(Be)longing
I often find myself grappling with belonging, not as an academic but as a human being who moved homes many times. Now, during political changes in the Netherlands and many upheavals worldwide, I must revisit old questions I have been living through.
How have I been constructing my sense of belonging, and what influences (do I let) shape my identity?
When are conversations about belonging healing, and when are they harming?
These questions are still brewing in me, so this is neither a tell-it-all nor a guide. I hope this essay renews your questions as it renewed mine.
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Let us admit it. Belonging is a confusing word. The Cambridge Dictionary defines it as “a feeling of being happy or comfortable as part of a group and having a good relationship with the other members of the group because they welcome you and accept you”. But search the Merian Webster, and you will find a much blunter definition: “1. Possession; 2. Close or intimate relationship”.
The etymology helps unpack these further: “to go along with, properly relate to,” from be- intensive prefix, + longen“to go,” from Old English langian “pertain to, to go along with,”. We can see why a possession (from mid-14c) is associated with it: it speaks to what we carry with us, that we take along.
Two metaphors often accompany these meanings: belonging as feeling at home and belonging as growing roots. But there is space for much, much more.
Growing up, I moved a lot. I was born in one city but brought up in another. In both places, I was treated and felt foreign. As a child of a family ‘climbing the housing ladder’, I had many addresses before I left my parents’ home to study. School was where I felt most at home: I studied at a sprawling Jesuit school for 13 years, courtesy of my mom’s teaching there.
An avid curiosity and the need for funding to deepen my studies took me to multiple places and universities. Since 2006, I have left Curitiba and lived in Lyon, Paris, Madrid, Nantes, Stockholm, Brighton, and now Utrecht. That was never the plan; each chapter unfolded surprisingly and enrichingly.
I moved on average once a year, in part because of study programmes and in part to navigate the shitshow that is housing in large European cities. I lost count of all the addresses I lived in and all the people I shared flats with. The longest i lived in one address was two years.
Unsurprisingly, negotiating belonging has been a staggered and challenging process. Every place felt meaningful and worthwhile, but not one resolved my quest for belonging.
On the bright side, I have become excellent at entering new spaces, making connections, finding amazing friends, and learning to deepen relationships quickly. I met brilliant, kind people of uncountable nationalities and have been struck by how bonds could emerge with every one of them. My understanding of who I am becoming and my view of the world and humanity expanded at each encounter.
But the process left scars. Every uprooting came with its losses, its grief. As a young man with few exemplars of healthy emoting, I was numb to it. The excitement of entering new spaces and making new connections hid the truth: I felt lost, alone, and disconcerted, even if, on the outside, all went well.
Therapy, coaching, and meeting reflexive and generous friends and partners helped. What didn’t help was witnessing the countries I lived in veering to the right and dilapidating the very tolerance and cosmopolitanism that had attracted me in the first place. Now, with the Netherlands’ recent election results, I once more have to revisit this issue of belonging.
I had to learn to notice how I am implicated in my loneliness: I was often the one doing the abandoning, and if I needed things to change, I had to assume responsibility for mending the bonds I had. I also had to accept that belonging to a community or network is moot unless I contribute to sustaining it. Relationships, too, erode with neglect. Participation was the entry ticket, and belonging was the outcome.
Looking back at the word belonging, I see three features jump out:
- It implies being a part of something larger whole than the individual but does not specify what whole that is.
- It conflates material belonging with spiritual/psychological belonging.
- It contains longing: ‘a feeling of wanting something or someone very much’.
The first issue intrigues me: so often in discussions of belonging, we talk about place (e.g. a city) or country, but there are so many wholes we can feel like a part of. We often assume a binary, either-or state: I either belong or don’t; I feel completely at ease or don’t.
The nuance can easily get lost. There is a lot of scope for a more plural and intersectional way of finding fellowship. There is no cap on the number of spaces and groups we belong to. In many contexts, there is no belonging police that checks how we affirm our participation. There is thus a lot of scope for a more active, involved form of belonging, a proactive participation, a conversation.
