Romulus My Father and Comparison Text

As life continues on and we grow older and more mature, we are able to look back at certain parts of our history and reflect on how these people or places have affected who we are and what we have become. The passage of time and the interactions we have with our world help us to achieve this ability to look back and view how we have grown and changed. In 1998 Ramond Gaita had his reflective memoir published and in this memoir we are told the story of his father and his various relationships with the land and the people he interacted with. Similar to Gaita, Maria Dell’oso has also written a reflective piece that features anecdotes of her family in different time periods and she has shown the change in their sense of belonging over time also.
Both texts share the migrant experience and the hardships that European migrants would have to deal with when they first arrived in a foreign land. In Romulus my father we are repeatedly forced to read about various people in the book who suffer from mental illnesses such as depression, this depression motif is used to emphasis the feeling of loneliness, desolation and non-belonging because of the migrant experience and even Romulus himself goes through states of madness during his life because of the migrant experience. Dell’oso uses the suitcase motif to represent her narrative story but, unlike Gaitia, she uses this motif to give us a better understanding of where her family came from and what they have been through rather than how the migrant experience has scarred them and left of them dead. This confliction in these to texts shows how this migrant experience can either strengthen or destroy this sense of belonging through the passage of time.
The use of first person narrative in these two texts helps to emphasis the realness of these stories and how these interactions with their world warped and changed them for better and for worse. Through first person narrative we are able to identify with the text because it is a