Belonging-How Do Copmposers Construst Their Changing Perception of Belonging in Texts

Essay- “how do composers construct perspectives of belonging in texts?”

Composers use various language techniques and modes to construct their perceptions of belonging in texts, these include poetic devices such as; similes, metaphors, emphasis, alliteration, structure, layout..ect, these are used to create depth and meaning within a text. These perspectives vary from person to person as they each have their own sense of belonging. These different perspectives will again vary in the texts- poems (Post card, Felix Srkzynecki, Migrant hostel, Ancestors, In the folk museum) written by Peter Srkzynecki, The scar, written by Alexandra(short story)
Peter Srkzynecki uses his poems as an artistic expression, he begins with personal experiences and background history, in order to understand or relate to Srkzynecki poems viewers must gain insight on peter Srkzynecki history and life experiences. In his poems he first looks at the life of his father, Felix Srkzynecki. Peter Srkzynecki uses his father as an anchor, whilst tussling with his own sense of belonging within the world.
Feliks Skrzynecki is constructed by the poet (his son) as a “gentle father”, dedicated and hard working. The dedication to his garden is expressed with a simile-“like an only child”… as he walks its perimeters and “sweeps its paths, ten times around the world”, as though he is revealing his journey across the world and identifying and confirming his place and belonging in a new country,
The poem Migrant Hostel- is also a place which helped to sculpt Srkzynecki sense of belonging, he described his experiences as formal and the walls of the camp much like that of a prison, a barrier to the outside world. The world he would soon call his new home country, full of open spaces, strange but beckoning. The poet continually uses similes of birds to identify a sense of impermanence within the camp-“We lived like birds of passage”,”…like a homing pigeon circling to get its bearings”. Srkzynecki also uses literal and figurative language to construct a sense of alienation, the most prominent sense of this is only displayed in the last two lines of the poem-“...lives that had only begun, or were dying”, this being binary opposition, referencing both life and death.
Post card is a poem where the poet fails to recognise any sense of belonging to the place that meant so much to his parents, though it is still a figment of his imagination. The poet uses high modality and rich meaningful words as he tries to understand his own mixed feelings of belonging to an earlier but unexperienced place. These terms employ a long history of meaning. “Haunts me” is in negative context to describe the relationship between the poet and the postcard. In the third stanza there is a recognised change in the poets attitude towards the city Warsaw, he addresses it as a friend”…Warsaw, Old town, I never knew you, except in the third person”- this implies the poet has a deeper connection to the city, a place where he feels he has a sense of belonging, even though it was from the stories of his parents.. Not only do the people living in Warsaw have a strong connection to it, so do that of-“a dying generation, half a world away”

j.k