BELONGING
Author: Maria Mirassol
Detail of
totem poles,
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
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