To Belong Somewhere

An interpretation of 'Strange Lands' by Billy Collins

 

Self-identity although not much talked about, is a huge personal struggle that many people face. It is the urgency of wanting to belong somewhere. Whether it’s a physical place, or a race or part of a belief, belonging doesn’t just equate to an identity. In regard to arts and literature, you often find people saying they can relate to the character or they feel like the song is about them. Therefore, self-identity or belonging is an emotional journey where we try to justify that a little bit of ourselves come from somewhere.

In many of Billy Collins poems, one distinctively identifies the search for self-identity. The poem 'Strange Lands' illustrates of the travels behind a photograph. Yet, through this poem, the poet uses tourists as a symbol of his own personal journey. Tourists try hard to indulge and learn as much as they can using “phrasebooks” and doing things locals would do such as “leaning obliquely against a kiosk” as if they belong there. Here we note the poet’s urgency to fit yet he particularly knows he is different. But towards the end of the poem, we begin to see the conclusion of the poet’s self-discovery. It’s almost as if the “quick rustle of the shutter released” served as an epiphany of how he wanted to live his life. Just like the tourist, he begins “noticing how we tried to be as still as paintings” trying so hard to fit, but “until the quick rustle of the shutter released” him is when he starts to “walk on again, unfocused, unphotographed”. Simply he starts to live as himself without the restrictions of focus and frames set in life for him.

The quest for belonging can be explained as a result of displacement from ones origin. For example, in light of post-colonial literature, Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, discusses the issues of the colonized trying to indulge in the culture of the colonizer in an attempt to cover up the fact that he is different. Take African-Americans; indigenously they are African, but for many of them, even up to their 4^th generations, they have lived in America and have no connection whatsoever to their African origins. Yes they immersed themselves into the American Culture which ideally was their colonizers. However, the question that comes up is, is it as a result of self-identity searching or survival? Do we search for our labels so we can fit with everyone or is it for our sole understanding?

 

Strange Lands