BELONGING

Author: Maria Mirassol

 

Detail of totem poles, Sitka National Historic Park, Alaska

 

Sitka, Home of the Totem Spirits

Sitka is situated on Tongass Island, which lies at the northern end of the chain of islands dotting the southeast coast of Alaska.  Although it takes its name from Russian fur traders, Tlingit Indian stories tell how their ancestors migrated here ten thousand years ago as the glaciers started to retreat, coming to the temperate coast from inland homes in the Nass Valley.

 

The Tlingit universe abounds with spirits; it is said that omens can be heard in the hoot of an owl or the cry of a raven.  In this world, the shaman mediates between humans and the kushtakas, the powerful Land Otter People who save those lost in the forest or at sea.  Because those saved are then transformed into half-human, half-otter beings like their rescuers, it is the shaman's task to reclaim the lost spirit before the kushtaka can transform it.  The stories of these legendary struggles were often recorded on totem poles.[1]

(video link: “I am Tlingit” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcVfcNuRfr0&feature=related)

 

BELONGING

fellowship, relationship, association, loyalty, acceptance, attachment, inclusion, affinity, rapport, affiliation, kinship

 

What is ‘Sense of Belonging’?

Social participation

Sense of Community

 

“McMillan & Chavis (1986) define Sense of Community as “a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter to one another and to the group, and a shared faith that members’ needs will be met through their commitment to be together.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_of_community

 

In the U.K., A Sense of Belonging is the first major report on the role of both culture (as a foundation for human development) and arts (as a means of expression, communication and sharing) in the resettlement process.

A Sense of Belonging is about validating the importance of the cultural lives, cultural expressions and cultural experiences of refugees and asylum seekers as part of the process of their inclusion and integration in…society. http://cultureartsrefugees.creativexchange.org/car/asenseof

 

ART as Expression of Sense of Belonging

Art activities are about expression and communication, enabling us to share our unique personal experience of life. They enable us to connect with the identity and values that are formed through that experience. Arts activities are also about creativity – that wellspring from which we find new and original pathways to the future. And they are about participation, about joining with others, and sharing our humanity in an inimitable way. Through the creative processes of expression, communicating, connecting, imagining and sharing we learn and grow. http://cultureartsrefugees.creativexchange.org/car/asenseof

Art Exhibit: "A Sense of Belonging” work by emerging exiled artists, refugees and asylum seekers. http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/gallery/2009/jan/13/sense-of-belonging-exhibition?picture=341562670

“The viewer is presented with a rare opportunity to witness the ‘double consciousness’ of transnational belonging, and inter-relationships between emotions, cultural memory and identity for participants…Here the inter-relationships between ‘art’ and biography are used to inform, remind, and enable the viewer to experience in emotional and sensory ways the choices, journeys, and feelings of people seeking freedom and safety from conflict and violence.”  http://www.qub.ac.uk/cden/NewsandEvents/RelevantExhibitions/SenseofBelonging/

 

Intercultural cinema – Art as creating the sense of belonging

 

Intercultural cinema[2] – work that comes from the new cultural formations of Western metropolitan centers, which in turn have resulted from global flows of immigration, exile, and diaspora.  Most of the artists whose work is central to this movement are cultural minorities living in the West, often recent immigrants from Asia, the Caribbean, the Middle East, Latin American, and Africa, as well as First Nations makers.  [T]his movement is an international phenomenon, produced wherever people of different cultural backgrounds live together in the power-inflected spaces of diaspora, (post- or neo-) colonialism, and cultural apartheid. (1)

Cinema exists on the threshold of language, and language must bring it across in order to have a conversation with it. (xvi)

Intercultural cinema performs an excavation of the available sources of recorded history and memory, only to find that cultural memory is located in the gaps between recorded images....Many works of intercultural cinema begin from the inability to speak, to represent objectively one’s own culture, history, and memory ;they are marked by silence, absence, and hesitation.  All these works are marked by suspicion of visuality, a lack of faith in the visual archive’s ability to represent cultural membory.  The use of silence and absence of visual image in these works may make them appear insubstantial, but I consider it to be an oopening toward the exploration of new languages, new forms of expression. (21)

I Come From There

 

I come from there and I have memories

Born as mortals are, I have a mother

And a house with many windows,

I have brothers, friends,

And a prison cell with a cold window.

Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,

I have my own view,

And an extra blade of grass.

Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,

And the bounty of birds,

And the immortal olive tree.

I walked this land before the swords

Turned its living body into a laden table.

 

I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother

When the sky weeps for her mother.

And I weep to make myself known

To a returning cloud.

I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood

So that I could break the rule.

I learnt all the words and broke them up

To make a single word: Homeland.....

 

Mahmoud Darwish

(from http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/i-come-from-there/)

 

“Without Exile, Who Am I?”

http://www.dhfaf.com/poetry.php?name=Poetry&op=shqas&poemsid=413

 



[1] Courtney Milne, Spirit of the Land. Toronto: Viking Canada, 1994. (172)

[2] Quotes taken from The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses by Laura U. Marks. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).