The Lost Boys of Sudan (P3)

Jaser Alsharhan
03-30-13
P3

It means “Demanding Empathy and Understanding through Cultural Connections”….

I found that most of the film portrayed refugees through their own personal stories. Rather than making the study of the displacement a scientific study or one narrated by a professor, the film gained credibility by presenting the facts through the voices of experience. As a self-proclaimed film critic, I feel that it was the documentary’s attempt at ethos, being their most prominent measure of rhetoric technique. 

The film portrays refugees and the refugee experience through a classical ethnography—a study of the culture or subculture of people through qualitative research. A little tangent – the most interesting portion of the documentary was of the portion of the documentary devoted to the Sudanese perspective of the US: people are lazy, with a lot more fat on their bones and (of course) money. This perspective of the US honed the ultimate viewer appreciation of the authenticity of the documentary. The transparent view of the refugees was refreshing; God Grew Tired of Us became more a political statement and truth than a PR effort concerned with profit.

The statistics given in the story highlighted the precise nature of the title, God Grew Tired of Us. The fact that 27,000 young men were forced to move to Ethiopia and crystalize makeshift families in order to survive or the fact that the colony of travelling refugees was reduced to 12, 000 (a loss of approximately 15,000 refugees) from the start of the war in Sudan forces one to recognize the reality of the situation and the hardship of the victims. 

(The above quote is a snippet of my discussion of the documentary's similarities to the the prescribed article).

One depiction which I noticed was the same in both Amal Hassan Fadlalla’s discussion of the refugees and the one in the documentary was the notion of the “Lost Boys” of Sudan. While Fadlalla focuses on the subaltern (or widespread inferior) nature of social welfare and politics, the documentary similarly talks of the longest civil war between the North and the South.  This depiction of the “Lost Boys” from Perer Pan made a pop-culture connotation for those who could still not grasp the gravity of the situation. It is from this depiction of lost children of Peter Pan—boys without homes, those without a homeland (or anything to live for)—serves as a metaphor for the nature of the boys of refugee camp. This commonality forces understanding. The cultural reference allows for people (originating from a bubble of perfection and infallibility) to know and empathize for those children of a refugee status and of a “lost”-status (seeking care and some sort of attention, with nowhere/no ultimate goal of feasible achievement) in the face of all adversity and misunderstanding. 

It means “Demanding Empathy and Understanding through Cultural Connections”…

Peace and Blessings!

Jaser