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What is the What Dave Eggers McSweeney's, 2006
What is the What is a partly fictionalized account of the life of one of the four thousand "Lost Boys" who were brought over to the United States in 2001 after fifteen years' wandering and encampment as refugees from the civil war in the southern Sudan. Above all, readers come away with a vivid sense of the cruelties and indifference human beings inflict upon each other, and with an equally vivid sense of the tenacity of life that has so long kept Achak Nyibek Arou Deng, the book's subject, going through all these years.
Deng was born into a Dinka village in southern Sudan before the outbreak of the civil war there (the war that preceded the current war in the western Sudanese region of Darfur). When his village was burned by Arab raiders, he joined the tens of thousands of refugees, many of them unaccompanied children, who trekked across the Sudan for asylum in Ethiopia. He spent three years in the Pinyudo camp inside Ethiopia until the refugees there were driven out with mass bloodshed by the Ethiopians. Horrors of many kinds-including those from humans, crocodiles and lions-accompanied Deng at each step of his odyssey. Eventually, he lived for ten years in the Kakuma refugee camp inside Kenya. It was from there that he and other "unaccompanied children," mostly boys but with a few girls, were brought to the United States in 2001.
To its credit, Eggers' book is not a typical account designed to play upon the empathy and credulity of sympathetic souls who read it. Eggers quite candidly describes that genre: "The tales of the Lost Boys have become remarkably similar over the years... Sponsors and newspaper reporters and the like expect the stories to have certain elements, and the Lost Boys have been consistent in their willingness to oblige. Survivors tell the stories the sympathetic want, and that means making them as shocking as possible." He admits that his own telling "includes enough small embellishments [so] that I cannot criticize the accounts of others." Perhaps, as he says, he cannot criticize those others; but there is much honest candor in the book, as we will see.
Some of this candor has to do...