beneath her weave, and this was the only way she could come close to scratching it. “Have fun oh, as long as your spirit accepts it, but as for me, I cannot spread my legs for a married man.” She said this often, with a clear-eyed moral superiority, as I packed my files and shut down my computer for the day.
We were friends out of necessity, because we had both graduated from Enugu Campus and ended up working for Celnet Telecom, in Lagos, as the only females in the community-relations unit. Otherwise, we would not have been friends. I was irritated by how full of simplified certainties she was, and I knew that she thought I behaved like an irresponsible, vaguely foreign teen-ager: wearing my hair in a natural low-cut, smoking cigarettes right in front of the building, where everyone could see, and refusing to join in the prayer sessions our boss led after Monday meetings. I would not have told her about my lover—I did not tell her about my personal life—but she was there when he first walked into our office, a lean, dark man with a purple tie and a moneyed manner. He was full of the glossy self-regard of men who shrugged off their importance in a way that only emphasized it. Our boss shook his hand with both hands and said, “Welcome, sir, it is good to see you, sir, how are you doing, sir, please come and sit down, sir.” Chikwado was there when he looked at me and I looked at him and then he smiled, of all things, a warm, open smile. She heard when he said to our boss, “My family lives in America,” a little too loudly, for my benefit, with that generic foreign accent of the worldly Nigerian, which, I would discover later, disappeared when he became truly animated about something. She saw him walk over and give me his business card. She was there, a few days later, when his driver came to deliver a gift bag. Because she had seen, and because I was swamped with emotions that I could not name for a man I knew was wrong for me, I showed her the perfume and the card that said, “I am thinking of you.”
“Na wa! Look at how your eyes are shining because of a married man. You need deliverance prayers,” Chikwado said, half joking. She went to night-vigil services often, at different churches, but all with the theme Finding Your God-Given Mate; she would come to work the next morning sleepy, the whites of her eyes flecked with red, but already planning to attend another service. She was thirty-two and tottering under the weight of her desire: to settle down. It was all she talked about. It was all our female co-workers talked about when we had lunch at the cafeteria. Yewande is wasting her time with that man—he is not ready to settle down. Please ask him oh, if he does not see marriage in the future then you better look elsewhere; nobody is getting any younger. Ekaete is lucky, just six months and she is already engaged. While they talked, I would look out the window, high up above Lagos, at the acres of rusted roofs, at the rise and fall of hope in this city full of tarnished angels.
Even my lover spoke of this desire. “You’ll want to settle down soon,” he said. “I just want you to know I’m not going to stand in your way.” We were naked in bed; it was our first time. A feather from the pillow was stuck in his hair, and I had just picked it out and showed it to him. I could not believe, in the aftermath of what had just happened, both of us still flush from each other’s warmth, how easily the words rolled out of his mouth. “I’m not like other men, who think they can dominate your life and not let you move forward,” he continued, propping himself up on his elbow to look at me. He was telling me that he played the game better than others, while I had not yet conceived of the game itself. From the moment I met him, I had had the sensation of possibility, but for him the path was already closed, had indeed never been open; there was no room for things to sweep in and disrupt.
Questions:
Text One - Painting (3 marks)
How does the painting represent the nature of adventure?
Text Two - Non-fiction (4 marks)
How does the text use language techniques to establish the beauty of the author’s experience?
Text Three - Poem (6 marks)
How does the poem represent the impact of place on the human experience?
Text Four - Prose Extract (7 marks)
How does the extract represent the complexity of the human experience?
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