Lost and found

The book is structured almost as an epistolary, with Valentino addressing various Americans he meets, usually under rather demeaning circumstances. The first third of the book is directed specifically at the three African-Americans who rob his apartment and hold him captive. How did you make the decision to use that as a narrative device?

D.E.: That was the last piece of the puzzle, figuring out how to tell the story. At some point after Val was attacked in real life, we were sitting on a bench at Stanford -- we went there a few years ago so Val could visit the campus and meet the admissions people -- waiting for our appointment, looking at the "complaint card" the Atlanta police had given him. He was attacked, robbed, held at gunpoint, and the Atlanta police gave him a little business card that said "Citizen Complaint" or something like that, with a phone number on it. It was like the thing you'd be given after complaining about the sound of some party next door. That's the kind of card he got for being attacked and held at gunpoint.

Anyway, we were talking about whether or not he had been targeted because he was fairly new to the country. He said something like, "I wish some of these people knew my story because maybe they would have acted differently." And I thought about that in a few different contexts, wishing that people who even just bumped into him would know

I remember the passage where this is articulated in the book. Valentino imagines saying to his captors, "You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I had seen." Is this book an answer to that, Valentino? Do you hope that people will understand better what you have seen, or what the people of Southern Sudan have seen?

V.A.D.: I always assume, because of my background, that I am being targeted because I'm from Southern Sudan. But with these particular criminals, they just spotted me and targeted me for reasons I don't know. In spite of how much horror and hostility went on in Sudan, nobody before had shown me that hate -- holding the gun in front of me, insulting me and kicking me -- an act that tells me he really hates me.

Sometimes people hurt others because they don't know them. They just look at them and say, OK, he's a target of opportunity. If we knew one another, we wouldn't have that. When we don't know people we just act discriminating to them. That's what that passage in the book is trying to say. For me, I get angry first, but then when I think about it later, I have to think about the role I can play. Should I add to the problem? Should I make it worse? Or should I be a solution?

About the people who attacked me in Atlanta, I consider it a gone case and I have forgiven them. I don't think they knew what they were doing.

D.E.: [smiling] That's very Christian of you. It would probably take me longer than that to forgive somebody who held a gun to my head.

V.A.D.: Dave was very upset when I informed him that I have been mugged.

The loneliest parts of the book seem to be the parts that take place in the United States. Are you happy here?

V.A.D.: That incident was the most loneliness I have ever felt, but no, actually, I feel lively, more confident, more surrounded here in America than in Sudan. It cannot be compared. Since I have come to America, I have helped many Sudanese and I thought that I have made great differences. The first proceeds from the book went to paying school fees for Sudanese college students in Atlanta. The next thing I want to do is build a community center in Marial Bai, and I feel so positive about that.

D.E.: All the proceeds of the book will go to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation. So next summer, Val will go back and be able to build the center.

V.A.D.: There are things I know now that people there could use to better themselves. Before I went home in 2003, I thought that I had suffered the most. But when we went back, I witnessed the ruins: I saw the survivors of two decades' war, I saw Marial Bai and other towns and the infrastructure there. All that's left of life there is a shamble. Everything in South Sudan was brought down to state of complete nothingness. While I was being protected in refugee camps and then living in the U.S, these people were surviving on almost nothing, and in spite of consistent assaults by militias and the government for 23 years. I thought, "These people have suffered a lot, and they are not supposed to suffer like this." Now I don't think of myself as someone who's suffered a lot.

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