In “What is the What,” a harrowing, bleak autobiographical account of a boyhood in Southern Sudan is turned into a uplifting, lyrical, fictional epic.
The book is the result of a collaboration of Valentino Achak Deng and David Eggers, author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (a Pulitzer Prize finalist), You Shall Know Our Velocity! and How We Are Hungry.”
Valentino Achak Deng is one of 20,000 boys who were victims of displacement, torture, and unimaginable challenges during the second Civil War in Sudan, which lasted from 1983 to 2005. Deng went on to join the group of 4,000 refugees, a diaspora of Sudanese young people, who took up existence in the United States. They’ve since become known as the Lost Boys.
Eggers interviewed Deng for over a year with the intention of writing his story in third person biographical form, but after becoming frustrated with the results, Eggers decided instead to incorporate the strengths of fiction and dictate the story through the writing style that has brought him such enormous accolades in his previous works. The resulting combination is a work of art whose power stands on its own.
Though you are aware that what you are reading is a personal account, the books narrative is woven with the expertise of skilled novelist. The story of Deng’s childhood is told through the present, looking back, beginning in his apartment in Atlanta, Ga., when he opens his door to find himself the victim of a brutal robbery. He is tied, gagged and beaten.
“It is a strange thing, I realize, but what I think at this moment is that I want to be back in Kakuma ( a refugee camp in which Deng spent ten years of his childhood and adolescence). In Kakuma there was no rain, the winds blew nine months a year, and eighty thousand war refugees from Sudan and elsewhere lived on one meal a day. But at this moment, when the woman is in my bedroom and the man is guarding me with his gun, I want to be in Kakuma, where I lived in a hut of plastic and sandbags and owned one pair of pants. I am not sure there was evil of this kind in the Kakuma refugee camp, and I want to return.”
Eventually his assailants put Deng under the watch of a small boy named Michael, who is, perhaps, age 10. Michael is the first of a number of people Deng imagines himself telling his story to throughout the book, certain that if they knew what trials he had lived through, they would come to treat him with more humanity. It is this metaphysical narrative that allows his survival story in Sudan to unravel naturally but palatably in all its immense proportions.
During his time with Michael—nicknamed TV Boy, Deng relates the story of his prewar village life with his Dinka tribe in Marial Bal, where a car driving through is a rarity, and people trouble days over whether to remove the plastic from a brand new bicycle.
“TV Boy, you are no doubt thinking that we’re absurdly primitive people, that a village that doesn’t know whether or not to remove the plastic from a bicycle—that such a place would of course be vulnerable to attack, to famine and any other calamity. And there is some truth to this. In some cases we have been slow to adapt. And yes, the world we lived in was an isolated one. There were no TVs there, I should say to you, and I imagine it would not be difficult for you to imagine what this would do to your own brain, needing as it does steady stimulation.”
But the talk is to no avail as TV boy cannot hear Deng’s story as Deng’s mouth is covered with duct tape, a metaphor for so many victims of these kind of genocidal atrocities.
Deng does manage on two occasions to work the duct tape loose. On one of those occasions the boy drops a telephone book on his head to shut him up.
“This boy thinks I am not of his species, that I am some other kind of creature, on that can be crushes under the weight of a phone book. The pain is not great, but the symbolism is disagreeable.”
It is this tone of the book that lifts it from being bleak to the level of funny and lyrical. It is also during this time with TV Boy that we hear the myth that is behind the title of the book, “What is the What,” from Deng’s father. God, after he had created earth and the monyjank, the first man and woman, then gave them the choice between having cattle or the What. God would not tell the man and woman what the What was, though. “The man and woman chose the cattle because they were God’s most perfect creation and God proved that they chose right as the Dinka lived and prospered.”
But no one knows what the What is, and after the raids on his village by the muhajadin, the heart-rending and torturous journey Deng is required to take, the temporary shelter in Ethiopia where he is traumatized, the vast refugee-camp in Kenya where he spends his adolescence, the What becomes increasingly important throughout the book.
Eventually, the robbery ends and Deng survives, but the ordeal is not over. He then has to confront hospital bureaucracy without health insurance, and attend a menial job at a fitness center that he would be in danger of losing if he called in sick.
The picture of an immigrant’s life in America, the promised land where the Lost Boys came to attend college with the hopes of eventually returning or contributing to their home country at a more peaceful time, proves troubling. The economic reality, the politics of their own diaspora with its petty jealousies, and the mental pressures that surface for his countryman because of cultural clashes all add up to a picture of America that is far from being the answer to these boys’ plights—yet there is always hope.
“I am tired of this country. I am thankful for it, yes, I have cherished many aspects of it for the three years I have been here, but I am tired of the promises. I came here, four thousand of us came here, contemplating and expecting quiet, peace, college, and safety. We expected a land without war and, I suppose, a land without misery. We were giddy and impatient.”
Throughout the book we are given contradictory experiences—horror of the kind you can’t imagine living through, and the delight of love and human creativity that flourishes on the other side of it; the despair that comes from disappointment after disappointment; and the hope that cycles in after it. It is the contrast in themes that keep the narrative from being just a survival tale, and places it firmly in the category of a riveting novel with all the development of character that one demands.
That Valentino Achak Deng is a real person makes his development all that much more inspiring a tale.
In addition readers get the benefit of knowing that all proceeds from the book will go to The Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which distributes funds to Sudanese refugees in America, rebuilding southern Sudan, beginning with Marial Bai and to organizations working for peace and humanitarian relief in Darfur. It also goes to help pay for a college education for Valentino Achak Deng. For more information: www.valentinoachakdeng.com.
