Lack Of Self-Identity In Fiela's Child

Benjamin faces many problems throughout the novel, Fiela’s Child, but the biggest one is figuring out who he is. With the combination of terrible people and events in his life Benjamin starts to change from the person he was at the beginning of the novel to someone he no longer recognizes. In the novel, Dalene Matthee develops Benjamin’s internal turmoil of self-identity by presenting external conflicts in his new family and environment, which Benjamin has to adapt to survive, and then causes Benjamin to question whether he is a Komoetie or a Van Rooyen.
Throughout the novel, Benjamin is constantly bombarded with terrible events and harassment by the people that forced him away from his home, and in an attempt to survive he adapts to their …show more content…
He first separates himself from both halves of himself Benjamin and Lukas, and places himself in unknown territory. After he escapes from his current family he looks for opportunities to become a new person a takes the sea as his answer. Then again Benjamin becomes a new person, but this time it’s of his own choice. It’s not till Benjamin realizes that his own brother Dawid has passed away that he is thrusted back into reality and realizes that he has a responsibility to be there for his family, “’ Dawid was my brother long before Willem and Kristoffel were’” (Matthee 296). From this quote the reader can tell that Benjamin still has a connection to his pervious family and thinks of them as more special than his current family members. Furthermore, when he arrives at Long Kloof, where his original family lived, he feels welcomed and at home and decides to stay at Long Kloof where he belongs despite already having a life elsewhere. But, before Bemjamin can be at peace with his family he must confront his other family, the Van Rooyens. But once he arrives back to the Van Rooyen he finds the family in a disaster and has no choice but to reconsider his original plan of living with the …show more content…
Even through the hardship he faced from the Van Rooyens, Benjamin would feel guilty leaving his new parents alone in their time of need,” What if Kristoffel did not come back? Who would make the beams then? Till Kristoffel got back, the snare was around his neck – he could not just leave them like that” (Matthee 314). By this point of the story Benjamin has decided to reunite with Fiela and leave the Van Rooyen’s family; but when he returned to the forest, he found his father in critical condition and his brother nowhere to be found. This shows that Benjamin, whether he likes it or not, cares for the safety and well-being of his new family and can’t just turn a blind eye towards them. But this effect is reversed when he learns of how Berta identified him as her child, “’I took the wrong child, Elias.’ The words torn from her like pieces of her own flesh. ‘I took somebody else’s child’” (Matthee 337). The only real reason Benjamin felt like he had to help the Van Rooyens was because he thought they were blood related, not because he felt attached to them. Once, Benjamin found out that he really wasn’t, a Van Rooyen, Benjamin was free, “He was trapped within a body but at the same time he was free. Lukas van Rooyen and the seamen were dead, but he was alive and he could be whatever he wanted to be” (Matthee 349). While Benjamin did have loyalty toward