What Is the What

Dave Eggers helps to put a human face on a tragedy that too often appears immense but remote.
Billed both as a novel and an autobiography, What Is the What was written by Dave Eggers, but its author is Valentino Achak Deng, whose journey from southern Sudan through Ethiopia and Kenya to Atlanta, Georgia is chronicled within its pages. The story begins in the 1980s, just before the first ripples of civil war reach the village of Marial Bai. The horrors that follow are at times unimaginable, but never sensational. Even when he is writing in the back of a truck filled with corpses, Valentino is reminded that the stench of genocide is “a human smell.”

Eggers frames Valentino’s decades-long trek to safety with snapshots from his new life in America, which also proves far from peaceful. In the first scene, Valentino is pistol-whipped and robbed in his apartment, and later sits for hours in a hospital waiting room. Sudan, he makes clear, does not have a monopoly on inhumanity.

Writing in what the preface calls “an approximation” of its protagonist’s voice, the book is framed as often as possible as a series of monologues addressed to audiences real and imagined. Reader Dion Graham captures the poetic lilt of Valentino’s voice, as well as his conversational informality. Even when he is describing watching his friends being eaten by lions, the telling is tinged with bitter humor. Such stories, he says, are common currency among Sudanese refugees since they inflame Western sympathies; he sounds almost abashed that the cliché is, in his case, true. Epic in scope but intimate in its appeal, What Is the What puts a human face on a tragedy that too often appears immense but remote, and fulfills its author’s claim that storytelling itself is an act of political struggle.