Belonging;_Romulus_My_Father_&_Boy_Running_(Russell_Drysdale)

2) How do composers show us the value of belonging, or indeed not belonging, in a variety of situations' In your response, refer to your prescribed text and two other texts of your choosing. Belonging is an integral concept that shapes an individuals perception and lifestyle. Through the memoir, ‘Romulus, My Father’ by Raimond Gaita, the poem, ‘Outcast’ by Claude McKay and the visual image, ‘Boy Running’ by Russel Drysdale, a range of visual and language techniques are used to explore a variety of situations which show us the value of belonging and not belonging. In ‘Romulus, My Father’, Romulus and his family immigrates from Yugoslavia to Australia. As soon as Romulus arrives and settles into the immigration camp at Baringhup, he asks the immigration officer if ‘there are any other Romanians’. As Romulus always ‘considered himself a Romanian’, he tried to find people who shared the same cultural background as he did. When he was told that there were two Romanian brothers named Hora and Pantelimon, he ‘quickly sought them out and they became friends’. By doing this, Romulus establishes belonging through friendships and shared experience as they share the same cultural background and would understand each others language, practices and lifestyle. They would also understand what each other are going through as they are both European immigrants and would need to adapt to the Australian culture and landscape from their previous life in Yugoslavia. Thus, this sense of belonging through relationships and shared experience affects Romulus because it provides him a sense of security and understanding for support during the transition of immigration from Yugoslavia to Australia. Also, when Romulus first sees the ‘dead red gums’ and scraggly Australian foliage, he finds it ‘desolate’ and ‘longs for the generous and soft European foliage’. As his perception is shaped by the European landscape he has grown up to know, it makes it difficult to accept the new Australian landscape as he ruthlessly compares the two. Raimond, who is Romulus’s son, takes on this perception as he belongs to his father through kinship and family. He looks up to his father and believes that Romulus’ perception is right due to their strong familial relationship between father and son. He had ‘absorbed [his] father’s attitude to the countryside…because he talked so often of the beautiful trees of Europe’. This powerful familial relationship shows that belonging highly affects Raimond’s perception and attitude towards certain ideas and situations like the landscape since he trusts his father completely and believes that his perception is undoubtedly correct. From this, we can evaluate that belonging is important because it shapes an individuals perception and causes them to think and act like the person whom they belong to. In ‘Outcast’, the character illustrated in the poem lives in a society where there is white supremacy. He is caught in the ‘great western world’ but he is a native American. This separation of culture within society represents how he already doesn’t belong to society since he was ‘far from [his] native clime’. The poem also identifies how inequality of culture influences a lack of belonging through ‘to [the western worlds] alien gods I bend my knee’. This imagery of physically bending his knee to bow down to the ‘great western world’ highlights the cultural inequality between white westerners and a black native American. The effect that this has on the character is that he ‘must walk the way of life, a ghost’ and ‘sing forgotten jungles songs’. Through symbolism of ‘a ghost’, McKay portrays how not belonging to society as a result of cultural inequality influences a loss of identity. Like a ghost is transparent and ‘drifts’, with no particular purpose, this symbolic reference is effective in showing how a man who has lost his identity due to his context and cultural inequality does not know who hie is or who he belongs to, drifting without being seen and ‘dead’ to the world. In addition to this, ‘jungle’ in ‘sing forgotten jungles songs’, reinforces his native background but McKay’s’ word choice of ‘forgotten’ identifies that he does not remember his native identity due to western influence. Thus, the effect that not belonging has on an individual in a society which does not share the same culture and where an individual’s native culture is influenced by one that is more supreme, is that the individual loses their identity and forgets who they really are. Lastly, in ‘Boy Running’, an indigenous boy is pictured running in the middle of a Westernised street. He is frozen in time, captured in a stance where he is still running and wearing a white t-shirt over his body. As his context is of white settlement, with buildings, memorials and roads, he seems displaced because of his culture as an indigenous boy. His culture separates him from his location and creates a lack of belonging. Also, the t-shirt, which is an effective representation of western influence on the indigenous boy, shows the juxtaposing cultures and disillusion of which culture he (the boy) belongs to. Consequently, not belonging stems from context and therefore influences a loss of identity as well because he is ‘caught’ in between two cultures, unsure of which one he is a part of. This is also shown by the way he is trapped in stop-motion in the middle of the road as if indecisive of which side he needs to go. As a result of this, the image shows that not belonging to your culture through context initiation a loss of identity and disillusion of self-concept. In conclusion, through these three different texts portraying a variety of situatino0s such as immigration, perception and cultural context, it is clear that belonging and not belonging shapes an individual’s attitudes and identity.