An individual’s interaction with others and the world around them can enrich or limit their experience and knowledge.
Discuss this view with detailed reference to your prescribed text and one other related text of your own choosing.
Tim Winton once said “Our Culture is obsessed about belonging, but people haven’t grasped the notion that you have to earn belonging, to earn some kind of comfort and ease of familiarity with yourself’’. Peter Skrzynecki’s poems Feliks Skrzynecki and Migrant Hostel reflects this idea through many different ways and in many different contexts such as family, school, home, culture and land.
To belong is to feel as though you are a part of something, where you connect with other people, and where you feel a sense of security. Belonging can be individually, within a group, community, society, or the larger world. This sense of belonging can be earned through our family, friends, likes and dislikes, backgrounds and opinions. Two texts that are related to Peter Skrzyneckis poems is the film ‘Freedom Writers’ and the article on Ali Ammar.
Feliks Skrzynecki explores the relationship between the poet and his father, and their contrasting experiences of belonging to a new land, which can also be linked to Ali Ammar and his father. The first line of the poem is “My gentle father”. Already we are shown the sense of belonging through the words “My” and “father”. This relates to a common emotion that the audience can feel through the belongingness in a family or relationship. In the last stanza we hear the quote “I forgot my first Polish word”, which shows the loss of belonging to his original country and its culture. This quote can also be linked to the Feature article on Ali Ammar, a Lebanese Muslim, who didn’t respect the sense of belonging that his new country has given him. In the case of the Cronulla riots, where Ali Ammar burnt the Australian flag and sentenced to 9 months juvy, people from the same country as him and