Belonging Essay Example for Free

Belonging Essay According to Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs, love and belonging is what drives human existence. We search for a sense of belonging every day of our lives, not realising that it is our perceptions and attitudes towards belonging that determine the fulfilment we experience. We can choose how we belong and the level of fulfilment we experience by changing our perceptions and attitude. This concept is expressed through the poetry of Peter Skrzynecki’s â€Å"Immigrant Chronicle†, Marc Foster’s film â€Å"Finding Neverland† and Nam Le’s short story â€Å"Love and Honour and Pride and Pity and Compassion and Sacrifice. Skrzynecki communicates the way that his perceptions and attitudes towards belonging affected his ability to feel fulfilled and content from a cultural perspective through his poetic anthology â€Å"Immigrant Chronicle†. In â€Å"Feliks Skrzynecki† the poet describes the admiration he has for his father and the way that he can remain connected to Poland in his mind whilst living in new country. Skrzynecki uses the word â€Å"gentle† to define his father, demonstrating the level of respect he has for him. He references the saying ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ in the line â€Å"Kept pace only with the Joneses/ Of his own minds making† to communicate that his father is able to feel content and fulfilled by choosing to stay connected with Poland, but only in his mind can he do so because they now live so far away. Skrzynecki doesn’t understand how his father can choose to belong, demonstrating his confusion by saying that his father is â€Å"happy as I have never been. † We begin to understand that Skrzynecki’s attitude towards belonging to his Polish heritage reflects his feelings of disconnection in the poem â€Å"Ancestors†. The line â€Å"where sand and grasses never stir† is a metaphor used to represent the stagnation of Skrzynecki’s connection with his Polish heritage. He is plagued with guilt and frustration as a result of his disconnection and this is demonstrated through the accusatory nature of the figures in his dream. The use of alliteration communicates Skrzynecki’s threat: â€Å"Standing shoulder to shoulder†. Skrzynecki does not realise that it is his own perceptions and attitudes that prevent him from belonging to his Polish ancestors, and this is reflected in his use of rhetorical questions throughout the poem: â€Å"how long is their wait to be? † Skrzynecki’s attitudes towards belonging begin to change in the poem â€Å"10 Mary Street† and a greater sense of fulfilment is communicated. Skrzynecki references his own poem â€Å"Feliks Skrzynecki† in the line â€Å"tended roses and camellias/ like adopted children. † This demonstrates that Skrzynecki’s perception of his father’s sense of belonging to his garden had changed. In â€Å"Feliks Skrzynecki† Skrzynecki felt excluded because his father â€Å"loved his garden like an only child†. In â€Å"10 Mary Street† he realises that the sense of belonging he shares with his father is greater than the connection his father has with the garden and that to him it is just like an â€Å"adopted† child. This change in attitude leads to the last poem of the anthology â€Å"Post Card† in which Skrzynecki comes to the realisation that he has the ability to choose where and how he belongs. He writes of a post card that has been sent to him by a friend visiting Warsaw, the town in Poland where he and his parents once lived. Skrzynecki gives a description of the post card that is plainly devoid of emotion until the last line: â€Å"The sky’s the brightest shade. † This line is positively connoted and reflects Skrzynecki’s realisation that he has the ability to connect with Warsaw. Skrzynecki directly addresses the town by stating â€Å"I never knew you. † This personifies the town and further demonstrates the poets growing connection. Skrzynecki uses the qualifier â€Å"for the moment† to undercut the line â€Å"I never knew you† which is repeated in the fourth stanza. This demonstrates that Skrzynecki recognises that he doesn’t feel a sense of belonging to his Polish heritage, but that he is willing to explore it. He once again addresses the town with a rhetorical question in the fourth stanza: â€Å"What’s my choice to be? † This directly communicates that Skrzynecki understands that he has a choice about connecting to his Polish heritage and belonging, whilst also conveying his sense of indecision. Throughout the entire anthology Skrzynecki communicates his feelings of disconnection from both Australian and Polish cultures. Post Card† is Skrzynecki’s resolution as he is content with acknowledging that he doesn’t have to belong, and at the same time recognising that he doesn’t have to feel excluded from his Polish culture either. He uses the last lines of the poem to communicate that he does feel some sense of belonging to Warsaw, through personifying the town as speaking to him: â€Å"On a rivers bank/ A lone tree whispers:/ â€Å"We will meet before you die. † This externalises Skrzynecki’s new perceptions and attitude towards belonging and his acknowledgement that he will visit Poland one day and then make the choice as to whether or not he belongs to it. Marc Foster’s â€Å"Finding Neverland† alludes to the perception that a place where we belong can be created, through imagination as well as relationships. The protagonist James Barrie James Barrie is the protagonist in â€Å"Finding Neverland† and uses his imagination to create a place where he can hide from the unhappy reality of his failing plays and marriage, a place where he belongs. Foster demonstrates Barrie’s sense of not belonging at the beginning of the movie, when