2024 NABTEB LITERATURE: 2024 NABTEB LITERATURE ANSWERS (7327)

Originally Adah Ofili, Adah obi is her name in marriage . She is the daughter of Ma and Pa who are artisans - Ma, a seamstress and Pa, a railway moulder. She is an Ibuza woman, married to an Ibuza man, named Francis. She is a brilliant girl whose brother ,Boy, is considered more important than she is. Her brother is sent to school while she is being encouraged to take to a trade , probably sewing.

She is a prolific woman; in a few years she has four children, and the fifth was on the way as she parted ways with Francis. Adah's desires to get into the secondary school is so enormous that she steals her cousin's , Cousin Vincent's two shillings in order to purchase the entrance form. She pilfers this money and claims that she has lost it. With the pilfered sum, Adah buys the entrance examination form, passes the entrance and obtains a scholarship with which she attends a secondary school which she would not have attended, her father having died and he r mother having remarried.

She is a self willed fellow who does not "believe in that stuff of loving your enemy" . She is unhappy with Cousin Vincent to the extend that when she heard that he has failed his Cambridge school certificate examinations, " Adah bust out laughing. Good had heard her prayers". Her stubbornness is also manifested in her tangle with the headmaster who canes her for laughing when in fact her laugher or smile has nothing to do with the man Nicknamed "the ibo tigress," she bites Latifu 'copied from e x p o c o d e . n e t free' ,the boys who backs her for the headmaster's strokes of the cane.
Because of the nature of her family, for practically having no hole, early marriage is acceptable of her . Although she is originally pestered by elderly suitors whom she rejects, Francis is whom she accepts his hand in marriage " was not an old baldy" . She said to have been happy that Francis " Was too poor to pay five hundred pounds bride price Ma and the other members of her family were asking for"

She is a censorious person and a bit on the termagant side of life. We have made reference to her squabble with Trudy under whose care Vicky takes ill; her wrangles with her husband portray her as a turbulent fellow. Her painting of the character of her husband shows that during is ill-at-ease with everything about Francis.

Adah's comportment when she is in hospital shows that she has no confidence in herself . She is virtually jealous of fellow hospital inmate who have something she has not. As she sees the new shawls used to cover the other babies, she wonders why her baby shawl . She also desires a new dress and for not having one, she forgets to say "good-bye, nicely" to her fellow inmates with whom she had exchanged jokes and pleasantries

Adah is a writer . In spite of her busy schedule both at he and in the library ,she writes up the manuscript of the Bride price which Bill calls her brainchild . It is this brainchild that Francis burns.
Being a worker and the breadwinner 'copied from e x p o c o d e . n e t free' of the Obi family . Adah is richer than Francis who abhors work. Notice that when Adah is under the apron string of Francis ,the family lived in a one room apartment; after leaving him, she and her children lives in two rooms.

In the end ,all the struggle between Francis and Adah in that name of marriage is a nullity . Even the marriage could not start as it was initially planned because there was no ring. This apart from the constant squabbles between husband and wife,there is no document to show that they are married: " Francis said they have never married ...Francis burnt Adah's Passport and the children's birth certificate. To him, Adah and the kids ceased to exist.

Symbolism is a literary device that uses symbols, be they words, people, marks, locations, or abstract ideas to represent something beyond the literal meaning. Invisible man, as a literary text, thrives on the use of symbols. Some other important symbols in the novel are the personal items that the Narrator burnt while he is inside the manhole which include the slip which contains the new name that he had been given by the Brotherhood. The burning of the items represents the Narrator's movement from innocence into experience as he tries to redefine himself. By the end of the story, when he takes the decision to emerge out of the manhole, he has become more mature, someone that would be able to resist any form of manipulation.

Initially, when he gets stuck inside the manhole ,his inability to get a ladder to climb out, to the streets above, is indicative of the restricted access that many black Americans have to the many social , economic and political privileges that are available for the white members of the American society.
This idea of restriction is also highlighted through the two blobs of the Narrator that Brother Jack cuts off in the dreamlike trance. These two blobs are his two testicles and they represent the emasculation of blacks in the American society.

The manhole itself represents several years of marginalization and the restriction of black people to the fringes of American society, while the college that the Narrator attends and 'copied from e x p o c o d e . n e t free' which has Dr Bledsoe as it's principal, is a symbol of the black led American educational institutions which are used to impart the idea of white superiority of the blacks.

Mary's piggy bank, which the Narrator mistakenly destroyed and which is cast in the dorm of a black red lipped and wide mother Negro with a large grin is a symbol of the deprecatory representations of black people in American art . The fact that the Narrator is unable to dispose of the broken pieces of the piggy bank is a reference to the difficulty that blacks in America encounter while trying to shed the label of inferiority and backwardness in which they have been moulded by several centuries of racism
Some other symbols of black exploitation and marginalization include the use of electric shock on the narrator at the hospital of Liberty paints ,the forced dance at the Battle Royal programme by the Narrator and some other black school boys as well as the asylum- cum-club ,known as Golden Day, where the Narrator meets the Veteran, when he is looking for a drink for Mr Norton.