Sharing Stories, Linking Lives: Literacy Practices Among ... - CPLS

Perry Sudanese Refugees
Sharing Stories, Linking Lives:
Literacy Practices Among Sudanese refugees
Ours is an oral tradition. My people told stories about the raids and slaves–they sang
about slavery. But they did not write books or newspaper stories about their suffering.
And they certainly did not file reports to international human rights organizations. That
is changing, as Dinka refugees move to the West and organize. (Bok, 2003, p. 249)
Introduction
This chapter presents a case study of the literacy practices of southern Sudanese refugee
youth–the so-called “Lost Boys”–in Michigan. There are approximately 17,000 southern
Sudanese refugees in the United States today (Bok, 2003); of these, approximately 1,000 live in
Michigan, and about a quarter of Michigan’s Sudanese refugees come from the group known as
the “Lost Boys”. These youth, primarily boys, were orphaned by the 20-year-old civil war in the
Sudan, made a grueling journey on foot across Africa, lived for years in the Kakuma Refugee
Camp in Kenya, and eventually were resettled in American communities. The purpose of this
case study was to describe the literacy practices of these Sudanese refugees, both in their current
lives in America and in their past lives in Africa.
In a recent article, Luke (2003) lays out an agenda for literacy research. He suggests that
literacy researchers should focus their attentions on questions such as:
Which linguistic competencies, discourses and textual resources, and multiliteracies are
accessible? How, in what blended and separate domains and to what ends, are different
languages used? How do people use languages, texts, discourses, and literacies as
convertible and transformative resources in homes, communities and schools? How are
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