Belonging

It is essential for one to experience not belonging in order to find their belonging The struggle to belong and find one’s place is significant in the lives of many people and often consider as an inherent human condition, and to those people, this often means to find or to make a place where they feel accepted by groups or certain individuals, a place where they feel they meant to be and be able share a collective agreement, whether this is physically or ideologically and hence that is why groups, societies and nations are formed. The journey of one to seek their belonging can be trigger by a series of personal experience, an event or a thought, and this journey could mean for someone to seek refuge from their daily routine as well as for some to fight physically against the ruling class to create what they perceived as an ideological society that they wish to live in. The reason for these people struggling to find their belonging is often because it can bring them a sense of security and comfort and in a sense freedom; freedom from discomfort and oppression, freedom from insecurity and uncertainty, and freedom from rejection. These themes can be found in text such as The Simple Gift by Steven Herrick, V for Vendetta directed by James McTeigue and Beds are burning by Midnight Oil. There is one common background and starting to all of the three texts mentioned above, that is the main character experiencing the sense of discomfort, oppression and ultimately not belonging and they wish to change the current situation that they’re facing. In the simple gift the main character Billy, a 16 year old boy who came from a dysfunctional single parent family, that is sick of the banality of his school and ‘family’ life and decides to leave for a better place which he doesn’t know where that would be. In V for vendetta, the protagonist V, a victim of a conspiracy and a revolutionary that aims to overthrow the totalitarian regime to restore what he believe is freedom and lead the frighten public away from their uncertainty of moving away from their dictator and into the unknown [which ironically not belonging in a sense] and lastly Beds are burning by Midnight oil, the song was written and first published in 1987 demanding lands to be return to the Pintupi people in Western Australia, the sense of not belonging is carry throughout the song and the band hopes the raise the public awareness and ‘fight for’ the rights of the Pintupi people, similarly in V for Vendetta where V hopes that his action will be able to left the public’s fear of losing the existing regime and fight for ‘their own sake’. In The simple gift, Herrick use a variety of poetic techniques to demonstrate the idea of not belonging in the first few chapters of the book; ‘I failed every year eleven subject....my favourite classroom’[p 6] this passage shows the inner thought of Billy, the unwillingness to participate and the sense of separation from his school. ‘gave me one hard backhander across the face, so hard I fell down… and slammed the door on my sporting childhood.’ (p. 15-16) Billy is recalling an event that happen to him as child and explains why he doesn’t find comfort in his family, “slammed the door “ is a metaphor used by Herrick in demonstrating the isolation and alienation that Billy is feeling. These two example demonstrates how Herrick establish the sense of not belonging in this text, he then later on writes ‘No. I can’t go back’ in [p.6] to signify the urge of Billy to escape from his family and school.......