DebbieAnne Baione-Doda's List: What is the What

• Eggers Blends Fact, Fiction of Sudanese 'Lost Boys'
• Valentino Achak Deng and Dave Eggers traveled to southern Sudan together in  2003. They managed to fly to Deng's village, Marial Bai, on a cargo plane.

• The Lost Boys and Girls are  young war refugees who survived a-23 year genocide in Southern Sudan . As  children 3-7 years old, they saw their villages bombed and burned and their  families murdered before their eyes. Most were orphaned during the attacks on  their villages. They fled on thousand mile treks through the desert seeking  refuge. Along the way they were attacked by northern government soldiers and  slave catchers. They hid in the grass from helicopter gunships and were attacked  by wild animals in the night. Of 30,000 who began the trek, only 11,000  survived. They endured chronic illness, thirst, starvation, and personal loss  that scared their souls but never beat them. They spent 14 years of their young  lives in the refuge camps of Ethiopia and Kenya where their food ration was one  cup of corn meal to last 15 days. In the weeks before 9-11 almost 4,000 were  brought to asylum in the US . Over 40 settled in Hampton Roads

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• pro-government Arab militias are accused of carrying out a campaign of ethnic  cleansing against non-Arab groups in the region.
• Humanitarian crisis: Civil war in Darfur region is seen  as "one of the worst nightmares in recent history"

   

  Politics: Omar al-Bashir heads a unity government formed  after a peace deal ended 20 years of southern civil war. An independence  referendum in the south will follow a six-year period of autonomy

   

  Economy: Oil production and revenues are rising
• However, as the civil war between north and south was coming to an end, another  one broke out in the western region of Darfur. Following rebel attacks,  President Bashir's regime was accused of orchestrating violence by  pro-government militias in which hundreds of thousands are thought to have been  killed.
• President Bashir won re-election in 2000. Supporters of the National Congress  Party filled the parliament. The opposition boycotted the poll, accusing Mr  Bashir of vote-rigging.

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• Since 1983, the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) and the Sudanese  Government have been at war in southern Sudan.

• One distinction is that a masterpiece like Twain’s can make us feel exactly what  it was like to live at another time, in another culture; it’s easier for the  novel than for even the most incisive biography or historical study to make the  reader experience the subject from the inside. The liberties and devices of  fiction (dialogue, voice, characterization and so forth) enable the writer to  take us into the mind and heart of a person not unlike ourselves who talks to us  from a distant period and place, and so becomes our guide to its sights and  sounds, its sorrows and satisfactions
• • The purpose of reading literature...human experience.
• We readers are the fortunate beneficiaries of this collaboration. Eggers’s  generous spirit and seemingly inexhaustible energy — some of the qualities that  made his memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” so popular —  transform Valentino and the people he met on his journey into characters in a  book with the imaginative sweep, the scope and, above all, the emotional power  of an epic.
• • Empathy

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• What’s remarkable is that, given its harrowing subject matter, the book isn’t  simply horrifying or depressing. The considerable appeal of Valentino’s  personality and the force of Eggers’s talent turn this eyewitness account of a  terrible tragedy into a paradoxically pleasurable experience. As with any book  we enjoy and admire, we keep turning the pages to find out if everything will  turn out all right in the end. And just as in life — I don’t think I’m giving  away any suspense-ruining plot points here — things do work out for some  characters, if not, alas, for others.

• I suppose some merciless pruning could have reduced “What Is the What” by a  few ounces, but by the time you reach its stunning and beautiful conclusion, you  can’t help feeling that the resonant power of its last lines derives at least in  part from the cumulative weight of every word that has gone before.
• • Do you agree?
    

• “Whatever I do,” Valentino assures us, “however I find a way to live, I will  tell these stories. ... I speak to you because I cannot help it. It gives me  strength, almost unbelievable strength, to know that you are there. ... I am  alive and you are alive so we must fill the air with our words. I will fill  today, tomorrow, every day until I am taken back to God. I will tell stories to  people who will listen and to people who don’t want to listen, to people who  seek me out and to those who run. All the while I will know that you are there.  How can I pretend that you do not exist? It would be almost as impossible as you  pretending that I do not exist.”

   

  Reading “What Is the What” does indeed make it impossible to pretend that  Valentino Achak Deng and the other Lost Boys and all the men and women and  children who have suffered, and continue to suffer, fates like his do not exist.  Dave Eggers has made the outlines of the tragedy in East Africa — so vague to so  many Americans — not only sharp and clear but indelible. An eloquent testimony  to the power of storytelling, “What Is the What” is an extraordinary work of  witness, and of art.

