BEGC 114 Postcolonial Literatures Solved Question Paper June 2026 for IGNOU Bachelor of Arts (Honours) English (BAEGH)

Compulsory Block 3, Units 2 to 4 2 × 10 = 20 Neruda and Walcott in all 4 papers

Question 1. Discuss any two of the following stanzas with reference to context: 2 × 10 = 20

(a) She loved me, sometimes I loved her too
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

(b) Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

(c) I'm still here. No, don't worry,
I won't appear out of
that old time to discomfort you.
And no, at this
distance, I'm not holding
my breath for a reply.

(a) Reference to context. These lines are from Pablo Neruda's 'Tonight I Can Write', the twentieth poem of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (1924), read in BEGC-114 in W. S. Merwin's English translation. Neruda (1904-1973) was a Chilean poet and diplomat who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971.

The speaker sits alone on a starry night and recalls a woman he once loved and has now lost. The poem keeps moving between memory and the present moment, and this stanza comes from its middle, where he weighs what the love was against what he feels tonight.

Explanation. The first line admits that the love was uneven: she loved him, and he loved her only some of the time. The second line answers his own doubt. Nobody, he says, could have helped loving her wide, calm eyes. It is the one clear picture of the woman that the poem gives us.

The refrain then returns, reminding us that the poem itself is the 'saddest lines' he says he can write tonight. The last line splits his grief in two: he thinks that she is no longer his, and he feels that he has lost her. Thought and feeling arrive separately, as they often do after a parting.

Critical comment. Earlier in the poem the speaker puts it the other way round: he loved her, and she sometimes loved him. The reversal here shows a memory that keeps rewriting itself, and a speaker honest enough to admit he cannot settle who loved whom more.

The style is bare: short statements, repetition and almost no ornament. That plainness helped make the collection one of the best-selling books of poetry in Spanish. In BEGC-114 it also shows Neruda's early lyric voice, before the political poems of the Spanish Civil War such as 'The Way Spain Was', which the course also prescribes.

(b) Reference to context. These lines come from Derek Walcott's 'A Far Cry from Africa', published in his collection In a Green Night (1962). Walcott (1930-2017), born in St Lucia, was a poet and playwright who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. The poem responds to the Mau Mau uprising against British rule in Kenya in the 1950s and the brutal way it was crushed.

The stanza belongs to the middle of the poem, where Walcott sets the violence of animals in nature beside the violence of human beings. Animals kill by instinct, he suggests, while man claims a higher purpose even as he inflicts pain.

Explanation. Here 'his' refers to man in general, colonial soldier and rebel alike. Man's wars are as frenzied as frightened animals driven out of the grass by hunters. They dance to a drum whose skin is stretched from a dead animal, so the music of war is literally made out of death.

Man still calls this 'courage', but it is really an inborn fear. The last line is bitter: the only 'white peace' on offer is the peace of the dead. It recalls the peace imposed by colonial power, a settlement agreed only by those no longer alive to object to it.

Critical comment. Walcott packs double meanings into single words. 'Native' means both inborn and belonging to the colonised land. 'White' suggests the colonisers, the bleached bones of the dead and the flag of surrender. These puns turn a picture of war into an attack on imperial claims of bringing peace.

The stanza also refuses an easy side. It condemns colonial violence without romanticising the rebels, and it uses African images, the drum and the beasts, to speak of a failing shared by all humans. This balance prepares the moral confusion the speaker confesses at the poem's close.

Section B essay Block 2, Unit 2 20 marks First set in June 2026

Question 5. Critically comment on the short story, 'The Collector of Treasures' by Bessie Head. (20)

Introduction. Bessie Head (1937-1986) was born in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa, to a white mother and a black father, a union forbidden under the country's racial laws. She moved to Botswana in 1964 and settled in the village of Serowe, where most of her fiction is set. 'The Collector of Treasures' is the title story of her 1977 collection, The Collector of Treasures and Other Botswana Village Tales.

The story is Head's sharpest study of what independence did and did not change for village women. It asks a hard question: when the law, custom and the state all fail a woman, what is left to her? The answer it gives is violent, and Head refuses to make it simple.

The story in brief. Dikeledi Mokopi is taken by prison van to begin a life sentence for killing her husband, Garesego. In the women's prison she meets Kebonye and others who have also killed their husbands, and a long flashback tells us how she came to be there.

Garesego deserts Dikeledi and their three sons soon after independence brings new jobs and money. For years she raises the boys alone, earning a living by sewing, knitting and thatching. Next door live Paul Thebolo and his wife Kenalepe, a loving couple who become her closest friends.

Trouble comes when the eldest son needs fees for secondary school. Garesego refuses to pay, and then, stirred by gossip linking his wife to Paul, he announces that he is coming home. Dikeledi prepares his bath and a meal, and when he lies down she castrates him with a kitchen knife. He dies, and she makes no attempt to escape.

Structure and narrative method. Head opens at the end, in the prison van, so the reader knows the crime before the cause. This shifts attention from what happened to why it happened. The suspense is not about the killing but about how a gentle woman, known in the village for kindness, is pushed to that point.

The narrator also steps outside the plot to give a short social history of the village man. This mix of storytelling and commentary is typical of Head's village tales, which read like oral accounts shaped by a writer who is also a close observer of her community.

Two kinds of men. The heart of the story is the contrast between Garesego and Paul Thebolo. The narrator traces the first type through three stages: ancestral custom that placed men above women, colonial rule and migrant labour that left men with no real role at home, and independence, which gave them wages but no new sense of responsibility.

Garesego is the product of that history. He treats his wife as property and his salary as a licence for drink and other women. Paul is the rare man who has rebuilt himself, sharing work and tenderness with Kenalepe. By placing the two side by side, Head shows that male cruelty is learnt, not natural, and so can be unlearnt.

Dikeledi as a character. Dikeledi is drawn with great warmth. She is practical, generous and proud of her work, and her neighbours rely on her skills. Her patience with Garesego lasts for years, which makes the final act more shocking. Her breaking point comes not from jealousy but from a threat to her sons' future.

Why she is the collector of treasures. The title refers to Dikeledi's gift for finding and keeping the small kindnesses people offer. Her name means 'tears' in Setswana, yet her life is built on the treasures of friendship, her children and her skilled hands. That a collector of good things ends in a terrible act is the story's central tension.

Violence, justice and female solidarity. Head does not ask us to cheer the killing, but she makes it understandable. The law offered no remedy for desertion, and custom gave the husband the upper hand. Dikeledi's act is the only power left to her, a final refusal of a body treated as his possession.

The prison scenes balance this darkness. The women who share Dikeledi's fate form a quiet community of care, much like her friendship with Kenalepe outside. Head suggests that women survive through one another, even where the state has failed them.

A postcolonial reading. In BEGC-114 terms, the story shows that national independence did not end domination; it only changed its form. The critics Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford called this the 'double colonisation' of women, oppressed first by empire and then by patriarchy. Dikeledi's Botswana has won its independence, yet she has not.

Style and limits. Head writes in plain, almost biblical sentences, with stretches of moral reflection between scenes. Some readers find her division of men into two types too neat, since it leaves Garesego little room to change. The neatness is deliberate: the story works like a parable about a whole society.

Conclusion. 'The Collector of Treasures' is a tender story with a violent centre. It honours the endurance of village women, exposes the damage left by custom and colonialism, and refuses easy judgement. In an exam answer, link Dikeledi's choice to the social history the narrator gives, and the story's force becomes clear.