Assuming spiritual or psychological belonging stems from the material is not surprising in an increasingly materialistic society that generates material insecurities for many people. To belong in this context means owning a house, furnishing it, and possessing more and more items, linking us to a particular place and a (commercial) culture.
The Home as a metaphor for belonging reinforces that idea. The symbolic home can easily be conflated with the physical house, assuming that those who don’t have a fixed address must be somehow unmoored, ungrounded. It also implies that we have some pre-specified place and should ‘go back home’ to feel belonging. This is an ancient and powerful myth reminiscent of Oddysseu’s return to Ithaca. But are we all equally protected by the gods in our ‘return home’?
In the current register, many of us don’t have or have ever had the luxury of belonging to specific places or homes. So many don’t feel safe or welcomed where they were born, let alone belong. And insisting on belonging premised on possession and (inherited) membership will always leave so many of us high and dry. The common man can find resonance in the trials and tribulations of Odysseus. Still, we are not all kings and queens of our land before departure.
If belonging becomes tied up with scarce commodities and amenities, if belonging for one comes at the cost of exclusion for another, it is not surprising how quickly arguments about belonging turn defensive. Implicitly, without reflection, “If I belong to my country, my country belongs to me. Newcomers trying to belong here are a threat”.
As you could expect of someone who has lived in multiple places and experienced awe at each of those cultures but felt the vulnerability of being a migrant, I have an issue with that narrative.
But to play with the parenthesis, as in the title, can be revealing of that third point:
We are beings that long for. We are beings who long to go along. We are beings who bring (others) along.
If we are beings longing for that pleasant feeling but confusing it with some form of possession and not recognising the impermanence of it all, we compound our fragile position. For many of us, belonging is not something found ‘back home’ but something we must (re)construct elsewhere, as humanity has done so many hundreds of times.
Looking back at our past, we are not all particularly wise, as the name of our species would suggest. But look long back enough; we are all migrants, all parts of wholes bigger than ourselves.
But let’s not forget the politics of belonging and how our longing to belong is used in politics. Clearly, in a moment in history where so many territorial disputes are raging, with extreme violence, displacement, and terror, it would be idiotic to dismiss these feelings altogether. If people feel a threat to their sense of belonging, culture, and places, and if that threat is violent and abrupt, a defensive eruption is not surprising.
We are also clearly witnessing the weaponisation of identity and belonging. The populist template of ‘us vs them’, where the leader claims to embody ‘the will of the people’ directly, is increasingly popular and electorally effective. Criticise the leader, and you are criticising the people. Parody the leader, and you are scorning the followers.
The bonfires of populism are often fueled by real logs. There is a vast divide in who gets to do politics and who is subject to it, or between how different parts of the population access formal education and its opportunities. Billionaires evade taxes and play god, and there is considerable disdain between classes. But rightwing populism steps in and fans the fires in a particular and problematic direction.
Whereas left populism would blame the wealthy elites and capitalist institutions, perhaps simplistically at times, the right’s version of populism goes on: “Blame that group. They are the problem!”. Refugees, migrants, Muslims, woke people, Antifa. The blame goes around, but the game stays the same.
Anyone who steps in between, asks questions, or is in disagreement quickly becomes ‘the enemy of the people’. Here, reflecting on belonging, how we may construct more inclusive forms of defining is quickly dismissed as a dilution, or worse, a substitution of the ones with an inherited right to belong. Any institution that supports inclusion is recast as a threat to sovereignty. Human rights are too inclusive; they must go, too, so only the rightful ones can have rights.
Because populism requires blaming specific groups for society’s problems, it is no longer afraid of ‘being nasty’. Any social issue becomes leveraged in the same way. It is now boosted by social media’s (profitable) proclivity for amplifying conflict and downplaying nuance; it is increasingly difficult to have a generous conversation about issues, their causes, and ways forward without facing an angry mob.
