CTE offers this review of the First Year Book as a resource as you make this text part of your fall and spring courses. For more on the book and on First Year Book programs, visit http://www.firstyearbook. umd.edu/.

Dave Eggers’ What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a Dinka Sudanese, who becomes one of the “lost boys” during the violent uproar of the second Sudanese civil war (1983-2005). The book opens in the midst of Achak’s new life in Atlanta, Georgia, where he has settled after being relocated to the United States. It is in the first few pages that he is robbed and assaulted in his Atlanta apartment. Tied up and waiting for help, Achak starts remembering his long flight from Sudan. There is a great sense of tragedy that runs through the novel, when Achak not “only” loses family and friends to hostile militiamen, wild animals, and hunger, but, once in safety in Kenya, loses his Japanese colleague, Noriyaki, in an accident and, later in the United States, his Kurkuma love Tabitha to the murderous jealousy of her ex. The sense of tragedy, paired with a sense of immediacy, make What Is the What an engaging read.

What Is the What, however, also comes with several shortcomings that are not only problematic with respects to the text alone but present obstacles to incorporating it in our courses. The title alone brings these potential pitfalls  to light. The title, for one, provides an impetus to read; for surely, as readers, we want to find out about the What. While references to the What persist throughout the novel, Eggers describes the What in most detail early on (p. 61-63), perhaps to foreshadow the perspective on the events to come that drive his entire book. It is Achak’s  father who tells the story of the What to his Arabic-speaking and Muslim Baggara business associates. The What  is part of the Dinka mythology of origin, where God creates man and woman to then make them choose between “this

creature, which is called the cow…”  (62) and the What. The man and woman “see the cattle were God’s most perfect creation” and choose the cattle over the What. And, as Achak’s father then tells the Baggara men: “And God has proven that this was the correct decision. God was testing the man. He was testing the man, to see if he could appreciate what he had been given, if he could take pleasure in the bounty before him, rather than trade it for the unknown.” (62) And, as Eggers tells us through Achak’s voice moments later, when not compromised by the presence of the Baggara, the story usually continues with God “giv[ing] the What to the Arabs, and this was why the Arabs were inferior.” (63) While this is Achak’s perspective and therefore, at this moment in the story, a child’s perspective, the novel only ever gives us Achak’s perspective. From a narrative point of view, the novel thereby entertains the most brutal and vile images of Arabs and Muslims that Edward Said questioned with Orientalism. After all, the narrative is Achak’s perspective – Achak, who loses family and friends to the Arab-Muslim Baggara, henchmen of the Sudanese government.

The focus on Achak’s perspective, in fact, speaks to the book’s larger complications with genre that are, once again, apparent in the title. The  title What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel combines three narrative conventions – the  autobiography, the biography, and the novel. One result of this mixing of conventions is that the book potentially defies genre expectations that readers

 inevitably bring to the text. What Is the What performs in an autobiographical, even testimonial, mode, when the story seemingly exposes the traumatic events Achak endures. His perspective dominates in the text often with such eerie immediacy, as if there was no writing process involved. The result of this strategy is that immediacy frequently overrides what could have been a more (self)reflective approach to the story and the writing process. This critique seamlessly transitions to the book as a biographical text. After all, it is Eggers not Deng himself, who fictionalizes Valentino Achak Deng’s “lost boy” experience. Eggers is, however, aside from the preface, absent from the text, all the while the text mostly operates as if it were unmediated experience. Eggers’ absence, in that sense, not only obscures that this text has been written (the writing process), but that it has been written by a white American man in his thirties, who inevitably brings his own, culturally-grounded assumptions to Deng’s experience. Auto/biography are two modes that are at work, even if What is the What lays greatest claim to being a novel. This brings me back to Achak’s perspective and the Baggara. In the context of the novel What Is the What, the book’s uninterrupted focus on Achak and his inner world provide a vehicle to empathize, even identify with, the plight of the “lost boys,” but it does so, while it simplifies the complexity of the Sudanese civil war into familiar tropes of the Arab and Muslim violent Other. Teaching the novel in the classroom may, in other words, be a risky business, when complicating its representational strategies and repertoires also means that instructors have to be particularly prepared to address the complexities of Sudanese history and politics.

What is the What, by Chris Eggers. Paperback: 560 pages. Publisher: Vintage; (October 9, 2007). Language: English. ISBN-10: 0307385906. ISBN-13: 978-0307385901. Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.9 inches. $15.95