Difficulties Faced By Migrants: Speech Example

My dear friends, as one of the migrants, I understand the difficulties they face as they try to belong in an unwanted country. The migrants struggle for a sense of belonging as they want to establish a relationship with the new society. My poems demonstrate the problems encountered by migrants as they establish new lives in a new country. The challenges include alienation, emotional torture, and feeling of uncertainty about their future. I will discuss these challenges using the poems Feliks Skrzynecki, Mirant Hostel, and St Patrick's College. The main message in the three poems is identity's alienation because of cultural isolation and also uncertainty about their future. To convey these difficulties I use various techniques in these poems. They include similes, rhetorical questions, metaphors, tonal variation, and personification. Although the migrants faced these challenges, they remained hopeful of a better future.

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The poem Felix Skrzynecki depicts the strong sense of belonging I feel with my family. However, the poem also describes the challenge of alienation and loss of cultural identity in the country. My father faces the challenge of keeping up with the new lifestyle. He decides to surrender to the Australian culture and chooses to spend time in the garden. He pretends not to care but still tries his best to compete with the Australian lifestyle. I use the simile "Loved his garden like an only child" (line 4) to show that he has a close relationship with his garden like that of a family. However, I also express my detachment from my cultural heritage. My isolation is also depicted in stanza 6 line 2 'Remnants of a language I inherited unknowingly'. The use of "I" shows my perception of my father and how different we were. For instance, I do not belong to the same culture as the father or his friends they were formal. In stanza 3, he states that 'That formal address I never got used to'. The migrants also lose the spiritual connection they shared with their mother country. As we all know, our environment shapes our lives and therefore we cannot ignore our background. I recognize that to achieve my true identity, I had to forego my polish and leave my family. This is demonstrated through the use of imagery stanza 8 lines 3 which state that "I forgot my first polish word". I am trying to demonstrate how migrants losses cultural identity in the new land. The poem also utilizes the literary techniques of repetition and alliteration to stress how I lost cultural identity. "Further and further south of Hadrian's Wall" is the last line of the poem which emphasizes how new migrants lose their polish heritage.

The problem of assimilating into the new culture is another major challenge faced by migrants. They also feel insecure and uncertain about their future. I vividly describe these challenges in the "Mirant Hostel" to show their problem with belonging. I use birds as a metaphor to demonstrate that like birds the migrants are not certain about their future. They may live a stressful life trying to locate the appropriate place that is safe and secure. For instance, the poem states that "We lived like birds of passage always sensing a change" (Stanza 3 line 2-3). The migrants live in tension because they are unaware of what could happen the next minute. They may be forced to relocate or return to their home country any time and hence their lives are full of worries and insecurities. They search for comfort from individuals who came from their home country and felt a sense of belonging. The migrants are also denied freedom of movement because there are areas they are not supposed to cross. They are "sealed off the highway" which demonstrated that they are restricted from the outside world. This also demonstrates that the immigrant to not reach their goal since they desire for a new and improved lifestyle but they do not achieve.

The migrants face rejection and discrimination in schools and other places as demonstrated in the poem "St Patrick's College". My message in this poem focuses on the experiences of isolation and alienation in Catholic School. In all my year's discrimination had become part of my life as other students greeted me with "outstretched arms" (Stanza 2 line 4). This act makes them embarrassed and contradicts the expectation of my expectation of a welcoming environment. I feel disconnected from this environment that "like a foreign tourist, Uncertain of my destination" (Stanza 3, Line 5-6). This expresses my lack of sense of belonging in the new country.

As I conclude, migrants faces need to belong which may be determined by the environment. My three poems Feliks Skrzynecki, Mirant Hostel, and St Patrick's College elaborate how the migrant's loss their cultural identity in the new land. They face the problem of assimilating to the new culture where they are rejected by everyone. Moreover, they also experience discrimination in school where other students do not want to touch their hands. They lose their senses of belonging and live in fear of a new life that they cannot predict. Although they are denied freedom of movement, they still remain hopeful of a better tomorrow.