The populist right acts as if there was a mythical past in which everyone belonged in harmony together before obnoxious arrivals. Even in ‘melting pots’ as diverse as the US and Brazil, countries with remarkably violent histories of settler colonialism that exterminated indigenous populations and enslaved millions of Africans, this kind of narrative has gained purchase.
That is precisely why we need to be critical of the questions we ask in our quests to belong. Centre-right and centre-left coalitions won’t cut it by playing mild populism and adding migration restrictions to their manifestos.
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I contend that even for those of us who ‘already belong’, belonging is, at best, a delicate collective accomplishment we must strive for and carefully nourish. Not exploring how we accomplish or sustain it collectively exposes us to deceit and distress.
As someone who is also not directly implicated in those conflicts, writing from a privileged position of relative safety and peace, I have a different angle and way of perceiving. It is not the only way nor the most valid, but perhaps a fruitful blip of a thought that will react with others. My perspective is not overriding.
I do hope we can ask better questions and better narratives.
What if belonging was explored in a more encompassing framing, more readily accessible, day-to-day, and conducive to flourishing and fighting for the belonging of others?
In innumerable ways, we are necessarily embedded in the places, spaces, environments, and communities we interact with.
The question, perhaps, is not whether one belongs but how deeply are they afforded to belong, how deeply and skillfully they build on those affordances and how we let that belonging touch us and those around us.
What if we treated belonging as a longing we all share and accomplish together instead of assuming it is something we arrive at alone?
What does it mean to recognise that we share a longing for belonging?
And how may we resignify belonging more inclusively and less territorially or defensively?
Like the home metaphor, treating belonging as a matter of ‘having roots’ also has a dark side. Yes, it highlights some entangled and slow processes of deepening the commitment to a place and refers to how nourishing that can be. But it also hides other valid ways of pursuing that quest.
What if we looked at the various sedimentary and reactive interactions, meanings, and bonds that burst forth when we participate with others instead of extending and deepening roots into the land?
What if some of us have aerial roots and far-flying seeds?
What if some of us are more like nesting birds than old-grown trees?
What other mobile and fixed entities may we inspire ourselves with?
It is hard to be empowering without being inclusive, and hard to be inclusive without imagining the plural and appreciating difference.
If these are the questions, let me share glimpses that influenced my approach.
When I arrived in Utrecht five years ago, I had to start anew. Luckily, Joost Vervoort, a great friend of mine who deeply belongs to Utrecht, was once reminded by Charlotte Ballard, another great friend and dear colleague, that his sense of belonging was a luxury that most international colleagues in his midst did not have easy access to. They had not studied in that city for years and built deep bonds. They often had to travel ‘back home’ and didn’t know the ins and outs of the underground scene. They struggled to figure out how things worked, let alone how to have fun. It was a tough call, but it came from a place of love and authority, as Charlotte herself was a famed connector, cross-pollinator, and social catalyst.
He took it to heart and began catalysing other peoples’ belonging. Between the two, there was a great deal of community building, inviting people for tea or meditation, organising a party, and helping with basic things. All had tremendous effects on those participating and were equally enriching to their experience. There is now a tapestry of links and nourishing friendships where there was disconnection. Each effort brought forward new friends, ideas, communion.
Together, the two of them have become great guides to my arrival, helped in minute and gigantic ways, and made space for me — in their group of friends, or even helped me find a room to stay over the summer and an apartment to rent. I am immensely grateful for their care, and I have since been trying to extend that to those around me who need it.
Besides friendship, I have often found intellectual solace in notions of cosmopolitanism, especially in the work of Kwame Anthony Appiah and his beautiful Reith Lectures on Mistaken Identities. His ideas made me contemplate the possibility that the containers we have used to think of belonging and their associations with creeds, countries, colours, and cultures are too constrictive. In cosmopolitanism, I find a more equanimous and spacious form of belonging less volatile to the politics of the day, who is in power and the latest policy change from a migration office. But in cosmopolitanism, one must be careful not to construct a bland, placeless and generic simulacrum of belonging.
