Problems with the Concept of Belonging

This article takes fire from Seamus Heaney’s considerations on the ‘cultural depth-charges latent in certain words’. A predilection for words with Anglo-Saxon roots is integral, Heaney notes, to poet Ted Hughes’s attempts to evoke ‘the being-thereness.. of sea, stone, wind and tree’. So Heaney makes critical mileage of the existence of two key strata in the English lexicon: the Latinate vocabulary of ethnic and class power brought by the French overlords in 1066, and those older words–typically shorter, felt to be more earthy and everyday–which evidence the English language’s descent from proto-Germanic. Inspired by Heaney’s critique, the article asks how much the emotive power, and ‘being-thereness’, of the words belong and belonging can be attributed to etymological imaginings of this order. Otherwise put, is their invocation really a kind of trick? The article proceeds to question the deployment of these words as conceptual terms in scholarly literature, where belonging’s status as a universal human need is regularly assumed. In fact, belong and belonging offer creative licence for a wide variety of distinct projects, including the hateful. The article concludes that an era dominated by propaganda (a.k.a. ‘populism’) requires new uses for the tools of literary criticism.