Belonging speech
YEAR 12 ENGLISH ADVANCED
“BELONGING”
Belonging, what is it? I believe belonging is when you can say that you are a part of something, when you have a group or a club or even a lifestyle that other people share. In short, I believe that a sense of belonging can be found in the things or people that have shared the same experiences, both good and bad, because we can identify ourselves in those people.
Today we will be exploring this idea of belonging in two texts; one is the of poems “Feliks Skrzynecki” and “St Patrick’s College”, by Polish-born Australian poet, Peter Skrzynecki, and the other text is the 2012 movie “Wreck it Ralph”, directed by Rich Moore.
The poems “St Patricks College” and “Feliks Skrzynecki” both deal with the notion of self-isolation and an inability to relate to the people that surround a persona. In both poems, we can assume that the persona is Peter Skrzynecki himself. In “Feliks Skrzynecki” he talks about how he could never relate to his father and his father’s friends when they would reminisce of their lives in Poland. He feels a sense of distance between himself and his parents’ culture that, as he says in the poem, he “inherited unknowingly”. In the poem “In the folk museum”, dissociation from a culture is also portrayed, but this time it is about the persona’s lack of connection to the Australian culture. The persona describes the things he sees in the museum as if they are foreign and unknown to him, so much so that he has to read the names of the objects to know what they are.
A reason why the poet doesn’t feel he can relate may be because he doesn’t share the same experiences and doesn’t have the same traditions and customs that other people, both his Eastern European parents had and his Australian culture, would have shared. He can’t relate, or reminisce, or appreciate either of his two cultures, because he has never known enough about them to have an emotional attachment, and it is this lack of attachment that prevents
“BELONGING”
Belonging, what is it? I believe belonging is when you can say that you are a part of something, when you have a group or a club or even a lifestyle that other people share. In short, I believe that a sense of belonging can be found in the things or people that have shared the same experiences, both good and bad, because we can identify ourselves in those people.
Today we will be exploring this idea of belonging in two texts; one is the of poems “Feliks Skrzynecki” and “St Patrick’s College”, by Polish-born Australian poet, Peter Skrzynecki, and the other text is the 2012 movie “Wreck it Ralph”, directed by Rich Moore.
The poems “St Patricks College” and “Feliks Skrzynecki” both deal with the notion of self-isolation and an inability to relate to the people that surround a persona. In both poems, we can assume that the persona is Peter Skrzynecki himself. In “Feliks Skrzynecki” he talks about how he could never relate to his father and his father’s friends when they would reminisce of their lives in Poland. He feels a sense of distance between himself and his parents’ culture that, as he says in the poem, he “inherited unknowingly”. In the poem “In the folk museum”, dissociation from a culture is also portrayed, but this time it is about the persona’s lack of connection to the Australian culture. The persona describes the things he sees in the museum as if they are foreign and unknown to him, so much so that he has to read the names of the objects to know what they are.
A reason why the poet doesn’t feel he can relate may be because he doesn’t share the same experiences and doesn’t have the same traditions and customs that other people, both his Eastern European parents had and his Australian culture, would have shared. He can’t relate, or reminisce, or appreciate either of his two cultures, because he has never known enough about them to have an emotional attachment, and it is this lack of attachment that prevents