This illustrated anthology is concerned with the notion of belonging, it is concerned with the notion of drowning and lastly, it is concerned with the notion of rowing or otherwise navigating the ocean of one’s inner most experiences. These key thematic concerns are explored through the two characters of a bird namely a blackpoll warbler and the girl. The girl is represented in doubles, her selfhood is visualised as an autonomous entity that concurrently lives outside of, beside and within herself. In a way it is an autobiographical work depicting the innermost circle of belonging to one’s own selfhood, singularity and sovereignty.
Social scientist Bréne Brown describes belonging in terms of the three circles. The outermost circle encompasses our relationship with belonging in terms of broader group sets. How our value sets align with the shared political, national and religious agreements we create a sense of belonging to a set of people who share aligning principles and values. The middle circle encompasses our relationships closer to home for example, the ways in which we connect with the people that we engage on a daily basis who share similar objectives and directives perhaps the teams we work with in our local and provincial communities. The innermost circle encompasses the ways in which we relate to our relatives, close friends and family. It encompasses the relationships we hold most dear to the hearts. However, in the centre of the circle there is one more. A circle described by Toltec spiritual author Don Miguel Ruiz as the self. This circle encompasses the manner in which one relates to one’s own selfhood one’s own singularity, one’s own sovereignty.
In conversation with Bréne Brown 2020, author Vivek Hallegere Murthy notes that when a vital connection is lacking in either one of the circles, we suffer great pain. Deep reaching loneliness can set in and isolate one. In my experience, the loneliness that has been with me for the longest time has become a sort of character and in my search for belonging with others around me, I have always found myself on the outskirts. This loneliness perhaps my own selfhood has always stepped in and kept me company. There are oftentimes depictions of two women. They are in fact one woman, the self mirroring the self. She is tethered to a bird namely a blackpoll warbler. The blackpoll warbler is the smallest bird of its size to achieve the transatlantic migratory feat of roughly 20 000 km from Canada to South America over the short period of two to three days. With a wing span of roughly 25-27 cm it is the only songbird of its kind able to achieve this most physically taxing journey. Even so, the blackpoll warbler succeeds . In transcending the ocean of emotions I have felt associated with my loneliness, I have considered the blackpoll warbler conquering the sea by transcending it, In this knowledge, I have found solace. The characters of both the women and the bird are interchangeable, a unit, and an expression of my own selfhood.
in my dismay, I wrote this poem,
My great aunt lived alone in Lady Selbourne before being forcibly removed to Garankua,
my grandma lived alone in Kibler Park Johannesburg South before passing on in my little brothers room,
my mother lives alone and has lived this way pretty much my whole life, here now in Olivedale,
this scares me for I too, am alone.
When I wrote this poem, it had dawned on me that a friendship I’d sincerely nursed would inevitably come to die. This pained me deeply as I was coming up on the awareness that I would be completely alone again. I wrote many poems thereafter grappling with the feeling of being both morose, and marooned in regards to belonging, this was the navy blue feeling that I myself had designed.
I had longed to belong for so long, hoped to belong to different groups, hoped to create a nucleus of my own, hoped to belong to a person outside of myself, hoped to belong to a larger family, cultural groups set, belong elsewhere, and so on and so forth, but it was to no avail. During my time at the Boathouse artist residency December 2023 however, I found myself nurtured by the pastoral environment based on the outskirts of the city of Shilaj, Ahmedabad. Left to my thoughts alone I began imagining the natural environment and its solemnity as a refuge, a safe haven, and a home that can exist within one’s own selfhood. The poet Rumi once said, do not be lonely for the entire universe resides inside you. In thinking through this particular sentiment alongside some of the writings of author and spiritual teacher Miguel Ruiz, I sought a different kind of belonging, a belonging deeply concerned with the home one builds within ones self. I began thinking it is to ones own selfhood, singularity and sovereignty this the innermost of the innermost circle, where the true place of belonging resides. Perhaps one is Never alone. It dawned on me, perhaps I was never alone.
