Aufgabe HT 1 - Aufgabe 3.1 · Abitur NRW Englisch LK · Haupttermin · Weiterbildungskolleg 2022

Klausurteil A

Bernardine Evaristo

Girl, Woman, Other

The story takes place in the UK today. Carole has just arrived at the university where she is going to begin her degree.

Note: The text is reproduced in the same form as in the original printed edition.

her mother couldn’t get the day off work and anyway, it was just as well because she’d

wear her most outlandish Nigerian outfit consisting of thousands of yards of bright material,

and a headscarf ten storeys high, and she’d start bawling when she had to leave her only

child for the first time

5 Carole would forever be known as the student with the mad African mother

that first week she counted on one hand the number of brown-skinned people in her

college, and none as dark as her

in the baronial dining hall she could barely look up from her plate of revolting Stone Age

food, let alone converse with anyone

10 she overheard loud reminiscences about the dorms and drugs of boarding school, Christmas

holidays in Goa, the Bahamas, gap years spent climbing Machu Picchu, or building a school

for the poor in Kenya, about haring down the M4 for weekends in London, house parties in

the countryside, long weekenders in Paris, Copenhagen, Prague, Dublin or Vilnius (where

was that, even?)

15 most students weren’t like that but the really posh ones were the loudest and the most

confident and they were the only voices she heard

they made her feel crushed, worthless and a nobody

without saying a word to her

without even noticing her

20 nobody talked loudly about growing up in a council flat on a skyscraper estate with a

single mother who worked as a cleaner

nobody talked loudly about never having gone on a single holiday, like ever

nobody talked loudly about never having been on a plane, seen a play or the sea, or eaten

in a restaurant, with waiters

25 nobody talked loudly about feeling too uglystupidfatpoor or just plain out of place, out

of sorts, [...]

people walked around her or looked through her, or was she imagining it? did she exist

or was she an illusion? if I strip off and streak across the quadrangle will anyone notice me

other than the porters who will not doubt call the fedz, an excuse they’ve been waiting for

30 ever since they first set eyes on her

when a student sidled up after a lecture to ask for some ecstasy, Carole almost texted her

mother to say she was on the next train home

at the end of her first term she returned to Peckham informing her mother she didn’t want

to return to university because although she liked her studies and was managing to stay on

35 top of most of it, she didn’t belong there and wasn’t going back

I’m done, Mama, I’m done

eh! eh! which kain nonsense be this? Bummi shouted, am I hearing you correctly or you

wan make I clean my ear with matches?

listen to me good, Carole Williams

40 firstly – do you think Oprah Winfrey (V I P) would have become the Queen of Television

worldwide if she had not risen above the setbacks of her early life?

secondly – do you think Diane Abbott (V I P) would have become Britain’s first black

woman M P if she did not believe it was her right to enter politics and represent her community?

thirdly – do you think Valerie Amos (V I P) would have become the first black woman

45 baroness in this country if she had burst into tears when she walked into the House of Lords

and seen it was full of elderly white gentlemen?

lastly, did me and Papa come to this country for a better life only to see our daughter

giving up on her opportunities and end up distributing paper hand towels for tips in nightclub

toilets or concert venues, as is the fate of too many of our countrywomen?

50 you must go back to this university in January and stop thinking everybody hates you

without giving them a chance, did you even ask them? did you go up to them and say, excuse

me, do you hate me?

you must find the people who will want to be your friends even if they are all white people

there is someone for everyone in this world

55 you must go back and fight the battles that are your British birthright, Carole, as a true

Nigerian

Carole returned to her college resolved to conquer the place where she would spend the

next two and half years of her life

she would fit in, she decided, she would find her people, as her mother had advised

60 not with the misfits who skulked about the place with scowls on their faces, their hair

gelled up into purple Mohicans

or those with multi-coloured dreadlock extensions, people who were going nowhere fast,

as far as Carole was concerned, as she watched them walk through town with placards and

loudspeakers, people who would horrify her mother if she brought them home

65 to have come this far? did your Papa sacrifice his health so that you could become a punky

Rasta person who smells?

nor was she interested in the boring ordinaries, as Carole began to think of them, students

who were so bland they disappeared, even to her

certainly not the cliques of the elite, now that she knew they existed, who were unreachable,

70 [...]

she studied the inmates to find the best match for her, approached those with the most

friendly demeanours, was surprised when people responded warmly

once she actually started talking to them

by the end of her second term she had made friends and even got herself a boyfriend,

75 Marcus, a white Kenyan whose family owned a cattle ranch there, who unashamedly had a

thing for black girls, which she didn’t mind because she was delighted to be desired and he

treated her considerately

she knew she could never tell her mother about him, who’d made it clear she had to marry

a Nigerian, not that Carole was even thinking of marrying Marcus, they were only nineteen,

80 her mother would then ask her why she was courting someone who did not respect her enough

to marry her

it would be lose-lose

Annotations:

8 · baronial – here: elegant, grand

12 · M4 – motorway connecting London with Wales

29 · fedz – slang: security officers

33 · Peckham – part of London where many Nigerians live

37 · kain – Nigerian English pidgin: kind of

37 · Bummi – Carole’s mother

38 · wan – Nigerian English pidgin: to want to

61 · Mohicans – here: a hairstyle created by shaving the hair on each side and leaving a strip of longer hair in the middle

3. Select one of the tasks below:

3.1 The journalist and historian David Olusoga claims that many people in Britain reject the idea that structural racism exists and regard it as “a minor, if regrettable, fact of life – one that black people have to tolerate and learn to live with”. Assess to what extent David Olusoga’s statement accurately describes an attitude that is widespread in British society today. (Evaluation: comment) [14 Punkte]