Migrant Hostel Skrzynecki Analysis

The conceptual understanding of belonging forms as an innate desire of the human condition. It enables a sense of security, safety and a psychological semblance of comfort amongst individuals and thus forms as a quintessential aspect of social life. The repercussions of an unfulfilled sense of belonging stimulates the notion of spatial alienation which coherently perpetuates a deep rooted sense of estrangement and isolation, concepts which are heavily articulated within Skrzynecki’s poem Migrant Hostel, and 10 Marry Street. Congruently, both texts explore the aforementioned understanding of belonging in a personal voice through the textually dynamic medium of poetry.

Migrant hostel, is a moving account of the experiences of migrants living in an overly-crowded hostel, it depicts the strain and sense of imprisonment in the new
Country that awaits immigrants beyond the hostel.

Throughout the entirety of the poem Skrynzecki dwells upon the thematic premises of displacement as a means to justify the individual’s sense of uncertainty and isolation which plagues the concerns of the poem. In the opening stanza of MH , Skrzynecki encapsulates the transient status of the
The sense of irony is apparent in the notion that the hostel represents a new start for the immigrant, yet it is “prison-like” in its description, the poets last line highlights the bitterness felt by the migrant at this situation. Synonymously, the thematic tone of connection and belonging is also apparent in the short story “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” by Ernest Hemingway, and the effects which belonging has in shaping our identity. . In the work of both Skrzynecki’s and Hemingway, the sense of place is given significance by the fact that the writers and their style of writing speculate about place and the meaning it has in their