Who Is the Who?
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When Achak Deng, a Sudanese refugee in Atlanta, is asked by his sponsor for “words of wisdom” that his “elders would say,” he draws a blank. (The inquiry might as well be about dashikis and talking drums, for all the imagination it shows.) His friend Achor Achor, eager to please, offers a suitably gnostic saying: “Sometimes the teeth can accidentally bite the tongue, but the solution for the tongue is not to find another mouth to live in.”
Whatever its intended meaning, that proverb suggests the trouble with “What Is the What” (McSweeney’s, 386 pages, $26), Dave Eggers’s mostly true relation of Achak’s escape from the Sudan and its second civil war. The book is subtitled “The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng: A Novel.” So Achak’s tongue is living in the wrong mouth, and it is impossible not to see what is lost by the change of address.
First, consider what is gained. Mr. Eggers regards this book not only as literature but also as an expedient. Its profits go to a foundation in Achak’s name, from whence they are distributed to refugees in the United States and to humanitarian efforts in Sudan. Money and (as they say) consciousness are raised; the tragedy of a generation of Sudanese — real people, not the oleaginous James Freys on which Americans gorge themselves — is recorded. Surely this is a case in which Eggers’s efforts and his legion of partisans can do only good.
For that, and for all that is honest and artful in “What Is the What,” I have nothing but praise for Mr. Eggers. Granted, the meat of the tale is the product of Achak’s own blood, sweat, and tongue. But there is much to be said for the embroidered garment in which Mr. Eggers dresses it. Given the whimsicality of much of what he writes and champions, one is startled to find that he can render carnage well:
Another boy was standing against the elephant, with his hand and wrist missing; … A moment later the boy’s hand had been restored, but was covered in blood. It had been inside the elephant; he had thrust it in where the bullet had created an opening. He had grabbed whatever meat he could and was eating it, raw.
But there are moments that are pure Eggers. The book’s framing device is the burglary of Achak’s apartment in Atlanta, during which he is beaten and tied up. The narrative of his trek across Sudan is mentally addressed to various people: his assailant, a small boy left to guard him, his neighbors. At one point, kicking against his front door, he thinks:
I am kicking with a smile on my face, knowing that everyone outside is waking to the sound of someone in trouble. There is someone in Atlanta who is suffering, who has been beaten, who came to this city looking for nothing but an education and some semblance of stability, and he is now bound in his apartment. . . . Hear me, Atlanta!
He might have added, recalling the title of Mr. Eggers’s first novel, “You shall know my velocity!” There is plenty of rhetorical overkill in this book, and it exerts a decidedly deflationary effect. As the lover of crime fiction knows, you can’t write about the dead without the deadpan; you can’t lose sight of the fact that the more unthinkable a thing is, the more certain that it has happened a million times before and will go on happening forever.
The story of the Sudan is affecting by its familiarity: This kind of tragedy is as inevitable as the sunrise. When this is clear, the book is credible, even terrifying. When it isn’t, the book becomes a kind of dutiful, interchangeable humanitarian textbook—which, with its jacketless hardcover and lapses into Britannica-style historical backstory, it more than a little resembles.
But Eggers has always stood in awe of tragedy, even while keeping his distance from it. His first book, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” (2001), used a panoply of postmodern gimmicks to keep his parents’ untimely deaths at arm’s length. Is “What Is the What” his way of, so to speak, plunging that arm into the wound? Is he trying to feel the pain of those who have had it far worse than he has? (Achak has endured things that make Eggers’s tragedy seem downright ordinary—which, statistically speaking, it probably is.) Or is he, by writing another man’s “autobiography,” reminding us that whereof we cannot speak, thereof he can and he will?
One wants very badly not to be cynical about Eggers’s motivation. He’s giving all the money to charity: Well, he could hardly have done otherwise, and the grove of laurels is just as good. He’s raising the profile of the Darfur genocide: See the Onion’s recent mockheadline, “African Children Given 30,000 Unused ‘Save Darfur’ T-Shirts,” for proof that it could get no higher. Is this book about Achak Deng and his broken nation or the medical marvel that is Dave Eggers’s elephant-size heart?
It’s not a very nice question, and it’s admittedly a superfluous one: Mr. Eggers’s teeth sometimes bite Achak’s tongue, but it’s good enough that the tongue is speaking at all. Nevertheless, in a literary culture that has made household gods of both tragedy and compassion, it’s a question that many readers will ask in spite of themselves. Mr. Eggers might even do well to ask it of himself.
Mr. Beck is the associate editor of the New Criterion.