Belonging

Belonging is not always a choice; it is relevant to our individual experiences and context. Most yearn to belong however our cultural circumstances can often remain barriers in the desire to belong. This concept is epitomized in ‘School’ a short story by Peter Cowan, and Ian Kim’s cartoon, ‘Alienation’. ‘School’ considers the nature of our connection to the land through depicting a boy’s experience in contrasting rural and urban Australian environments. Alternatively, Ian Kim’s cartoon is a reflection on society’s views post September 11.   Essentially the cartoon challenges mainstream assumptions and offers an alternate perspective on the attacks; where a Muslim girl; hence the title ‘Alienation’, is experiencing the emotions of what it feels to not belong. The composers structural, visual and language techniques construct each characters and the barriers and desire to belong.
In Cowan’s short story, the sense of belonging can be gained through connections made with place, where Cowan reveals the contrasting environments of rural and urban. A clear comfort and happy disposition is evident in the structural composition of the story.   The first paragraph conveys the emotions of the boy’s urban environment and the second paragraph is of the boy’s rural environment and is comparably larger than the first paragraph. The variation in tone also suggests a noticeable comfort and discomfort with each of the environments. Within the orientation, there is an obvious tone of anxiety and agitation; ‘He raised his eyes slowly and saw the hard light and the bare ground and the dying grass’ Cowan’s persistent use of pessimistic use of metaphors ‘hard light’ and paradoxical lifeless forms of ‘dying grass.’ creates this anxious tone. This is distinctive from the jovial and content tone in the complication; ‘he listened to the talk and he knew the people and the wheat and town...’ From the texts structural features and tone it is conspicuous of the boy’s emotions for each...