What is the What

Interrogative, from the Latin rogare, to ask. And Valentino Achak Deng has plenty to ask, for all time. One of the Lost Boys of Sudan, fleeing the Sudanese war, Valentino is granted a visa to enter the US, a country of limitless opportunity compared to his native Sudan. Sudan, a country racked by civil war has produced one of the largest camps of children in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly consisting of children whose parents were killed by marauders from the North. Valentino survives the endless trek into Ethiopia, a land promised as one of peace and plenty. You know you’re in trouble when Ethiopia is billed as a land of plenty. Like all death marches, the road is littered with the corpses of the wayfarers, almost all children in this case. Not surprisingly, when Valentino gets there with his ragtag crew of survivors, they are scorned by the native Ethiopians who see them as a burden on already fragile resources.

Valentino is then resettled into one of the camps in Kenya, set up by the UN, and after an interminable delay, chosen to settle in the US. Like most new immigrants, Achak is eager to repay the favour to his adopted country. He enrolls in community college with the help of his sponsor, a man who is moved to tears by Deng’s plight. Throughout all this, Deng himself is stoic, bearing it with his good-natured fortitude, a strength and iron will that could seemingly shoulder the weight of the world. Deng is not immune to misfortune in his new home either. The book recounts a home invasion, assault and battery and kidnapping that wouldn’t faze the more hardened veterans of Compton or the Bronx, but is new to Achak, who expected peace and prosperity in the new country. He is then met with a polite disinterest on the part of Atlanta’s finest, who chalk it up as just another robbery in the projects. Deng is also a little nonplussed at the more polite forms of racism he encounters, on university campuses from faculty and staff.

Deng is lucky enough to fall in love and have that love reciprocated. This is a powerful story of brutal despair, relentless savagery and finally, soothing hope and redemption. Ultimately, our fate is determined by powers too big for our reckoning, but within the swirling maelstrom of eddying destinies, we can steady our craft and row towards the eye of the hurricane. In that respect, Deng is Captain Nemo himself, a solitary figure who has escaped hell and is working his way up to normalcy by sheer dint of effort.

ISBN: 1-932416-64-1