Emmanuel Jal

“I was shocked when I came to New Orleans. I never knew there were beggars on the streets here. I didn't know that there were poor people. I thought this was Heaven, you know?”

“Violence in Darfur is cataclysmic.”

“I would advise dancers, musicians and others in the entertainment industry to take up yoga, as it clears the mind and creates a sense of balance and stillness which is important for any perf...”

“I still have nightmares of dead comrades, a long time ago, talking to me. 'Emmanuel, don't forget about us, don't give up, keep telling our story.'”

“When you don't educate the people, you're crippling them. You are, you're not giving them ways to survive.”

“When I first went to school, I was fighting all the time. The soldier mentality was still in me. I kept getting expelled. I found it hard to take instructions from anyone who wasn't a milita...”

“I'm constantly seen as a 'foreigner,' and I need my passport to prove my identity, to keep moving and to carry on my work.”

“If I sleep for more than half an hour, I get horrible dreams in which I'm firing a gun and helicopters are coming down.”

“I don't know anywhere where the people are hungrier for education than South Sudan.”

“When I was in south Sudan, people used to rap in my village. But the rapping was more in the mother tongue, Nuer.”

“In times of war, starvation, hunger and injustice, such tragedy can only be put aside if you allow yourself to be uplifted through music, film and dance.”

“The only foreign policy advice I heard from China was when they said to Sudan, 'Don't go back to war.' That's all they said. They didn't push anything else.”