On the 9th of July, 2011, the country of Sudan will split in two, and the Republic of South Sudan will officially exist. This future is the outcome of the recent referendum in early January 2011; in early February, the final results were made public. More than 98% of those casting votes opted for succession.
The subtext for the referendum was the brutal civil war that raged across Sudan for the later part of the 20th century. Estimates suggest that a staggering 2 million civilians were killed, and nearly 4 million people were displaced during the fighting.
Among those displaced are the Lost Boys. During the fighting, it is estimated that more than 25,000 young male children were displaced from their families, many of whom were killed during the conflict. This phenomena occurred through the consistency of the violence as battles raged from village to village across southern Sudan, and from the specifics of rural culture in southern Sudan: boys often tended livestock and would be away from their villages with the animals. They would return home to find that home had been destroyed in the violence. Women and girls who did not escape were raped, killed, or enslaved–and so Lost Boys came to be: a generation of Southern Sudanese males displaced from their families and traditions by violence . These boys traveled to the borders of Sudan to seek international aid, often to Ethiopia or Kenya, battling violence, hunger, starvation, and exposure. There are vivid accounts of animal attacks, both lion and crocodile.
Harriet Levin’s “Yalla!” from the Winter 2011 issue of KR, is a harrowing account that recreates the experience of a young boy separated from his family and home and forced to create a new life in the wake of the violence that has displaced him. Levin created the story around conversations that she held with Lost Boy Michael Majok Kuch. It is part of a longer project around Kuch’s life, and comes out as part of the Reunion Project, which she helped found with her family and students at Drexel University. The story creates a history that too often is also a casualty of the violence of Sudan; it is an attempt to create the narrative that displacement and all the attending realities of displacement–the physical and mental trauma–keep from us.
“Yalla!” is also an attempt at reclamation; with so much lost–from families to ways of life to language to access –the narrative of each individual boy’s displacement is a story that no matter how brutal or violent is unequivocally theirs.
Levin’s work and story is part of efforts to support the Lost Boys and reunite families from Southern Sudan. A recent New York Times article details new efforts by a group in Arizona to digitize humanitarian records that are often the only records that refugees have that detail their accounts and offer some glimpse of where they have come from. For more information on the efforts to digitize humanitarian documents and connect Lost Boys with information about their experience and former lives, visit www.lostboysreunited.org