They fit well with the latest “novel” I’ve read titled What is the What. Written by Dave Eggers, it states that it is “a soulful account of my life” – the life of a young Sudanese man variously named Achak, Valentino, Dominic or Gone Far. There are two things of interest in respect of this novel. The content, and the politics of the way it is written. Let me start with the content.
Achak is about six when Muslin murahaleen sweep into his village, destroy houses, kill some of the inhabitants and carry off children, women and livestock. He survives this attack and eventually sets out to walk to a safer location in Ethiopia. It is an epic walk of young boys who become known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. Horrible things happen to Achak and those around him. I can’t do them justice here but am glad I read the book – I know more about this period of recent history now and that’s a good thing. Death, hunger, abuse, the ambiguities and cruelties of the liberation soldiers (SPLA), the loss of family – these are just a few of the elements of the book. He spends many years in two refugee camps, the one in Ethiopia and then one in Kenya. No plot spoilers here – we first meet Achak in the United States so we know he survives.
Survives is a good word for what happens to him in America as well. This is the part of the book which worked best for me. I kept thinking of the Sudanese who live in my local neighbourhood of Footscray. (See the Footscray Food Blog for a taste of this.) It must be radically different living here. From 2001, 3,800 Sudanese were allowed to settle in the USA. Most of these were young men. Achak ends up in Atlanta in the States. He arrives just after 9/11. He has high expectations of his ability to prosper quickly; to go to college and emerge with a good job and good prospects. It does not play that way despite his determination and clear intelligence. He is looked after by some people and harassed by others. At one stage he is working for $8.50 an hour as a storeman. It takes him three changes of bus to get to his workplace. Some young Americans stop him, harass him and tell him to go back to Africa. He says:
Through Eggers we experience the increasing cynicism and disconnection of Achak in his new home. It’s a powerful thing to read about, falling as it does on top of the truly horrible experiences of his previous time as a lost boy. Actually he is a lost boy in both countries…
“When I first came to this country, I would tell silent stories. I would tell them to people who had wronged me. If someone cut in front of me in line, ignored me, bumped me, or pushed me, I would glare at them, staring, silently hissing a story to them. You do not understand, I would tell them. You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I have seen.”A little of the comparison.
“Some sociologists, liberal ones, might take issue with the notion that one society is behind another, that there is a first world, a third. But southern Sudan is not of any of these worlds. Sudan is something else, and I cannot find apt comparisons. There are few cars in southern Sudan. You can travel for hundreds of miles without seeing a vehicle of any kind. There are only a handful of paved roads; I saw none while I lived there. One could fly a straight east-west line across the country and never pass over a home built of anything but grass and dirt. It is a primitive land and I say that without any sense of shame. I suspect that within the next ten years, if the peace holds, the region will make the sort of progress that might bring us to the standards of other East African nations. I do not know anyone who wishes southern Sudan to remain the way it is.”The title? Achak is from the Dinka people of southern Sudan. Dave Eggers is quoted in The Guardian as saying: gifts, and were using this What to inflict unending pain upon the southern Sudanese.”
“We had agreed that we would include in the book an ancient creation myth known in southern Sudan. In the story, God, pleased with his greatest creation, offers the first Dinka man a choice of gifts: on the one hand, the cattle, visible and known, an animal that can feed and clothe him and last forever; on the other hand, the What. The man asks God, "What is the What?", but God will not reveal the answer. The What was unknown; the What could be everything or nothing. The Dinka man does not hesitate for long. He chooses the cattle, and for thousands of years Dinka lore held that he had chosen correctly; the cow is thus sacred in southern Sudanese culture, the measure of a family's wealth and the giver of life. It was not until the torment of the southern Sudanese in the 20th century that the Dinka began to question this choice. What was the What, they wondered, and speculation about the answer abounded: was it technology? Education? Sophisticated weapons? Whatever the answer, it was assumed that the Arabs of the north - who, legend had it, had received the What - might have got the greatest of God'sThe controversy? Eggers was asked to help Achak write the book and recorded many interviews with him. At first I think they intended some kind of factual account of the style of ‘They poured fire on us from the sky’ but that book emerged first and Eggers felt that they could not add to that narrative. He also ran into some issues with recreating the story using just the fragments of Achak’s memory. It’s the usual issue – how do you recreate conversations with people where someone may only remember the intent or outcome, not the actual words. So he eventually decided to tell it as a novel but to use the first person voice of Achak as the narrator. IN doing this, he has got himself into trouble. I wasn’t too bothered by it because I think the story itself is really important – but here’s some of the criticism:
Lee Seigel’s review, titled The Niceness Racket says:
“The generation of people who survived the Holocaust and Stalin's vast network of camps is disappearing, but the number of novels about modern genocide has increased, and most of them are written by people who have no firsthand experience of their subject on which to draw. This presents a curious problem. Bearing witness, even in fictionalizing form, to extreme historical events that you have experienced is one thing. It is quite a different thing to try to recreate extreme historical events that you have not experienced, and then to try to imagine what it would be like to think and feel your way through them. This is hardly an illegitimate endeavor -- the imagination has an obligation to wrestle with even the most unimaginable experiences; but it is an intensely demanding endeavor, with moral and aesthetic pitfalls all around.”Interesting, this connection with The Holocaust. Having just read The Street Sweeper, I had thought about this a lot. Seigel goes on to say:
“Deng's attitudes are tyrannically refracted through Eggers's reshaping of them. Deng does not represent himself. Eggers represents him. You never know whether the startling self-pity that Deng occasionally displays -- when two other boys are eaten by lions, Deng laments his unluckiness -- is his own or not. In Deng's own voice, these flashes from the underside of his ego might have been extenuated by irony or self-awareness. The same goes for Deng's hostile, suspicious, sometimes contemptuous attitudes toward American blacks. They might have been somehow vindicated in the full-throated revelation of his personality. Or maybe not. We will never know. In Eggers's hands, the survivor's voice does not survive.”To some extent, I think Seigel is right but Achak has read and endorsed the book – he labels it his “soulful account” so do we take his own words at face value? Does it undermine his power and agency as a person to say that he is not capable of judging and addressing the ways in which Eggers has represented him? Is this just as patronising? I’m not sure.
Seigel goes on:
“And Eggers's book is also another unsettling thing. I never thought I would reach for this vocabulary, but What Is the What's innocent expropriation of another man's identity is a post-colonial arrogance -- the most socially acceptable instance of Orientalism you are likely to encounter. Perhaps this is the next stage of American memoir. Perhaps, having run out of marketable stories to tell about ourselves, we will now travel the world in search of desperate people willing to rent out their lives, the way indigent people in some desolate places give up their children. Perhaps we have picked our psyches clean, and now we need other people's stories the way we need other people's oil.”I selected What is the What to read because I’d read Eggers’ Zeitoun and thought it very impressive. It’s a later book – about a Muslim man and his family who are victims of some truly appalling events post-Hurricane Katrina. It’s written in the third person – it’s very clear that the author is not the person experiencing the events. But vivid and compelling all the same.
I like Eggers – he is a good man. You can read about the things that he and Achak do in Sudan after the book is written, to try to improve the lives of the villagers where Achak is born. (See the article in The Guardian.) He wants to make a difference. He, like Eliot Perlman in The Street Sweeper, is driven by the need to have the story heard. I think this justifies what he does in telling it.
