Word: deng
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...places What Is the What is surprisingly funny. Eggers explains that he didn't want the book to read like "a human-rights report." "We were trying to reflect the whole life, the complete life," he says, "not just disaster after disaster." After all, Deng spent 13 years in refugee camps. He grew up in them. He joked around with friends. He flirted with girls. "The horror was so overwhelming that for many years I never thought that I had this fun," he says. "But there are moments when I no longer recall missing my family. That was the time...
Sudan is really two countries: the north is predominantly Muslim, and the south is inhabited mostly by tribal peoples like the Dinka, of whom Deng is one. War broke out between north and south when Deng was about 6. His village was destroyed by horsemen, and many of his friends and relatives were killed or enslaved. He escaped. Along with many other boys--the so-called Lost Boys of Sudan--Deng walked hundreds of miles overland to a refugee camp in Ethiopia...
...disease. Some were shot. Some were eaten by lions and crocodiles. Some went insane. War is always horrifying, but there's something uniquely awful about a child's experience of it. What Is the What has the same sick, surreal intensity as Jerzy Kosinski's The Painted Bird. Once Deng was fleeing enemy soldiers with three other boys when a strange woman called out to them. "Don't fear me," she says in the book. "I am just a woman! I am a mother trying to help you boys." When two of the boys approached her, "the woman turned, lifting...
Eggers and Deng worked on What Is the What for three years, recording 100 hours of interviews and visiting Sudan together. What could have been an awkward literary three-legged race became instead a synergistic collaboration. In person there's an obvious and rather touchingly empathic bond between the two: Eggers is the confident, gregarious one, while Deng speaks in quiet, melodious, not-quite-grammatical English. "Dave would listen to me," he says, "and he would write and send me a chapter, and I see him in me. And I ask him sometimes, 'How are you able to put yourself...
From the day his village was destroyed, Deng never stopped looking for a safe, peaceful home. He finally made it to the U.S.--the promised land for many Sudanese--but in America he found new and confusing challenges: menial jobs, discrimination, endless seriocomic misunderstandings. In his first apartment he didn't realize he could turn off the air conditioning and spent a week sleeping with all his clothes on. The loudness and lewdness of the preshow festivities at an NBA game seemed to him "perfectly designed to drive people insane." The book is framed by Deng's experience of being...