As Mark Bixler tells it in his new book, The Lost Boys of Sudan, this story is true for some of the Lost Boys. For many of them it is not, but it's still the story they tell, having learned (or been coached) that Americans would only help them if their story was simple, dramatic and morally unambiguous.
The whole truth of these boys and young men is not so simple and cannot be simply told.
Bixler, a reporter with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, first wrote about the Lost Boys in April 2001 when some of them began arriving in Atlanta. More than 100 readers contacted the paper to donate time and money. Bixler decided to follow four of the Atlanta Lost Boys for their first four months in Atlanta, literally beginning from the moment they walked off the plane that had brought them to America.
Jacob Magot, Peter Ayuen Anyang, Daniel Khon Khoch and Marko Aguer Ayii. (In Ethiopia, missionaries had encouraged the boys to take on Christian names.) Bixler was with them when they moved into their first apartment, when they applied for their first jobs, when they learned how to drive, when they went to school or studied for their GED. The feature story that came of that led to a book deal for Bixler and a total of two years spent with the Atlanta Lost Boys.
It's easy to romanticize their stories and the (eventual) American response into some post-colonial, Disney-ready heroic tale of noble innocents who lose their parents and, through perseverance and pluck, go on to become happy and heroic adults. It's easy also to cast the United States and the American volunteers who welcomed the Lost Boys as benevolent and selfless heroes in their own right. But Bixler tells me he considered these too-easy stories a failure of truth in the Rudyard Kipling mode: "the white man's burden ... save those poor, savage creatures.
"There are a lot of depictions of the refugee program and the war in Sudan that do not embrace the complexity of the truth," says Bixler. "I was determined to learn that truth." It's a truth that includes the well-known "secret" that many of the Lost Boys left their villages voluntarily because the Sudanese People's Liberation Army told them they could get an education in the Ethiopian camps. Once the boys were in Ethiopia, the SPLA would recruit them as soldiers, a practice that compromised the status of the camps in the eyes of the international relief community.
After many years isolating and "containing" Sudan as a safe haven for terrorist organizations (including Osama bin Laden), the United States finally intervened on behalf of the Lost Boys not merely out of long-lagged pity, though that was part of the motivation. Helping the Lost Boys also served foreign policy priorities and answered domestic pressure from conservative Christians, who encouraged a simplistic view of the conflict: Christians were being killed by Muslims in religious warfare. Never mind that black Muslims were (and still are) also being killed, in Darfur, by Arab Muslims. Never mind that southern Sudanese Dinkas sometimes killed southern Sudanese Nuers in tribal battles. Ignore the economics, the history. ...
Bixler ignores none of it, showing us the long and complex view of the Lost Boys through many lenses: history, religion, geography, economics, politics and, of course, the personal stories of the young men he followed.
They are heroic, yes, but also damaged, having lost their childhood and collected too many recurrent memories of murder.
"It is a little complex, what it means to be a Lost Boy, what it took for us to become Lost Boys," Magot tells me on his day off from work in food service at the DeKalb County Jail. "I'm a grown-up man now, but I ... have lost an important time in my life to be a child."
The Americans who help the Lost Boys as they establish themselves in Atlanta are mostly good and generous people, but their sometimes misguided actions are often motivated as much by their own needs as by the needs of the young men in their care.
Far from diminishing the story, these complexities and contradictions respect the full humanity of all involved and connect us to what Bixler says are "universal themes played out on a very dramatic stage. It's a story about grief, resilience, and the desire to transform your life. We all can relate to that."
Epilogue: On Jan. 9 of this year, the Sudanese government and the SPLA signed a peace agreement. People are still dying, but there is hope that a larger story of resilience and transformation is yet to be told.
thomas.bell@creativeloafing.comThe Lost Boys of Sudan: An American Story of the Refugee Experience by Mark Bixler. $24.95. University of Georgia Press. 272 pages. www.lostboysbook.com. A portion of the book's proceeds will go toward education and emergency relief for Sudanese refugees in Atlanta. Another portion will benefit Jubilee Partners, a Christian community that helps refugees adjust to American life.
