Beyond her dark, slender form and white teeth, Emmanuel Jal does not remember much about the mother that gave life to him in the Bahr el Ghazal region of Southern Sudan.
“I remember she used to sing a lot of mourning songs in the church,” said Jal. “As a child, it was like death, death, everyday.”
Songs lamenting the passing of playmates and hymns that ushered relatives off to sweet rest were Jal’s earliest musical memories.
But, now those songs of mourning have transmogrified into songs of peace and reconciliation as the life of Jal, an ex-child soldier, becomes the subject of the hip hop album and award-winning documentary film, War Child.
Directed by C. Karim Chrobog, War Child chronicles the life of Jal who at age 7 was fighting on the side of the rebel army in Sudan’s bloody civil war, yet now lives to tell the tale of his struggle through his unique style of hope-filled hip hop.
Two toddlers in adjoining strollers are being pushed along a busy sidewalk by a pregnant woman in her early twenties while she holds an infant in one hand and the wrist of a rambunctious second grader singing “Go, Diego, Go” in the other.
What is her story? Where is their father? Has she not heard of birth control?
These and many more inappropriate thoughts you wouldn’t dare share with the struggling mother, but would most definitely with your girlfriends later on that day, inevitably cross your mind.
Yet, these scornful glances and critical whispers are not new for the young mother. She has been the butt of many a Comedy Central stand-up joke and PTA lecture since she decided to pop out that fourth baby while still subsisting on government cheese.
But, now, she and many others in her situation are in good comedic company as the story of one Nadya Suleman inundates our broadcast frequencies from sitcoms to school board hearings.
In the very same week amid the throngs of off-key “Lift Ev’ry Voice” refrains sung during this - Black History Month - two statements that stirred controversy were made – one in direct address by our first Black Attorney General and one in a timely, yet poorly timed editorial cartoon.
“To get to the heart of this country, one must examine its racial soul,” said Attorney General Eric Holder in a speech marking Black History Month to hundreds of Justice Department employees.
Examine its racial soul, huh? What a way to take the advice and run with it, New York Post. The paper’s famed editorial cartoonist Sean Delonas sketched a bloodied chimpanzee collapsing under the bullets of two befuddled cops who say, “They’ll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill.”
While the mass media-driven stereotype of Black achievement in rapping, dancing or shooting hoops have consumed all of American culture, in this year…2009…there is at least one shining example of an African-American succeeding devoid of his stand-out artistic ability. Some would ask, “What’s the formula for this kind of Black?”
Well, the variety of talent within Black America is not just restricted to the behind the scenes story of Notorious B.IG. or Ray Charles - in February TNT broadcast, on the heels of the instatement of our new president, the amazing story of Ben Carson. He was the man that made medical history when in 1987 he separated a pair of Siamese twins joined at the head.
The movie, based on Ben Carson’s inspirational memoir, chronicles the journey of Carson – played by Cuba Gooding, Jr. – from his frustrated inner-city days in Mo-Town to the halls of Johns Hopkins University Hospital.