Belonging Speech Essay

888 Words4 Pages
Join with me as I attempt to answer a question that has plagued HSC students since 2009. How are perceptions of belonging and alienation shaped within personal, cultural, historical and social contexts? I say belonging comes from a self-awareness of your personal identity. In Nadia Wheatley and Matt Ottley’s 1999 picture book ‘Luke’s way of looking’ and Emily Dickinson’s poems, number 83 ‘I gave myself to him’ and number 82 ‘I had been hungry all the years’ from the ‘Selected poems of Emily Dickinson’, shows how identification impacts their ability to make connections as well as the effect of barriers on the individuals identity is explored. Ones social identity is instrumental in constructing individual identity. It influences our sense of identity and by extension how we interact with nature, others and ourselves. Dickinson expresses this, with influence from the romanticist movement, believing the self and nature were one and that harmony and unity with the universe, primarily through self-awareness was achievable. In ‘I had been hungry all the years’ the persona has the entire banquet to herself, yet the “crumb” is shared with nature and birds, communicating the degree to which nature makes up her identity as well as the freedom it provides for her. Dickinson further explores this through the rejection of social norms from her time forcing her to cling to the only sense of belonging she had left, her self. The references to nature are used to represent how she sees herself, like the simile of the “berry of a mountain bush, transplanted to the road” affirming she felt she didn't belong to her context and using the displacement of environments to show this. Techniques such as the symbolism of the window as a barrier of belonging shows the acceptance of her seclusion with the notion that the outside, natural world is where the persona of the poem truly belongs.
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