The third book in HPPR’s Radio Readers Fall read bears the enigmatic title of What is the What. A collaborative effort between novelist Dave Eggers and Valentino Achak Deng, the novel is set, primarily, in war-torn Sudan. Both Eggers and Deng have said that they believed the book needed to be written to share and document Deng’s experiences as among the millions dead and displaced by the Sudanese Civil War. Both men were committed to creating a work that would document the culture of Deng’s people, the Dinka.
As Deng talked about his life, Eggers collected vast amounts of material—a couple years’ worth of conversations-- then struggled to organize it in a compelling way, one that didn’t play on scenes of horror and brutality in prurient ways. He considered various titles for the book – one was It Was Just Boys Walking and another was Hello, Children. Those titles, as Eggers has said, suggested a focus on Deng’s experiences during the war and in refugee camps in Ethiopia and in Kenya. But, Eggers has said, eventually neither title seemed right for the book. After all, in Eggers’ words, by the time he and Deng were collaborating, “Valentino had been a man for a long time…and he and the other so-called Lost Boys were tired of being known as boys. The story of Valentino's life would need to be equally, if not more so, about the issues he faced [as a man].” Eggers began to explore ways that the novel/memoir might be crafted to convey questions about Dinka culture and ongoing conflicts in Sudan and Darfur
( http://www.vadfoundation.org/it-was-just-boys-walking/), and, it would seem, the story of Deng’s time in the United States.
Deng had shared with Eggers traditional Dinka stories; one in particular that Eggers had planned to include is a story about the first Dinka. God gives them a choice: they can have cattle, creatures that would provide milk and meat as well as future prosperity, or they can have the What, an ineffable entity, an abstraction. In the novel, Deng’s father tells the story in these words:
“The man and the woman could see the cattle right there in front of them, and they knew that with the cattle they would eat and live with great contentment. They could see the cattle were God’s most perfect creation…They knew that they would live in peace with the cattle, and if they helped the cattle eat and drink, the cattle would give man their milk, would multiply every year and keep the [Dinka] happy and healthy. So the first [Dinka] knew they would be fools to pass up the cattle for this idea of the What. So [they] chose the cattle…. God was testing the [Dinka]….to see if [they] could appreciate what [they have] been given, if [they] could take pleasure in the bounty before [them], rather than trade it for the unknown” (62).
When pressed to explain what “what” is, Deng’s “father shrugged. –We don’t know. No one knows.”
And that, according to Eggers, is the relevance of the title of his novel about Valentino Achak Deng. I think it’s a great story – both about the naming of the book but more so about stories themselves….
What might the stories we tell about ourselves, about our communities, about our nations, suggest about our beliefs and values? What does it mean, what is revealed about our values, if, like the Dinka, we choose that which is before us, that which we can see, touch, smell, and hear? What if we choose that which is ineffable, unnamed, indescribable? What gaps in our knowing do the stories we tell reveal?
