What is the What, by Dave Eggers

“You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I have seen."

This is what Valentino Achak Deng thought as he was being robbed in his apartment in Atlanta, GA. Or, I should say, this is what Dave Eggers writes that Valentino Achak Deng was thinking as he was bound, bleeding, and being robbed.

Valentino is one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. What is the What, as the introduction to this novel explains, is his autobiography, as told by Dave Eggers.

Alternating between the past and present, What is the What tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, from the age of seven, when he was violently separated from his family in their Sudanese village, to the 13 years he spent in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, to his eventual exposure to Western culture and finally, the United States.

More than a coming-of-age story, What is the What is a portrait of grim despair and humanity at its worse, but also a moving and compelling tribute to human endurance.

Beginning in 1983, tens of thousands of people, displaced, their families’ fates uncertain, were forced to into the unknown to escape the horrors of Sudan’s civil war.

The Lost Boys, most under the age of ten, endured days without food, assaults, cruelty, and gunfire from soldiers and countrymen, disease, minefields and massacres, bombings from aircraft, attacks from lions, hyenas, and crocodiles. Many of the Boys did not survive the journey. After months of walking across Sudan they finally made it across the Nile to a place described as “not the worst place on the continent of Africa, but among them”, a place in which no one, simply no one but the most desperate, would ever consider spending a day. This place would become their home for one year, for two, then five, then ten. Many of the Lost Boys thought that the situations and circumstances surrounding them were temporary and that they would soon return to their villages and homes. For over ten years they lived with the constant tension and anxiety of the unknown.

And yet for all of those years Valentino maintained hope in his harrowing struggle to survive. Hope that his parents were still alive. Hope that he could one day return home.

Two and a half million people perished in Sudan’s civil war.
Some of the Lost Boys did make their way to America.

For most, the prospect of traveling to America seemed like another in a long line of reckless acts of faith. They had few personal possessions, no money, and no family where they were going. They were again leaving everything they knew to go to a land that was as much of an “unknown” as the previous lands. But America offered grace in place of suffering, serenity in place of pain. And this time the choice to relocate would be theirs.

Valentino Achak Deng said, “We had been tested as none before had been tested. We had been sent into the unknown once, and then again and again. Now we can stand and decide. This is our first chance to choose our own unknown.”

The Dinka of Sudan have a creation myth.
When God created the Earth he made the first man and woman. He made them tall and strong and more beautiful than any of the creatures on the land. And when God was done, he said “Now that you are here, on the most sacred and fertile land I have, I can give you one more thing. I can give you this creature, which is called the cow, which will provide milk and meat and prosperity of every kind, or you can have the What," The first man lifted his head to God and asked, “But what is the What?” And God said, “I cannot tell you. Still, you have to choose.”