'Lost' and found

WALTHAM -- When Panther Alier and scores of other young boys and girls trekked more than 1,000 miles out of battle-ravaged southern Sudan in the 1980s and '90s, they had no idea where they would end up. They only hoped it would be better than what they left behind.

One of the few things Alier and the other "Lost Boys" and "Lost Girls" carried was a Bible. Whenever he felt on the verge of giving up hope, he would remember the story of Exodus.

"The experiences we related to was the Children of Israel, and how one day they were given the promised land," said Alier, now 29. "And that kept us alive."

Alier finds it fitting that nearly 20 years later, a university founded by Jews plans to preserve and celebrate the culture he was forced to leave behind as a boy.

Brandeis University is showcasing paintings by Sudanese refugees in "Leave the Bones and Catch the Land," the first exhibition organized by its fledgling Southern Sudan Cultural Documentation Center. The title, a phrase that appears in one of the paintings, refers to a traditional admonition to move beyond tragedy and embrace life.

The plight of the Sudanese struck a chord at Brandeis, where many students have relatives who survived another genocide, the Holocaust. The university is home to 10 centers and institutes that focus on cultural groups or geographic regions, most having to do with Judaism and the Jewish diaspora.

The Sudan center was the unexpected outgrowth of an anthropology course, Museums and Public Memory, offered for the first time last year. At its outset, professor Mark Auslander had envisioned students tackling a number of projects, including writing labels for a few paintings by Sudanese refugees that had been on display in a small department gallery.

As it turned out, one of the students had more than a passing interest in the artwork. A "Lost Girl," Aduei Riak had spent part of her childhood in a refugee camp in Kakuma, Kenya, where they were painted. She fled southern Sudan at age 3, was separated from her family at 8, and settled in Belmont when she was 16. Now she is a junior at Brandeis pursuing a double major in anthropology and international and global studies.

For the two dozen students in Auslander's class, the legacy of Sudan's brutal civil war no longer was the subject of a history book, but alive and sitting right next to them.

"She was an amazing person -- very open to sharing many aspects of her experience," Auslander said.

Inspired by Riak, the class devote d the semester to researching the history and culture of Sudan's southern provinces. They spent hours with refugees who had settled in New England, including Alier, asking about their lives before and after they fled their country's 22-year civil war. Since most of the artists in the exhibition are still in Africa and unreachable, the students recorded the local Sudanese for the accompanying audio tour.

Miriam Landau, a Jewish student in the class who has relatives who perished in Nazi Germany's Holocaust, said working on the display changed the way she perceives genocide.

"For me the Holocaust is something that happened so long ago, and I have survivors around me. It was something that happened for four years and was finished," Landau said. "But this opened my eyes a lot, not only to genocide and its forms, but also about poverty. Even though the militia isn't going into Kakuma refugee camp and killing people, there's still hunger, there's still poor sanitation, there are still things that are killing them."

Anna Jaysane-Darr, a doctoral student in anthropology who worked on the exhibition's website, said she is thinking about switching her area of focus from South Africa to Sudan.

"I think everyone worked a lot harder on this, put a lot more time into this, than anything in our lives," said Jaysane-Darr. "Not because it was asked of us, but because we felt this responsibility to the artists and to the community."

Classmate Adi Shmuel said the experience had turned her into an activist.

"A lot of the time people try to not talk about genocides when they're happening. It's unfortunate because if we just talk about it, we can prevent it," Shmuel said. "Our class doesn't want to end it here, we want to keep going with this. I want to see us do some lobbying in Washington, D.C."

Riak said working on the exhibition "was exhausting."

"The hardest thing I experienced... was to separate myself from the paintings," she said. "It was hard for me to say I'm going to play the role of the student and not directly narrate what happened."

The paintings are on loan from the Lincoln-based Sudanese Education Fund, set up to help Riak and other Sudanese refugees go to college. The fund planned to auction off the paintings as a fund-raiser, but Riak objected. Selling them was like selling her history, she told the fund's director, Susan Winship.

"These paintings are a testimony to what was lost, and how to bring it back," said Riak. "To reconcile with the past and move on with the future."

In the end, the painting s were sold to buyers who agreed to give them back to the fund. Proceeds were sent to the artists in the refugee camp.

The paintings feature symbolic representations of tribal mythology and traditions. Some show scenes from Sudan; others from the refugee camp.

"Empty Village" shows a house with a darkened door and two almost imperceptible black dots on the horizon. The students were able to talk to the artist, Atem Aleu, who has resettled in Utah.

"Inside the dark door were his own memories of the massacre" of his village, said Auslander. "Those two little dots at the horizon of the painting, that we thought were just two little dots, were actually him and his brother, fleeing."

The exhibition will be at Goldfarb Library until Feb. 1. But Auslander said faculty at several colleges and high schools had contacted him about hosting it, including Tufts University and Haverford College in Pennsylvania.

The center still doesn't have a physical location, its collection primarily consisting of the paintings, videos of Kakuma camp, photographs, and audiotapes of advice that camp elders gave to refugees before they were resettled. Auslander is its de facto director, although he has informal assistance from colleagues who study African culture and history.

Brandeis president Jehuda Reinharz said he is exploring ways to fund the center's work.

"It's already playing a role, and that's to really draw attention from a large segment of the community to the war in the Sudan, to the plight of the refugees; to the destruction not only of human beings, families and so on, but also of culture," said Reinharz. "These paintings are really a way to preserve the memory of those refugees, and it's really the only thing they can hold on to when they're here."

Auslander said the center is beginning to collect less tangible artifacts, such as music, dance, and oral history. Eventually, he hopes to document the culture's food, dress, and ritual body art. He noted that Sudanese poetry, once an oral tradition, is now being written down.

"I always tell my students that culture is not dead, it's not something that you just pass down and receive, it's something that is always evolving... that under conditions of terror and trauma, the human nature responds, often in remarkable and beautiful ways," Auslander said.

The center is also preserving a past that some of the Lost Boys and Girls were too young to remember. Alier was 10 when he and many of the males in his extended family were attacked at a cattle camp. He never had the chance to learn the customs and traditions of his tribe.

"I don't know how we will reclaim that. We are no longer children as we speak right now," said Alier, who lives in Somerville.

"I would really like to see things that are from the villages that we left from. I would like to see the life that the people lived before the war," he said.

"These are the things we need to see and remind ourselves, and hopefully pass them on to the next generation."

"Leave the Bones and Catch the Land" is on display in Goldfarb Library on the Brandeis campus in Waltham until Feb. 1, and can be seen online at brandeis.edu/projects/sudan_center/kakuma_exhibit. Stephanie V. Siek can be reached at ssiek@globe.com.