<em>Emmanuel Jal:</em> A Modern-Day Nomad's Approach to Peacebuilding through Music
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Emmanuel Jal:A Modern-Day Nomad’s Approach to Peacebuilding Through Music Lee-Anne Ragan (bio) and Emmanuel Jal (bio) I. INTRODUCTION Emmanuel Jal, a self-described modern-day nomad, was born circa 1980 in war-torn Sudan. After witnessing horrific violence and being forced to serve as a child soldier for approximately five years, he was rescued by an aid worker and smuggled into Kenya, after which he enrolled in school, discovered hip hop music, and later became a Canadian resident. Today, Jal is an internationally renowned peace activist, singer, and actor. In this essay, we explore Jal’s songs and the ways they promote peacebuilding through music. Through interviews conducted in Vancouver on July 15, 2012, and in Nairobi on April 14, 2014, we unpack the stories and meaning behind three of his favorite peace songs: “Forced to Sin,” “Emma,” and “We Want Peace.”1 They reveal the redeeming power of music to heal a man who underwent horrific violence as a child, and to advocate for peace and forgiveness in South Sudan and the world. II. “FORCED TO SIN”: FORGIVENESS, EMPATHY, AND HEALING In the 1980s and 1990s, four hundred “orphaned Sudanese children (the so-called lost boys)” tried to flee the war in Sudan, trekking hundreds [End Page 162] of miles on foot towards the perceived safety of Ethiopia (Hermes 2005). The majority died along the way from fighting, exhaustion, animals, sickness, and hunger; Jal is one of only 16 to survive. Jal’s 2008 song “Forced to Sin” recounts this experience and the ways in which the struggle to survive brings out the best and worst in him and others. Recalling how he considered cannibalism on the journey, he sings: SometimesWe find ourselves pushed toExtremities of circumstancesWhere our natural survival instinctsGovern our actionsWhich forces us to do things that weUnder normal circumstancesWould consider to beInhuman and barbaric2 With this song, Jal intended to bring about empathy for and awareness of the ordeal of child soldiers. To him, music and poetry have the power to reach the mind, heart, and soul, and this song shares the difficulties he and others went through as children in war. According to Jal, the song is also about self-forgiveness. He considers that forgiveness towards self and others comes with understanding, saying, “Forgiveness will elevate you to a form of power that you don’t actually know as a person until you experience it because you become free.”3 Jal views his music as a path back to himself and to healing. When many young people would have dulled their memories of horrific violence and conflict with drugs or alcohol or, perhaps worse, continued the cycle of violence, Jal turned to music as an outlet for healing and transformation. He says: “I just say music is for me to communicate to the wider audience, and music is where I become a child again. This is where I go to see heaven and any human being that doesn’t listen to music will go mad. It’s a therapy; it’s a pain killer for me.”4 Following the message of his own rhymes, Jal created Lose to Win in 2008 to motivate individuals to lose something in order to win for the greater good and make a positive change for the world at large. In the campaign, which ended in December 2013, participants gave up something of their choice and donated money to build schools in South Sudan. It originated when Jal decided to eat one meal a day to raise [End Page 163] money and thought it would take about a month to raise enough funds to build a school. Instead, it took 662 days, but “we put kids that were learning under the trees into classes.”5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qR-WesCJa4 III. “EMMA”: CHANGE, PEACE, AND CULTURE Some of Jal’s songs are addressed to world leaders (e.g., “Vagina”), others to the everyday person (“We Want Peace”). “Emma” was written for women, and is dedicated to Emma McCune, an aid worker who rescued him in 1991 (Rock.Paper.Scissors Inc. 2012). In “Emma,” Jal...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".