Daniel Krikke

Bruce

Bruce, 27, drives past the school where he lived as a child. This is where the mischief started, he explains. His aunt believes it began with his parents—smoking joints was more important to them than their son. Drugs and neglect were givens in his life. But now, after years in institutions and prison, he is free. Bruce learns, for the first time in his life, to reflect on his habits, behavior, and feelings. He visits his father and travels to his relatives abroad as he attempts to come to terms with them and himself. At the boxing school he gets to vent his frustrations—with the punching bag, and in conversation with his best friend Lamyn. Reinventing himself isn’t always a smooth process—when he finds it difficult to answer a question, he sometimes feels like he’s going to “freak out” again. But each time, he pulls himself together. He learns to speak a new language, even with his parents. Despite their difficult relationship, he wants to take care of them in their old age.

Bruce

Bruce, 27, drives past the school where he lived as a child. This is where the mischief started, he explains. His aunt believes it began with his parents—smoking joints was more important to them than their son. Drugs and neglect were givens in his life. But now, after years in institutions and prison, he is free. Bruce learns, for the first time in his life, to reflect on his habits, behavior, and feelings. He visits his father and travels to his relatives abroad as he attempts to come to terms with them and himself. At the boxing school he gets to vent his frustrations—with the punching bag, and in conversation with his best friend Lamyn. Reinventing himself isn’t always a smooth process—when he finds it difficult to answer a question, he sometimes feels like he’s going to “freak out” again. But each time, he pulls himself together. He learns to speak a new language, even with his parents. Despite their difficult relationship, he wants to take care of them in their old age.

Scared of Revolution

Umar Bin Hassan hasn’t even hit 70 yet, but he walks with difficulty and there’s sadness and fatigue in his eyes. As a member of The Last Poets, a group of performance poets who expressed the progressive spirit of the times starting in the late 1960s, he was a major influence on later hip-hop artists. In one of his best-known pieces, Ni****s are Scared of Revolution, he criticizes his black brothers’ destructive, macho behavior. Scared of Revolution concentrates on Hassan’s personal life, in which he still fights his demons. He grew up poor with a violent, unpredictable father, which in turn left him with an inferiority complex. In the course of his adult life, he has had a string of bad relationships and left children without a father figure. In his darkest hour, he also battled a crack addiction.