Lost and found

Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng -- one of 17,000 Lost Boys of Sudan -- talk to Salon about their collaboration on Eggers' new novel, visiting Africa together, and the challenges of coming to America.

By Sara Corbett

Read more: Books, Interviews, Authors, Sudan, Books Interviews, Darfur

Nov. 13, 2006 | "What is the What," the latest book from Dave Eggers, declares itself as simultaneously a novel and an autobiography, and curiously, it manages to work on both levels. All the literary derring-do Eggers has shown in his previous efforts -- the 2000 Pulitzer-nominated "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," plus a more recent novel and collection of stories -- is put to more potent use in the new book, in which Eggers adopts the voice of an actual Sudanese refugee named Valentino Achak Deng.

The words belong to Eggers, but the story is Deng's. The two men met in January, 2003, introduced by a woman who founded the Atlanta-based Lost Boys Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to aiding in the U.S. resettlement of the "Lost Boys of Sudan," a group of some 17,000 largely unaccompanied children who made a harrowing, roughly 1,000-mile exodus from Southern Sudan in 1987 during an upsurge in fighting in the country's long-standing civil war.

In a situation strikingly similar to what's unfolded more recently in Darfur, villages in Southern Sudan were brutally marauded by militiamen, destroying crops, burning homes, and shattering families. The Lost Boys sought shelter first in Ethiopia and later at Kenya's sprawling Kakuma refugee camp. Along the way, many hundreds fell prey to disease, dehydration, and attacks by lions, militiamen, and bombs dropped by government troops. In 2000 and 2001, more than 10 years after their initial displacement, about 4,000 of the Lost Boys were resettled in cities across the U.S., including Atlanta, where Valentino Achak Deng, who is now 25, landed just weeks after 9/11.

"What is the What" offers a 478-page account of Deng's journey that is unsparing in the misery it depicts, but also richly embroidered with sharp detail and fully drawn characters. Eggers reimagined scenes from Deng's life, adding details, reconstructing dialogue, and in several instances creating composite characters. The resulting collaboration between writer and survivor yields a finely nuanced portrait of life inside an African genocide. There is a wrenching love story, an invigorating dose of humor, and plenty of painfully intimate renderings of what war does to a human soul. Deng and Eggers debunk a number of legends that have sprung up about the Lost Boys, including the notion that they were uninvolved with the war in Sudan. A significant portion of the Lost Boys, they assert, were were trained or served as child soldiers, conscripted into the rebel Sudanese People's Liberation Army [SPLA].

It would be nice to imagine that after years of subsistence living in refugee camps, Deng's relocation to the U.S. offers an easy salvation, but despite the efforts of kindly, church-going Georgians, Deng's sense of dysphoria pervades. The novel opens with him being robbed, beaten, and held for hours at gunpoint inside of his Atlanta apartment. His primary concern during the hours he is lying bound and gagged on the floor is that he will be late reporting to his minimum-wage job at a yuppie health club. Deng, speaking through Eggers, refers to America as a "miserable and glorious place."

Eggers, who lives in the San Francisco Bay area, interviewed Deng relentlessly over three years. Each man traveled to the other's home; they exchanged long emails; and Eggers often left Deng alone with a microcassette recorder and a request for detailed memories. Late in 2003, the two traveled together to Southern Sudan and specifically to Deng's hometown of Marial Bai, where he was reunited with his mother and father, an experience Eggers wrote about more journalistically in "The Believer," a magazine belonging to his indie-publishing empire.

Another byproduct of this unusual mind-meld is what appears to be a genuine friendship between Eggers and Deng. When I met them on a recent rainy Tuesday at a diner in midtown Manhattan, they were relaxed and seemed a bit relieved that the book -- which Eggers originally thought could be written quickly -- was finally in print. Eggers polished off a cheeseburger, while Deng, a towering, gentle presence with elegant school-boy diction, sipped tea. Even though he's not yet 30, Deng has lived many lives: This fall, he took up a new identity as a full-time student at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pennyslvania, where he says he is one of four African students in an overall population of 2,100. He is hoping to craft his own major, not surprisingly, in diplomacy.

Valentino, what did you think when you first met Dave?

I had wanted to find a writer to help me document my life. And then here is Dave, who has written this book ["A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius"] that I believe made him understand what I have been through. He raised his brother. He missed his parents at the same age I missed mine. I thought, what I'm going to say to him, he's going to be able to understand it well.

DE: It wouldn't have worked if we didn't get along really well. It's a relationship that we knew would require hundreds of hours together. Valentino's incredibly patient and giving. If he weren't it would've been really difficult. I really wanted to write the book right away so that it could help. It was like, okay we're going to get this out. We're going to tell this story. We're going to get you this money and it'll help you pay for your college and help your hometown and your parents. We're going to do it right away, it'll just take a year or so, and of course, it didn't happen that way. And year after year went by, and Val never complained. He never said, "You know what? I think I need to find someone a little speedier."

Can you talk about that crossroads you must have come to in figuring out what category the book fell under. Is it autobiography? Is it fiction?

VAD: I wanted to tell the story. The war in Sudan took so long, and so many people have died in that war. And it took a very long time for that conflict to attract the international media. I felt like this is a situation that needs an elaborate telling, that my own life could be a microcosm of the Sudan wars. So I began to tell the story, roughly, and Dave would ask detailed and specific questions.

DE: We got through one linear take on the whole story and that took some number of months and then there was another run-through where it was like, oh, we're missing this part, we're missing that part.. And then for a long time, I tried to write through and fill in the gaps and make it a whole story, as opposed to "this happened, that happened." After a while, I realized that Val was sticking to a script in a way. He would say, "Here's the lion attacks; here's the elephant we had to eat. Here's this little boy dying. Here's the bombing, here are the landmines." He was going from calamity to calamity, because those are the headlines.

But I knew we had to get off that script and dig deeper into the whole life. I remember writing him an email and saying, "We have the basics, but what were you thinking about when you walked to Ethiopia? Were you, for example, joking around in the middle of it?" It seems like an insane idea, but then again, it's human nature. There are a lot of hours in the day, and you can't be miserable every minute.

Next page: "In spite of what I went through, there was some fun here. There was some happiness here"