Word: deng
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...tall, quiet man sitting across from me in the diner has several names. These days he goes by Valentino Achak Deng, but in the African refugee camps he grew up in he was called Gone Far, for the hundreds of miles he walked when he fled the violence of Sudan's civil war. One girl nicknamed him Sleeper, for the time he was so exhausted he lay down in the middle of the road and tried to die. The other guy sitting across from me, next to Valentino/Gone Far/Sleeper, has just one name: Dave Eggers...
Eggers is, of course, a famous writer: he is the author of the bestselling memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. It's odd that the two men even know each other, but a few years ago Deng was looking for someone to help him write his life story, and a charitable foundation for Sudanese refugees helped him reach out to Eggers. Intrigued, Eggers agreed to a meeting, and the two became friends. Now they've collaborated on a moving, frightening, improbably beautiful book, a lightly fictionalized version of Deng's life titled What Is the What: The Autobiography...
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...
...Deng eventually made his way to the United States, where he and Eggers met and became friends. Their conversations together are the basis for Eggers' remarkable new novel What Is the What (McSweeney's Books; available Oct. 25), which takes the form of a fictionalized version of Deng's life story. In this exclusive excerpt, Deng silently addresses a young boy who is helping to burglarize his apartment. How do you make another human understand that you were a child of war? "Picture your neighborhood," Deng thinks, "and now see the women screaming, the babies tossed into wells. Watch your...