Life > October 25, 2007

By Meg Smith | Staff writer

“You have no ears for someone like me,” Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng challenges his reader in What is the What (McSweeny’s; 475 pages), the powerful story of his life written by Dave Eggers, author of the modern classic A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

As one of the “Lost Boys” of Southern Sudan, Deng left his village around the age of 6 or 7 after a vicious attack by the militia of the Sudanese government, not knowing if anyone in his family had escaped the murder, fire, rape and enslavement wrought.

He walked over 800 miles to the relative and unreliable safety of Ethiopia with thousands of other unaccompanied minors. Likely many of us have likely heard harrowing headline-worthy snippets of their journey, of the populations of boys decimated by starvation, land mines, bombs and disease. But just as likely, besides those few attention-grabbing details, we know little of their history, experience or present circumstances.

Eggers indicts himself as well as us when he laments in an essay about the novel’s creation that “most of our compassion is like so much mist, fleeting and inconsequential.”

It is for this reason that Eggers and Deng have collaborated on this novel to, as Valentino says in the novel’s preface “reach out to others … so as to prevent the same horrors from repeating themselves.”

The two decided to classify What is the What as a fictional autobiography because Deng “over the course of many years…told (his) story orally” to Eggers, who “then concocted this novel, approximating (Deng’s) own voice and using the basic events of (his) life as the foundation.” Eggers infuses Deng’s tragic story of unimaginable hardship with simple grace and humanity, assuming the understated, intensely likeable narrative voice of the protagonist to tell of Valentino’s early life in his village, his horrific experiences fleeing from Sudan’s civil war to refugee camp after refugee camp and his struggles after immigrating to America.

For Valentino, the pillaging of his village by the murahaleen, the militia charged by Sudan’s Muslim government that killed rebels “was the beginning of the end of knowing life would continue. Do you have a feeling … that you will wake up tomorrow? That you will eat tomorrow? That the world will not end tomorrow?”

He says of the Lost Boys’ ensuing grueling walk, “I (could) have forgotten that I had not been born on this journey. That I had lived before this … I could have imagined myself born here in the tall grasses, paths broken by the boys before me, that I had never had a family, had never had a home, had never slept under a roof, had never eaten enough warm food to fill my stomach, had never fallen asleep feeling safe and knowing what could and could not happen when the sun rose again.”

The novel’s small boys experience a far more brutal reality than most of us can even imagine. Valentino, then called Achak, endures starvation, thirst, sickness, persecution and witnesses countless atrocities.

He walks next to boys who are suddenly snatched by lions; he hears the crunching and the screams. He rides in a truckbed laden with corpses. He sees two boys killed by a female Ethiopian soldier.

Death in their ranks becomes common: “Boys died of malaria, they starved, they died of infections.” Some die only because they lose their will to live.

One such boy decides to simply stop walking after a bombing by government aircraft, refusing to be “hunted” anymore. He steps into a hole created by a bomb, and all the boys “said goodbye to him because we were accustomed to boys dying and leaving the group in many ways.”

Achak himself at one point decides to sit down and wait for death, and is saved only by the prodding of a friend. In the camps, boys are easily lured away by the promises of the rebel army, becoming child soldiers subjected to harsh beatings and probable death. Achak says with sparsely elegant sorrow, “It is very easy for a boy to die in Sudan.”

Achak risks losing his place in the group of walking boys when he stays behind to bury his childhood friend. After burying the boy, Achak apologizes to him: “I told William K that I was sorry. I was sorry I had not known how sick he was. That I had not found a way to keep him alive. That I was the last person he saw on this earth. That he could not say goodbye to his mother and father, that only I would know where his body lay. It was a broken world, I knew then, that would allow a boy such as me to bury a boy such as William K.”

Valentino spends over 13 years in various refugee camps before he is chosen, with 4,000 other “Lost Boys” to immigrate to America. There, “giddy and impatient,” after waiting “twenty years only to know that something good will happen,” they expected “peace and college and safety,” and they “wanted it all immediately — families, the ability to send money home, advanced degrees, and finally some influence.”

But the men find adjusting to life in the United States more difficult than they imagined, and “the pressures upon us, the promises we cannot keep with ourselves” threaten to break them. “We refugees can be celebrated one day, helped and lifted up, and then utterly ignored by all when we prove to be a nuisance.”

One of the most heartrending scenes in the entire incredibly wrenching novel occurs when Valentino, leaving Kenya for America, is told to “make the Sudanese proud” and answers, “‘I will’,” clarifying that “At that moment, I believed I could.”

He has indeed given his people reason to take pride in him with the publication of this book. All author proceeds will go to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which distributes funds to Sudanese refugees in America, to the rebuilding of Southern Sudan, to Valentino’s college education and to organizations working for peace and humanitarian relief in Darfur. For more information, visit http://www.valentinoachakdeng.org.

But beyond the monetary gains of the book, the novel diminishes the suffering of Valentino and his fellow Sudanese refugees by sharing it with What is the What’s reader. The book expresses the power of storytelling to diffuse the narrator’s suffering, an idea familiar to readers of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Throughout the novel, Valentino mutely tells his story to those who are indifferent to or unaware of his past and present pain: “The stories emanate from me all the time I am awake and breathing, and I want everyone to hear them. Written words are rare in small villages like mine, and it is my right and obligation to send my stories into the world, even if silently, even if utterly powerless.”

His stories are silent and powerless no more. He has given us ears.