Belonging__Romulus_My_Father_and_Related_Texts

In Romulus, My Father, focus is placed on several different foundations for which our identity, and in turn our sense of belonging, is formed. The memoirs emphasis on setting and place acts as a metaphor to reflect Gaita’s orientation of self, which contextualises and explores the challenges of diaspora, and provides a framework for the text’s central tenet, that from suffering, wisdom is gained. Consequently, the autobiographical nature of Gaita’s memoir provides the subjective parameters by which Romulus’ formative conditions of deprivation and betrayal shape his and his son’s sense of Self. The autobiography offers an unmediated and stabilising exploration of the Self. Throughout Gaita’s piece of life writing, it becomes clear to the audience that the purpose of Romulus, My Father is to reflect on life’s critical lessons. This is highlighted by the composition of the text, which places more emphasis on critical moments of philosophical enlightenment than it does on details and events. Where does Raimond learn these valuable lessons from' Through his father’s relationships, ideals and actions. Gaita expresses the importance of his father with the quote “I know what a good workman is, I know what an honest man is. I know because I remember these things in the person of my father,” which utilizes repetition to emphasise and glorify his father’s life. Juxtaposition is also used to highlight Romulus’ admirable qualities by contrasting them with the morals of Mitru and Christine, which are considered “weak.” Barack Obama’s Dreams of My Father captures the strengths, weaknesses and lessons that Obama learned from several men who fathered him. His birth father, whose story he finally discovers, his maternal grandfather, whose innocence could have easily led to cowardive as heroism, his Idonesian stepfather, who taught him the importance of strength, and the old black poet, who gave him a sense of black American history. Each of these encounters inform Obama with a sense of identity, which gives him the courage to strive for belonging. Although the memoir aims to strip away the mythology of Romulus, the main focus of the text is Raimond Gaita’s discovery of Self, which becomes clear to the reader through the cyclical structure of Romulus’ life. This suggests that although Gaita’s father stays the same, the true change occurs in Raimond. The theory that wisdom and the formation of one’s identity are a result of suffering, is one explored throughout Romulus, My Father. During Gaita’s journey through life, much of the anguish that he experienced came from when the familiar transformed into the unfamiliar. For example, both his father’s madness and his mother’s mental illness and eventual suicide made Raimond resilient, and successful in his migration to Australia. Raimond also learns considerably from the wisdom that his father has gained through suffering. We never forget how Romulus came from a fractured and divided Europe, where he experienced a lack of food and education. He was, however, nourished by these hardships, and through them his spirit became strong, hard like the steel he tempered. He became a man of character. The film Big Fish, by “unknown director”, is also an example of a son’s discovery of identity through the understanding of his father. Because Will’s dad lives in a heightened sense of reality, Will finds it incredibly difficult to communicate with him. However, as evident in the extract “A man sees things differently at different times in his life,” which is given a sense of gravity by the innocence and youth of the speaker, Jenny, Will is able to finally reconcile these differences and gain wisdom from his late father. The quote “My father must have been heartbroken by his unfaithful wife” further illustrates through emotive language the intense suffering that Romulus was subject to. The text culminates with the quote “some kinds of wisdom, however, are given only to those have suffered deep and long.” Diaspora gives resonance to how one belongs to place. Although diaspora posits a culturally divided self, the concept also suggest new understanding of self, sameness and solidarity as identity reorientates ideas of Self away from national and genealogical imperatives. The tension exist because of the context that the memoir takes place in. Although Romulus was sentenced to two years of labour for his boat trip, he “had long come to accept what fate dealt him… so he saw his two years as a short interim.” This, combined with how they never “called my father by his name. They called him Jack” provides the context of a pre-multicultural Australia, where an immigrant must realign their sense of Self to belong. The proof for this division of Self is seen in the way that Romulus and Christine view the Australian landscape. “Although it is one of rare beauty, to a European eye it seems desolate.” Romulus is able to account for this change because of the deprivation, hunger and lack of education he experience in Eastern Europe. He was nourished by hard work, which made his spirit strong, hard like the steel he tempers. Christine, on the other hand, who viewed the “red gum… as a symbol of her desolation”, could not overcome this division; the amalgamation of diaspora, isolation, mental illness and her lack of resilience caused her to drown in the rural outback of Victoria. The Arrival, a graphic novel by Shaun Tan, weaves a story of times long past, of a migrant lost in a bewildering city of foreignness; peculiar animals, curious customs and indecipherable languages. It is through the absence of any written description that the audience is firmly placed in the shoes of a refugee view point, which challenges our notions of belonging, by eliciting empathy for the character as he is removed from his comfort zone – and exits the other side with a reinvented sense of belonging.