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My passion for the photographic image is rooted in childhood, though I took my first photograph just five years ago. Born in Sudan, I grew up amid the recurring waves of civil war. From infancy I was shifted from village to village and moved between members of my extended family, eventually traveling with them through Uganda, Kenya, and finally to a refugee camp. Three years latter, the INS determined that we were eligible for resettlement in the United States. There is no record of where I traveled, no visual documentation. The vivid images I carry with me are uncaptured photographs: Dust rising around a circle of my mothers and aunts as they kneel and pound the earth with their hands in mourning; my grandfather sitting under the tika tree smoking his pipe in the empty courtyard as I was taken away and he was left behind.I took note of photography for the first time when I was 13 years old. The photos were in a history book. One was a picture of skeletal men staring out from bunk beds at Dachau concentration camp, the other was a naked girl, my age, running in terror among other children down a road in Vietnam, her village in flames behind her. I said to myself, “Someone had been there, had been there, had seen, and had taken a photograph.†Where are the photos of the people I have been with in the refugee camps? Where is our story? I did not think of photography as something I could do then; I understood that a camera was a sophisticated machine, for use only by knowledgeable people, for those who could afford it.My turning point with photography came in my second year of college when I studied the work of Robert Frank, a Swiss photographer who traveled through the USA in the mid 1950s. Though a foreigner, he told the story of ordinary Americans frame by straightforward frame in a way that had not yet been done. I felt as though his work gave me, another outsider, permission. ............................................................ ............................Where we came from, the sky cries and the earth cracks as tears drop like the rain and blood flows like the Nile.Where we came from, the sound of sorrow echoes and we thought death will never stop.Where we came from, we are still slaves of one another like dogs with chains. Our shadows walk but the air never movesThen it ends in the blink of an eye and you wake up in the place of your dreams.But still...You think your prayers will be answered but the new struggle begins.Where you are, things sparkle in front of your face, not like in your dreams. It is real.Where you are, everything is years beyond your knowledge.So you run to catch up until your chest burns with pain. Not from where you're running, but to where you're running.Where you are, you think your prayers will be answered but the new struggle begins and that's when we all got vacuumed into this so-called American dream.Opportunity comes lost of identity. Lost boys, lost girls welcome to America. January 1st, we all got reborn. Put on you mask, that's how you will survive this land. Baggy jeans, white Ts, boys, get your swag on. Girls let's get our weaves on. Don't forget in advance to get your cream on.White face Black knuckle You didn't get it from your mama.She is the first daughter of the sun, black as night. Divine, she is the lost Queen. What ever happened to our African dream? Exploited. Abused. Used and not understood while we are doing decades of wars, genocide, corrupting ourselves to the root until there is no seed to bear new fruit.When we got the chance to get away, we ran fast without turning back or moving forward. Only got vacuumed into this so-called American dream. Permanent project housing, while rolling with our cars wheels spinning going nowhere. Working from 7 to 11. Schooling, cause that's what we were told is power. Chasing dreams close to impossible. Want to be anything thing photocopied other than us. Yes, maybe we will be all of that except for who we really are. Not lost boys or lost girls and not even a refugee, but a Sudanese.So what is your story?By:Terekah NaJuwan (Bimbi)
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