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Last Updated: May 30th, 2008 - 11:49:13 |
In the city of Baltimore, 76 percent of African American males do not graduate from high school.
This shocking statistic is the subtext for “Boys of Baraka,” a documentary that debuted last year on the film festival scene and is opening theatrically across the country. Produced on a shoestring budget with the Independent Television Service and distributed by Thinkfilm, the two-hour production tells the stories of several “at-risk” Baltimore boys who are recruited to attend a boarding school in rural Kenya. The aim of the school, The Baraka School, is to prepare these middle school-age males to enter and thrive at competitive high schools.
The Baltimore environment of these boys is the ‘hood’—either long stretches of mostly abandoned row houses or low-income public housing. Their families are the poor and the working poor, who are battling all manner of social ills. The mother of one boy, Devon, is in and out of prison. Richard, who we learn may suffer from learning disabilities but has never been tested, visits a prison to see his father, who is serving a 13-year sentence for shooting Richard’s mother in the leg. Classroom discipline in the public schools attended by the boys attend seems almost non-existent. Most of the boys are receiving failing grades. Most of the mothers, who are not with the fathers, say they do not want their sons to grow up to be like their son’s fathers.
These stories and lives of poverty are not easy to watch, even for those of us accustomed to being cinema voyeurs. The filmmakers, Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady, are White. Except for the Baltimore recruiter, every teacher and administrator shown affiliated with the Baraka School is also White. Despite the gripping nature of the stories being told, the Black viewer might be left here in the odd position of being a voyeur of the voyeur, as if we are watching through the eyes of missionaries as they enter the “jungle.” Though there is an in-depth look at the problems of the boys, this film does not delve equally into the background, funding or problems of the school, which, in reality, faced challenges about its curriculum, depiction of White religious images and a dearth of Black leadership. The failure to dig more deeply keeps this good movie from being great and, perhaps inadvertently, pushes it into the category of narratives that offer great White saviors and sorry Black downtrodden.
More than other recent documentaries about poor Blacks, however, “Boys of Baraka” manages to convey both the depth of poverty’s pathology and the remarkable ways that children fashion life and dreams for themselves, despite it all. It captures boys being boys, whether they are in a chaotic school cafeteria in Baltimore, or in a dormitory in Kenya, sneaking frogs and lizards into their rooms. As one boy cuddles a new spikey-haired pet, he declares, “There is something better than a cat—and it’s a hedgehog!”
“The Boys of Baraka” puts in our faces the stark flipside to popular images of poverty chic and ghetto fabulous. There’s nothing too fabulous or chic about a young life being limited or derailed because of what is, really, society’s breakdown.
Esther Iverem ireview of Boys of Baraka also appeared on www.BET.com. Her new book of poems, ‘Living in Babylon’ is available on Amazon.com
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
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