Dave Eggers Launches What is the What
This Is Not A Reading Series, St. Barnabas Anglican Church, 8pm
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
By Kerry Freek
Posted November 27th, 2007
This past Tuesday, amid a packed audience (obvious Eggers fans, predominantly early-to-mid 20s, roughly the same age the Sudan's Lost Boys would be now), Dave Eggers (author of You Shall Know Our Velocity and founder of McSweeney's) launched What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, at St. Barnabas Anglican Church. As part of Pages' This Is Not A Reading Series (TINARS), Eggers didn't read from his book, but rather discussed the four-year process of fictionalizing one man's memories of growing up in civil war Sudan.
The word "autobiography" in the title is a bit liberal. Read like a novel (some nice prose, an interesting non-linear approach) and narrated by Deng (one of Sudan's Lost Boys), the book is a blend of fact and fiction. A cool approach, I thought. But some reviewers were not pleased. "How strange for one man to think that he could write the story of another man — and then call it an autobiography," wrote Lee Siegel of The New Republic. "Where is the dignity in that?"
Funny he should ask. As Eggers explained on Tuesday, in preparation for the book, he and Deng spent a great deal of time getting to know each other. Deng shared his memories, starting from patchy recollections of when the war began — at this time he was around seven or eight years old. To supplement these gaps and provide more context, Eggers pored over books and reports, and threaded Deng's story with the coinciding war timeline as precisely as possible.
The two also took a trip to Sudan together, which required becoming official members of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA) and finding an aid worker willing to fly them in from Nairobi. When they finally made it to Deng's hometown, Marial Bai, they were greeted by several villagers — including Deng's birth mother and father. After so many years they were reunited, each having thought the other was long since dead.
To top it off, the book is prefaced by Deng, who confirms that the story is a "work of art" — not necessarily strict fact, and definitely a collaboration of two minds. But no mention of his dignity being compromised; in fact, praise for Eggers for helping him share his story and raise funds for the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation.
The same reviewer called the book's "innocent expropriation" of Deng's story a "post-colonial arrogance — the most socially acceptable instance of Orientalism you are likely to encounter." Now surely the book doesn't fit within the technical confines of an "autobiography," and it's not entirely Deng's personal story, but What is the What is an honest attempt to convey an approximation of what the Sudanese people endured (and now, as refugees in North America, endure). The approach is non-traditional and sort of experimental. But bringing Orientalism into the argument is missing the point. The fact remains that we learn through stories. And no matter how you slice it, Eggers' stories appeal to young people with open minds and energy to act. On Tuesday night he helped educate a couple hundred people in Toronto about the very real atrocities of war. Many of us, I'm sure, had little-to-no prior experience learning about Sudan's conflicts. Imagine not being informed on the topic of one of the worst wars of the 20th century — you probably don't, do you? That's probably more undignified than a well-written, well-researched novel.