Belonging

Belonging is the essence of acceptance, an abstract approval that is the latter of knowledge and understanding. Our ability to be understood and to feel annexed to others is a priority inescapable due to the concrete principals of human nature. The objective is to feel place in oneself or one’s external environment. Belonging is the feeling of position and place but our ability to belong is restricted to a time frame of cradle and grave. One can argue that at an embryonic stage the child is chambered in the mothers’ love, warmth and acceptance, however, there is not yet a consciousness in the being to feel such emotion, therefore this state of belonging can only be exhibited as a young child. It goes the same for the dead; they no longer feel the aura of belonging and cannot extend this state. Our sense of conformity and acceptance aids in the shaping of our psyche and inner values and this is accentuated in Raimond Gaita’s Romulus my father and “The little black boy” by William Blake. Of course, the exemplification erected from both memoir and poem adopts the concept of a belonging but it also investigates a change incited from belonging or not belonging.

Our sole priority in this world is to be approved by society and feel a sense of place and conformity to those in our external environment, hence aiding us to an understanding of oneself. The composer of Romulus my father, Raimond Gaita, explores his father’s endeavor into hardship, pain, misery, loneliness and betrayal, however, he does this with great respect, understanding and to ascend his father as an icon of the definition of a truly good man. This understanding is recognized through Raimond’s association with his father and the values Romulus holds to shape and construct his son’s understandings of the world, this is where nurture and belonging intertwine. Romulus is presented as an outlier in the onset of the memoir, we perceive him as an independent child having to protect his “grandfather” of...