Belonging Essay

Belonging Essay

Essay
Peter Skrzynecki's 1975 anthology Immigrant Chronicle demonstrates that a sense of belonging is never permanent because one's feelings, knowledge and experiences change throughout one's lifetime. A sense of belonging can only be discovered through a sense of self. Skrzynecki's poem 'Feliks Skrzynecki' and 'Ancestors' both discuss this notion and also how belonging which is permanent can also be isolating. Skrzynecki uses the technique metaphor, cumulative listing, second person and Imagery. Michael Bay's 2005 film The Island demonstrates the notion that belonging is never permanent through the techniques costuming and lighting. These techniques help the audience digest concepts of belonging and why as we grow to have changing experiences and ideals the places we belong also change. In this way belonging is never permanent or stagment. Likewise Heinrich Knirr's 1937 acrylic on canvas 'Portrait of Adolf Hitler' examines these same themes through the use of colour and lighting.

                            Skrzynecki's poem Feliks Skrzynecki utilises the technique metaphor to demonstrate the idea that belonging cannot be permanent because one's internal landscape changes due to certain exposure of different ideas changing one's need for attachment. The exposure of the Australian lifestyle suggests that Peter Skrzynecki is disconnected from assimilating as the sense of belonging is forced upon him by his father. This serves to prove the notion that permanent belonging can cause awareness of detachment.

                                                              'Further and further south
                                                              Of Hadrian's wall.'

Hadrian's wall which is historically a wall of separation serves to express the concept that an association is never stable because it is structures through one's internal sense of self which is developed through experience. The metaphor of Hadrian's wall separates Skrzynecki's father's...