What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng was published by McSweeney’s in 2006. The book is categorized as a novel but is based on the real life of Valentino Achak Deng, a Sudanese refugee whom Eggers spent years interviewing. The decision to fictionalize rather than ghostwrite was practical and ethical: Deng’s memories, especially of his childhood flight from his village, were fragmentary, and the novelistic form allowed Eggers to construct coherent scenes from incomplete recollections while acknowledging the gaps.
The narrative covers Deng’s childhood in Marial Bai, a Dinka village in southern Sudan; the 1987 attack by government-backed murahaleen militia that destroyed the village; his years-long walk to Ethiopia with thousands of other displaced boys; the violence of the Pinyudo refugee camp; the second displacement when the Ethiopian government collapsed in 1991; the decade in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp; and his eventual resettlement in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is robbed and assaulted in his apartment — the novel’s framing device.
The structural conceit is that Deng, lying tied up in his apartment during the robbery, mentally narrates his life story to the people around him: the robbers, the hospital staff, the social workers. He addresses each of them directly — “What is the What, you people?” — in a voice that is simultaneously intimate and oratorical. The effect is devastating: the reader becomes another audience that Deng is trying to reach, another person who might or might not choose to care.
All author proceeds from the book go to the Valentino Achak Deng Foundation, which funds education projects in South Sudan.
Collecting What Is the What
First edition (McSweeney’s, San Francisco, 2006): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$80
- Very good/very good: $10–$30
- Signed by both Eggers and Deng: $80–$200