Finding other metaphors may help deterritorialise and dispossess belonging, create space for more generative ways of participating, make space for the thickening of our ways of relating, expand our capacity to belong and make others feel belonging.
I have been seeing this happen first-hand, among friends, in a book club on Sci-Fi, Cli-Fi, and feminist speculative fiction. Sharing a space, a conversation, and a meal with them is a monthly balm.
In Walkaways, Cory Doctorow paints a delightfully weird near future in which groups of people walk away from society to establish communities that heal the scars of the land and thrive in communion, leveraging technologies to allow themselves more time for leisure and bonding. The book’s outstanding achievement is representing this possibility of reconnecting to each other and the land, irrespective of backgrounds through a new meta-identity that is more encompassing and accepting, that accommodates all the hyper-specific paths people walked before becoming Walkaways.
The classic Dispossessed, by the remarkable Ursula Le Guin, is an excellent example of the actual freedoms that could be associated with dispossession, surrendering material ties, and living in favour of one’s calling. Le Guin is too brilliant to create a simplistic utopia. Still, her exploration reveals how much we lose when not contemplating other possibilities.
Both these books show glimpses of belonging that are not tied to ownership, tied to being where you are from, and of the potential for genuinely inclusive meta-identities and ways of relating. Of course, so many of our problems stem from capitalism and patriarchy.
What if resignifying belonging goes hand in hand with mobilising other (re)volutionary efforts? What if our fiction and imagination shifted from science to kinship? What if our time needs is “kin-fi”?
Perhaps that’s what good fiction has always been about.
Great artists are often deeply attuned to these immense and ineffable webs of inter-participations, bringing our daily concerns into much grander, even cosmic scales. I often think of a song by the Brazilian genius Lenine, which captures the improbable ways we are irrevocably interwoven with the cosmos while maintaining the balance between zooming out and honouring the pasts, presents and futures of a given place.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAwuDzGsRL4
A botched translation would read, “I am made of the rest of stars, as the crow, the oak, the coal; the seeds were born from the ashes of one of them after the explosion. I am the Indian of the fast and shining star, who is strong as a Jabuti…”. The song celebrates the multiplicity that creates something as specific as his personal (and exuberantly Brazilian) identity but speaks to a broader, more profound, more alive way of situating oneself. “And from the cosmos where I am from, with the image of chaos, I project an unending future”. His identity is woven and celebrates and elevates indigenous voices and characters, “I am the grandchild of Galdino [an indigenous leader brutally murdered in Brazil]” but recognises the paradoxical situation of being a white Brazilian: “I am Caramuru [an early Portuguese colonist], I am Juruna [a tribe in the Xingu river], I am Raoni [na indigenous leader and environmentalist]”. It is not just confusion. In that hybridity, there is internal tension from which emanates an enormous transformative power.
So now, refreshed for having spelt this rambling essay out, I will continue attending the many questions it raises.
In which ways do I facilitate the belonging of others?
How might I co-create the environment I want to be a part of?
When am I participating in ways that undermine other people’s presence and belonging?
Which stories and wounds stop me from recognising when I already belong?
Hopefully, these are questions worth living, as Rainer Maria Rilke reminds us.
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Let’s ask better questions about belonging that support thriving communions, breathe solidarity, and invite us to step beyond fear of the other.
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I am deeply grateful for Michelle Hovy, my partner, who has been unpacking and reimagining these questions with me daily, my friends Charlotte and Joost, and the beautiful people of ¿Baetter Futures? Bookclub. A special thanks to Corinne Lamain and Timothy Stacey, who prodded me into writing more dangerously. And for the students in the Imagining the Futures for Transformations Course at Utrecht University, whose brave participation inspired me to write again after so long.
