Burnside Collective Reading: What is the What, by Dave Eggers

An introductory essay from Dave Johnson, co-moderator of Burnside Collective Reading:

Welcome to the first installment of the BWC reading community. Over the next several weeks this page will be the site of an online conversation about Dave Eggers’ most recent novel What is the What, a fictionalized account of a the life experience of a young Sudanese man named Valentino Achak Deng. There are some questions at the end of this introductory essay to which you may respond, but this space is for the BWC reading community to interact with the book and with each other. There are no rules save this one: be kind in your responses, both to the book and to each other. What is the What poses significant and difficult questions and this space should be a place where those questions can be explored without fear.

In 1987 and 1988 humanitarian aid workers in Ethiopia began reporting the arrival of young boys - hundreds at first, then thousands - at refugee camps on the other side of the Sudan-Ethiopia border. These boys had been orphaned by a brutal civil war that has consumed southern Sudan for 40 or its 51 years of post-colonial independence. They should have been sitting in an elementary school classroom or playing soccer; instead, they were staggering into refugee camps after walking hundreds of miles across an unforgiving Sudanese landscape. There were no adults to protect them. Many had witnessed the rape and murder of their families and the burning of their homes. All had watched as other boys fell along the way to starvation and disease and attacks by wild animals. And for over a decade they were forgotten and invisible, until 2001 when the first of approximately 3800 of the “Lost Boys” began arriving in the United States as part a unique refugee relocation program.

What is the What is a story of the experiences of Valentino Achak Deng, a real Lost Boy who fled from his home in southern Sudan when janjaweed militias, backed by the Sudanese government, attacked and destroyed his village. The novel is written in the voice of Valentino as a recollection of his life before violence entered his world, his flight to and experiences in refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, and his new life in the United States. The narrative travels back and forth in time as Valentino imagines himself telling his story to a series of strangers he encounters throughout the day.

Early in What is the What it becomes clear there is a larger story to tell than that of just one young African man. Valentino’s story is also the story of Sudan, which is in many ways the story of post-colonial, conflict-ridden Africa. These meta-narratives are directed less toward the individual reader and more toward the industrialized West - to the self-involved millions too busy to think about the suffering of those oceans away, to the fewer self-satisfied who confuse knowledge and coffee shop conversation with action, and to their God. In the first section of the book, after thieves have left Valentino tied up and alone in his Atlanta apartment, he waits expectantly for the help he is certain is coming:

I am grinning and tears are flowing down my temples because I know that soon someone, perhaps the Christian neighbor, perhaps…a passing stranger, will come to this door and say who is there? What is the matter? They will feel guilt in knowing that they would have done something sooner had they only been listening…

But the problem, Valentino soon realizes, is that not only are his neighbors not listening, but that those who have heard his cries for help have been lulled into inaction by the apparent complexity of the situation, by the notion that the need is beyond their capacity to address, by the cares of their own lives. “Where are these people,” he asks in disbelief?

I know that people are hearing me. It is not possible that they are not hearing me. But they see it as beyond their business…Is the noise of the world so cacophonous that mine cannot be heard? I ask only for one person! One person coming to my door will be enough.

Although many if not most of Valentino’s questions are directed to those around him, there are throughout the book deeper, more difficult questions posed to God. For Valentino and for those readers who believe in a benevolent God who is active in affairs of women and men, these questions are increasingly pressing. “I just don’t know what God has against you,” Valentino is asked by an American woman who has befriended him.

We sit there for a moment. We both know there is a question there that has not yet been answered.

At this point in the story Valentino has suffered in ways beyond the imagination of the ordinary middle-class American reader. Yet against all odds he has been delivered safely to America where he lives a life of relative safety and ease, especially when set against the background of his life in Africa and the lives of those boys who fell to disease, to lions, to starvation along the way; of those who still live every day in a bleak and hopeless shadow that has only a meager relationship to the lives of expectation and entitlement that characterize most of the book’s readers. Any outside answer that tries to justify God in the face of these horrors can only ring hollow. One of the boys answers the questions of God’s role in the drama by declaring, “Everyone wants us dead. God wants us dead. He’s trying to kill us.” Valentino, however, has a different though no less despairing perspective on God:

I have had friends who I decided were not good friends, were people who brought more trouble than happiness, and thus I found ways to create more distance between us. Now I have the same thoughts about God, my faith, that I had for these friends. God is in my life but I do not depend on him. My God is not a reliable God.

And after reading Eggers’ book, much less the International section of the newspaper, it is hard not to agree with him. How do you answer this?

The Burnside Writers Collective exists in part because of a shared belief in the ability of Story and Imagination to change our lives. Stories allow us to enter into the experience of others by celebrating our individuality while at the same time binding us together as a common human community. But it is difficult when reading about Africa not to become overwhelmed by the sadness of the land and its stories. The litany of suffering and violence seems endless, and people have worries of their own and only so much time for the troubles of others. So what are we to do with stories like Valentino’s? Now that we have, to a limited extent, entered into Valentino’s story, what response is required of us individually and collectively?