What Is the What

I had heard of the Lost Boys of Sudan before reading this, but they didn’t feel real to me – theirs was a story I was disconnected from. In this book, Eggers connected me. 

He follows one boy from age seven through young adulthood as he treks across Sudan alone at times and with many other boys at other times, separated from his family and pursued by armed militants who want to kill them. 

We get to see how the global greed for oil can destroy people who are totally non complicit. We get to see a child face obstacles… show more.

When One Book, One Philadelphia called me in my office at Drexel University and asked me to select 10 students to interview 10 South Sudanese refugees for a One Book project, I read Dave Egger’s epic tale of Valentino Achak Deng’s survival as a so-called “Lost Boy" of Sudan. Valentino along with thousands of other “Lost Boys” was forced to separate from his parents at a young age and trek thousands of miles across Sudan, Ethiopia, and Kenya without resources to food or water to arrive at several refugee camps. This is Valentino’s story yet it resonates with fleeing people… show more.

Okay, this is a bit of an outlier, since the author, did not live as an expatriate in Africa. Dave Eggers, well-known for his own very-American memoir, wrote an autobiography of one of the “Lost Boys” of South Sudan, who wandered hundreds of miles after being separated from parents by marauding Arab militia. Valentino Achak Deng, along with a starving band of Dinka boys, eventually crossed into Ethiopia but had to flee when soldiers turned on the refugees. He and others hiked all the way into Kenya, where they lived in limbo. Although Eggers has been criticized for appropriating Deng’s… show more.

An American author wrote an autobiographical novel about the journey of a refugee from the Sudanese civil war? Skeptical red flags going up all over the place. But the story is based on actual refugee Valentino Achak Deng (he and Dave Eggers are friends), and the proceeds go to a foundation birthed in Deng’s name. Which Deng now uses to fund schools in his native South Sudan. But then I read it. And it’s good. Like, really, really good. Heartbreaking yet hopeful, and if I forgot about Eggers, I would completely believe that Deng is sitting right in front of… show more.

As a white man who writes intimate books about black people, I find that this book raises questions that go to the core of what I do. The author is Dave Eggers, a white American. The book’s protagonist and narrator, Valentino Achak Deng, is a refugee from Sudan’s civil war. Eggers offers the book as a novel. Yet Deng is not a fictional character. He is a living person. And when the book came out, he promoted it as his true story. What Is the What was published in 2006. So much has changed since then. Is a collaborative project… show more.