"Imagine going without education for most of your life," says Valentino Achak Deng, summarizing the plight of his generation of Sudanese countrymen. "Imagine that in your entire lifetime there has been war."
Deng is the subject of Dave Eggers' new book What Is the What, a novelized biography based on four years of extensive research and collaboration between the author and his subject, who is one of the nearly 3,000 "Lost Boys of Sudan." The novel tracks Deng from his early youth, marked by the outbreak of the Sudanese Civil War, through the decade and a half that separates that time from his eventual relocation to Atlanta, Georgia and his gradual acclimation to American society.
Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) is donating every penny of the book's proceeds to fund the Valentino Achak Deng foundation, which will help in rebuilding Southern Sudan and in assisting other Lost Boys achieve their dreams of attending college in America. recess' Brian McGinn spoke recently with both Eggers and Deng.
recess: Dave, today you have huge governments operating as faceless entities and, in constrast, you've got Valentino, a warm, hopeful person. It seems so strange and also so beautiful that individual human stories can transcend greater atrocities.
Dave Eggers: That's the whole point of the book in a way-especially in showing Southern Sudan and Marial Bai [Deng's hometown] before the war. It's a real world. It's a real town, very much like the towns that we all grow up in here in the U.S.-there's a market, you have parents. There's a church and a school and a playground and whatever else. You have your friends and you play with them, and you like girls. It's a complete life, like our lives or the lives of anybody anywhere in the world. When we see images of Darfur, we see corpses in the sand but we never see what's lost. What was life before? When it comes to Darfurians and the Southern Sudanese before them, it's harder for us to empathize on a tangible level. It's like, "Well, I don't know what their lives are like, I don't know what their hopes and dreams are, I don't really have as clear a sense of their souls as I do my own countrymen."
Why is the book in Valentino's voice? Obviously, Sudanese culture is steeped in oral tradition, but what else went into that decision?
DE: I wanted the book to be completely about Valentino. I wanted to disappear completely. Oddly enough, the best way to disappear is to inhabit somebody else completely-in this case, to speak through Valentino. That was one goal. The other part of it was that Valentino is a really brilliant speaker. He's told his story in different forms many different times and I'd seen him with different audiences-I know how he shapes it for this audience and that audience. This book is just Valentino speaking to a different audience.
Valentino, how did you get through the hard times?
VAD: I come from a culture where if you are a man you have to be ready to face challenges. To be among so many other people [traveling across Sudan] helped me to realize I was not the only one facing that condition. I realized that on some days things can be bad, and some days things can be better. That was essentially what my life was, since I didn't have my family around me all the time.
Some days things will be bad, some days things will be better?
VAD: Some days people were going to die, and there was the possibility I might get killed; most days I was just going to survive and be happy for surviving. Everything builds from there. After every incident I discovered something about myself. There were days that I thought, "Oh, this is unbearable. I don't deserve to live, why don't I don't just call it a life? Why don't I just finish myself so I don't have to suffer?" Now there are days that I say, "If I had done this 10 years ago, what would have become of what I am doing today?"
Dave, what interests you so much about movement and travel? It seems to be a connecting thread that runs through all of your work, from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius to short stories like "After I Fell In The River and Before I Drowned," and definitely What Is the What.
DE: I have three answers. None of them are definitive, because I don't quite understand it myself.
One is that I didn't really travel that much as a kid. I didn't leave the country until I was 25. Then I was just naively struck by everything I saw, especially traveling in developing countries-the inequity and the bizarre and terrible absurdity of having the means to travel to places where some of the people are desperately poor. Just driving through and then leaving again still strikes me as completely-well, I haven't been able to process it.
Then there's a totally different aspect of it, in that I think the process of writing is kind of boring. You're sitting alone in a shed or in your garage for months or years on end. I just feel that if I'm going to be sitting there having this sedentary existence, the very least I can do is to make it interesting to myself-by writing about faraway places and people traveling and doing things like that. So much of [writing] is so grueling. What Is the What was incredibly grueling almost all the way through.
The third reason is just that inherently, characters going from one place to another are more interesting for me than characters that are static. I'm more interested in searchers and adventurers and physically restless people than I am in people that sit in one place all of their lives and-
-think that they've already found, rather than are constantly trying to find.
DE: That kind of stuff isn't as interesting to me as people out discovering things. As a non-believer in God or an afterlife, I think that the closest thing we have to that is trying to see as much of this world as we can. There's enough for 20 afterlives right here on this planet.
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