Book Review: "What Is the What"

“What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng.” A novel by Dave Eggers. McSweeney’s 2006. $26. 475 pages.

The village was burning and the horsemen were circling when Valentino Achak Deng fled his family and his home in southern Sudan as a 7-year-old boy. “What Is the What” captures his hellish journey from his war-torn country to the refugee camps of Ethiopia and Kenya, and finally to the United States as one of the resettled “Lost Boy” refugees, so named because many had lost their parents. As Deng writes in the preface, “This is simply one man’s story, subjectively told,” to author Dave Eggers.

It’s a helluva story though. The details are so horrific it’s almost easier to imagine they never happened. But they did, and therein lies the purpose of this book — to document the atrocities Deng and his fellow Sudanese faced and still face. As I read, I could almost hear the ghosts among the pages whisper, “Never forget.”

As Deng walked with hundreds of other boys to the Sudanese-Ethiopian border under the guidance of their impromptu 18-year-old leader Dut, death was a constant companion. In the United States, it’s hard to think of a child crossing the street safely, let alone dodging wild animals, rebel soldiers and machine-gun-toting murahaleen (the government-backed Arab militia that ravaged the non-Arab tribes and villages of southern Sudan).

The boys who did manage to trudge on had to be careful not to linger: “Sleeping for more than an hour in the sun was sure to bring carrion birds, and we had to be vigilant, lest the birds begin to feast while we were alive.”

The compelling story gets worse, much worse. The war between the Sudanese government and the southern rebels killed an estimated two million people and displaced many others. It also enabled a brisk slave trade. Deng’s boyhood friend Moses was abducted by the murahaleen and became a slave. Moses’ account is one of the book’s hardest passages to read: “The Arab was putting a burning metal rod to my head…. In my ear, he branded the number 8, turned on its side…. — Now you will always know who owns you, this man said to me.” When pressed about the slavery issue, the Sudanese government called them “consensual work arrangements,” Deng said.

It’s hard to pick apart such a weighty, well-intentioned book, but it does suffer from two flaws. The first glaring weakness is that Eggers and Deng agreed to call this book a novel, thereby allowing naysayers to dismiss whatever they dislike as fiction. Their decision leaves the book occupying the netherworld between fiction and non-fiction.

Eggers also overuses an annoying literary device. Instead of alternating between Deng’s present-day life in Atlanta and his past life in Sudan from chapter to chapter, Eggers seizes on random passersby in Deng’s days to launch into different recollections.

Here Eggers clumsily inserts a barely sketched woman from the health club where Deng works to segue into a musing on identity: “The last woman of the rush is Dorsetta Lewis, one of the few African-American women who works out at this club.” Two pages later, we return to Dorsetta: “Dorsetta, I pretend that I know who I am now, but I simply don’t. I’m not an American and it seems difficult now to call myself Sudanese.” One more brief mention and she is gone as quickly as she came.

Absent these two flaws, “What Is the What” easily captivated and educated me beyond the Darfur conflict, where much of the world’s attention has focused in the past three years. Separate from the longtime civil war, this western region of Sudan has lost hundreds of thousands of non-Arab residents in what the U.S. government has called genocide at the hands of the Janjaweed, an Arab militia. But nothing has stopped the violence in Sudan. Not pronouncements, not multiparty talks and not paltry peacekeeping forces sent by the African Union.

Until it stops, the story must be told. And veteran novelist Eggers, author of the rambling Gen-X tome “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” obliges in this unconventional autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng. Eggers wisely lets Deng’s story tell itself, rather than embellish it with florid, overworked prose. The result of Egger’s simple narrative style is a relationship forged over hundreds of pages between the reader and the protagonist. When I closed “What Is the What,” I felt as if I knew Deng. Finally a face, or even a friend, to accompany the news stories filed from Sudan.

-Reviewed by: Allison Loudermilk