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The First Year Book is a rare opportunity for a broadly shared academic experience across the campus. While annual selections are not necessarily part of many course syllabi, they do connect with work in the disciplines, and they are a venue for significant exchange of ideas, criticism, and, on occasion, action. The First Year Book will almost certainly never become an institutional part of a large percentage of undergraduate courses, but the very idea of a shared reading follows a sense that this is an enriching context for the thinking that those courses call for. It is an ahistorical fallacy to lament the loss of a timeless reading culture. We have not always read books on a large scale, and we still read all sorts of things. Nevertheless, this program points to the value of reading long-form works and making sure there are forums in which to talk about those books.
| Eggers' as-told-to biographical novel
raises, even if only implicitly, rich questions that have
the promise to complicate thinking in our courses. |
This year's selection, What Is the What, has the potential to initiate complex and meaningful readings on the part of our students, and it has the potential to raise critical questions about how historical experiences are told and distributed. In her piece on the book in this issue of
TLN Henrike Lehnguth engages with and articulates several challenging questions with which we need to work before integrating the book in academic work.
Eggers' as-told-to biographical novel raises, even if only implicitly, rich questions that have the promise to complicate thinking in our courses. While the First Year Book website (http://firstyearbook.umd.edu/what/) will help to structure implementation of the book across the curriculum, I want to suggest a small catalogue of problems it illuminates. Here, I'll raise an issue and offer a brief series of questions, prompts, or exercises that might be adapted for teaching or for colloquia outside of the curriculum.
First, as a recollection of forced and violent migration, it characterizes the experience of deadly conflict. There is a visible tradition of first-year books situated in war (including, of course, last year's
War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, Telhami's The Stakes, and Tim O'Brien's Vietnam nonfiction). It is of course not difficult to add
What is the What to the canon of stories about conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. As an interrogating counterpiece, see Binyavanga Wainaina's eviscerating "How to Write about Africa," linked from the First Year Book site. It nevertheless introduces a complicating effect among U.S. readers, likely to know something about Darfur. Students confronted with "Sudan" as a geographical category are likely to call up Darfur and popular laments in response to that history.
What is the What comes from another Sudanese conflict and therefore unsettles what we
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think we know about other parts of the world, too easily stored in bins called "Africa" and "the Middle East."
• How does this war story characterize Sudan? Visit allAfrica.com,
read at least three pieces on or from Sudan, and evaluate how having
read Eggers' work influenced your view of those articles. How do the
articles influence your view of Eggers' book?
• Read Binyavanga Wainaina's "How to Write about Africa." Which of
these "rules" does What Is the What follow? Which does it
break? Are there consistencies between Wainaina's satire and Eggers'
storytelling?
• Before reading What Is the What how would you have
described Sudan? How has the book reinforced, corrected, or enhanced
that description?
• In the U.S., "Africa" is often misread as a single country with a
single history, a small catalogue of systemic problems, and almost
no distinction between its many nations and communities. Is
What Is the What participating in that tradition? How well
does it address that misunderstanding?
Second, as unconventional life writing, this novel calls for
discussion of how lives are represented, who owns experience, and
how history and storytelling intersect. Eggers, whose
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius plays on the boundary
of fiction, memory, and criticism, may not devote self-conscious
attention to the problems of as-told-to memoirs in the work itself,
but almost any attention to What Is the What demands that
we
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Eggers' representation of immigrant life in Atlanta may be
especially rich for our students, who are perhaps inclined
to see life in the U.S. as the right goal of international
migration. |
consider what it means to for a popular U.S. writer to publish his
version of a Sudanese Lost Boy's experience. There are ethical,
political, and aesthetic problems to unpack. Asking those questions
is intellectually troublesome if we presuppose fault; instead, close
attention to the work itself in the context of other stories ought
to generate thoughtful scholarly exchange. Eggers traffics in the
sort of conventions Wainaina (participating in a long traditional of
postcolonial critique) abhors; and yet his Sudan is not just a
fictional contribution to the West's Other but one of many ways to
represent a life with experience under threat, and it was composed
with the cooperation of its subject.
• What does Dave Eggers gain from writing Valentino's story?
What does Valentino gain from having Dave Eggers write his story?
(Note that these questions may imply a cynical
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view of economics, celebrity, and victimhood. They need not be read
that way; Eggers and Valentino exchanged stories for Story.)
• Whose story is
What Is the What?
• What does it mean for a living person to become a fictional character? Is the latter less "true" than the former?
• How is historical knowledge created and shared?
Third, What is the What is a meditation on dangerous place. As Valentino Achek Deng makes his way from his home to Kenya to Atlanta, teleological wishfulness is regularly undermined by experience. Eggers' representation of immigrant life in Atlanta may be especially rich for our students, who are perhaps inclined to see life in the U.S. as the right goal of international migration. The novel's opening narrative frame, the violent robbery of Deng in his Atlanta apartment, is another immigrant story. Deng is no undocumented worker; he has arrived the "right way." And yet, metropolitan life at minimum wage and in search of an associate's degree means less than the Promised Land. This undercuts simplifying views of the U.S. as the object of any migrant's movement.
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What does What Is the What say about immigrant life in the U.S.?
• Does Valentino's life in Atlanta suggest a critique of how the U.S. views sub-saharan Africans?
• If life in the U.S. does not work out for Sudanese immigrants, what are the alternatives?
• Valentino is internally displaced in Sudan, finds himself in a Kenyan border refugee camp, moves to the U.S., and regularly returns to Sudan, where his foundation has built a school in Marial Bai. Valentino becomes a communication medium between Sudanese in the U.S. and in Sudan. This is not a story of movement from a starting point to a new home. How does
What Is the What challenge or re-imagine what migration and immigration mean?
As What Is the What operates as an object of--and initiator of--these questions, it serves efforts to guide students into an academic investigation of issues that are contemporary (refugee and immigrant life in the U.S., war stories, representations of race and racial conflict) and long-standing (refugee and immigrant life in the U.S., war stories, representations of race and racial conflict).
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