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• After having read "What Is the What," you no longer need to hesitate and wonder.  You know precisely who the boys were because you have experienced their mass  migration and the mass murder that occasioned it through the eyes, and in the  compelling voice, of Valentino Achak Deng. By the time the members of Eggers's  large and youthful fan base have repeatedly consulted the book's map of East  Africa, tracing the Lost Boys' wanderings, they will be able to visualize the  geographical positions of Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya with a clarity surpassing  their possibly hazy recall of anything they might have memorized for a World  Civilization class.
• • The story of the "What"

• The lyricism, the detail and, most important, the absolute specificity of  these sentences are what make "What Is the What" so persuasive. It's a real  high-wire act, yet Eggers manages to maintain this level of intensity throughout  the book as Achak and the other Lost Boys encounter minefields and massacres,  loneliness and fear, starvation, disease, predatory wild animals, the seemingly  endless varieties of cruelty, the sustenance of fellowship and the surprising  manifestations of instinctive human kindness. What's remarkable is that, given  its harrowing subject matter, the book isn't simply horrifying or depressing.  The considerable appeal of Valentino's personality and the force of Eggers's  talent turn this eyewitness account of a terrible tragedy into a paradoxically  pleasurable experience. As with any book we enjoy and admire, we keep turning  the pages to find out if everything will turn out all right in the end. And just  as in life—I don't think I'm giving away any suspense-ruining plot points  here—things do work out for some characters, if not, alas, for others.
• Reading "What Is the What" does indeed make it impossible to pretend that  Valentino Achak Deng and the other Lost Boys and all the men and women and  children who have suffered, and continue to suffer, fates like his do not exist.  Dave Eggers has made the outlines of the tragedy in East Africa—so vague to so  many Americans—not only sharp and clear but indelible. An eloquent testimony to  the power of storytelling, "What Is the What" is an extraordinary work of  witness, and of art
• Eggers puts a human face on what is happening in Africa today, specifically in  Sudan and the conflict between the Muslim North and the Christian South.  (What is not specifically about Darfur, but it helps the reader  understand the roots of that conflict.)

• And he's talking about one thing readers of "What Is the What" can't  say for sure: How much is fact and how much is fiction.  

  Why the line-blurring? The explanation goes like this: Introduced to Deng in  early 2003 and deeply engaged by his story, Eggers set out to write a  conventional biography. But he kept getting stuck.  

  "I didn't know how to do it," he says. "I didn't want my own voice in there."   

  Despairing, he was ready to give the whole thing up. Then it occurred to him  that "all the books that we remember about war and about the biggest events of  the 20th century are novels." Think of "The Naked and the Dead," "Catch-22" and  "all Hemingway's stuff."  

  More important, think of the ways fictionalizing Deng's story could solve  narrative problems. By labeling the book a novel, Eggers says, he freed himself  to re-create conversations, streamline complex relationships, add relevant  detail and manipulate time and space in helpful ways—all while maintaining the  essential truthfulness of the storytelling.  

  There was only one hitch.

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• Egypt conquers northern parts of Sudan, developing ivory and slave trades.
  
• The British Civil Secretary in Khartoum declares the "Southern Policy,"  officially stating what had always been in practice: the north and south,  because of their many cultural and religious differences, are governed as two  separate regions.
  
• Independence is granted to Sudan as a single unified nation.
• Sudan gains legitimacy in peacetime, Western countries begin supplying the  government with arms. The United States sells Sudan a great deal of equipment,  hoping to counteract Soviet support of Marxist Ethiopians and Libyans.
  
• Chevron finds large oil fields in the Upper Nile and southern Kordofan regions.  Shortly thereafter, oil is discovered throughout southern Sudan
• Khartoum attempts to redraw the boundaries of southern Sudan, transferring  oilfields to the north. When this fails, Khartoum begins taking the territory by  force. In What Is the What, Valentino tells the story of his friend  Lino, whose family was driven from their home in the Muglad Basin around this  time. The Muglad Basin is an area near the north-south border that was claimed  by Khartoum and renamed, using the Arabic word for "unity."
• The Sudanese People's Liberation Army (SPLA), led by John Garang, forms in  Ethiopia.
  
• Civil war rages through the south. The SPLA battles government forces and  attempts to gain control. Raids by the murahaleen – government-armed Arab  militias – reach their peak. Villages throughout the south are repeatedly  attacked and destroyed. Slavery becomes widespread. As villages are ransacked  and survivors flee, the so-called "Lost Boys" begin their walks across southern  Sudan into Ethiopia.
  
• As al-Mahdi moves toward signing certain peace agreements, he is ousted in a  coup and Omar al-Bashir seizes power. Al-Bashir is supported by the  fundamentalist National Islamic Front (NIF), headed by hard-line Islamist Hassan  al-Turabi. The new government fiercely enforces Islamic code throughout Sudan,  banning trade unions, political parties, and other "non-religious"  institutions.
  

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