we see the playwright peeping through the stage curtains at the audience in the theatre. This shows us that Barrie is anxious, an emotion that is juxtaposed with those of the laughing, relaxed theatregoers. His anxiety and inner turmoil is further demonstrated when a point of view camera shot shows us that Barrie is imagining a rain storm with a colour pallet of dark blues and blacks within the theatre. The repeated image of a door is used to demonstrate the disconnection between Barrie and his wife. For example, when Barrie asks Mary if she would like to join him on a walk to the park she declines via a shout through a closed door. During another scene Mary and Barrie are left bickering, and are again disconnected by doors when the couple retire to their separate bedrooms. The doorway into which Mary retreats is dark and presents a sense of gloom for the woman, but Barrie’s doorway reveals brightly coloured parkland. This is where we are introduced to the concept of the imaginary Neverland and the purpose it has in allowing Barrie to choose to exist in a world where he belongs. When Barrie meets the Davies family his perceptions and attitudes towards belonging begin to change. The strong relationship he is forming with the four young boys and their mother is represented through the shared experience of imaginary worlds. The scenes swap back and forth between the Davies’ back yard and an old western tavern where the boys play a game of ‘Cowboys and Indians’. Likewise, a setting of a quiet, countryside pine forest becomes an Amazonian jungle in which the Davies’ family are pirates awaiting to be appointed to the crew of Captain Barrie. The editing is fast paced to show that the sense of belonging that Barrie and the Davies are developing through their relationships with one another is becoming stronger. Barrie comes to the realisation that he can belong outside of his imaginary world. Foster uses close up shots that are shared between him and the Davies boys, which communicate the strong bonds of love and friendship that they have with each other whilst also demonstrating Barrie’s new perceptions of belonging. Barrie has a choice as to whether he belongs in reality or in Neverland. Nam Le’s â€Å"Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice† also demonstrates that perceptions and attitudes determine an individual’s ability to belong, through the relationship between a young writer appropriately named Nam and his father. In the title of his short story, Le references William Faulkner and the verities that define human interaction. The words become Nam’s influence in adapting his perceptions and attitudes towards belonging throughout the story. Nam struggles over whether he should use his father’s account of surviving the My Lai massacre as a fourteen year old boy and later Vietnamese prison camps after the fall of Saigon for a writing assignment. A strong sense of disconnection is evident between Nam and his father, demonstrated through the use of short, blunt sentences and pronouns that separate the two characters identities from each other: â€Å"He loved speaking in Vietnamese proverbs. I had long since learned to ignore it. † Nam is influenced by his mentors who tell him that â€Å"ethnic literature is hot†, but he questions whether Faulkner’s verities would apply to any ethnic literature that he could write when he doesn’t feel a sense of belonging to his Vietnamese heritage. Nam feels pressured to get his story done, and the only thing breaking him free of his writer’s block is his father’s past: â€Å"F**k it, I thought. I had two and a half days left. I would write the ethnic story of my Vietnamese father. † Personal pronouns are used in this example to communicate that Nam is writing the story for his own gain, and not his father’s because there is no sense of belonging in their relationship. The use of profanity suggests that there is internal conflict within Nam and guilt over not feeling a true sense of belonging with his father and Vietnamese history. Nam’s attitude towards feeling a sense of belonging to his father’s story changes when a friend tells him that the reason he respects his writing is because he doesn’t â€Å"exploit the Vietnamese thing. † He feels a sense of shame for taking his father’s history so lightly: â€Å"We were locked in all the intricate ways of guilt. † This is where Nam comes to realise that even though his heritage is rich with the verities that Faulkner talked about, he cannot write truthfully without feeling a sense of belonging to his Vietnamese culture or his father. Nam chooses to reach out to his father in attempt to understand and develop a sense of belonging to what he had written about. He uses his new perspective about his father and his father’s past to rewrite the story, and the pronouns â€Å"me† and â€Å"he† are used in the same sentences now, to show the son’s connection to his father: â€Å"He would see how powerful was his experience, how valuable his suffering – how I had made it speak for more than itself. He would be pleased with me. † Nam has chosen to change his attitude towards the relationship he has with his father and as a result can belong through his new understanding. All three texts communicate how changes in perspectives and attitudes towards belonging determine the level of fulfilment we can experience. Through these texts we can perceive that belonging is a choice and that our perceptions and attitudes towards belonging determine how fulfilling our lives are. If we can control our perceptions and attitudes towards belonging, we can effectively control how we belong, and as a result develop a higher understanding and awareness of our own identities.