Sudanese Lost Boy Valentino Achak Deng Visits DCC on April 20

Release Date April 4, 2007

Pougkeepsie, NY – Sudanese Lost Boy Valentino Achak Deng – the subject of the new novel What is the What by Dave Eggers – will speak at Dutchess Community College on Friday, April 20 at 12:00 noon in the James and Betty Hall Theater, Dutchess Hall, at the main campus in Poughkeepsie. Deng will discuss his experiences as a refugee in the civil war in Sudan, his view of the current situation in Sudan and Dafur, and the process of collaborating on the novel about his life. His visit is sponsored by DCC’s Writing Center, the June and Aaron Gillespie Forum, DCC’s Student Government Association, and the College’s Departments of English and Humanities and History, Government and Economics. Admission is free. For information, contact Professor Tom Denton at (845) 431-8436.

The Lost Boys of Sudan is the name of an International Rescue Committee program to resettle refugee boys from Sudan to the United States who were displaced and/or orphaned during the Second Sudanese Civil War, which took place between 1984 and 2005. In 2001, about 3,800 Lost Boys, including Deng, arrived in the United States where they settled in about 38 cities.

Deng met author Dave Eggers in Atlanta through the Lost Boys Foundation. The organization’s director, Mary Williams, thought Eggers might help Deng write his autobiography. They immediately started the slow process of in-person and phone interviews, initially creating 12 hours of audio tape. “At that point,” said Eggers, “we really hadn’t decided whether I was just helping Valentino write his own book, or if I was writing a book about him. I really didn’t know exactly what form it would finally take – whether it would be first person or third, whether it would be fiction or nonfiction.” After about 18 months, they settled on a fictionalized autobiography in Deng’s distinct voice.

“It is very close to the truth,” said Deng, “but many things in the book are somewhat different than what happened in life. Some characters have been combined. Some time is compressed. They are minor things, but they were necessary. For one thing, I was very young when the book begins, so I could not remember conversations and small details from my early childhood in Marial Bai. It was necessary to reconstruct the chronology, and that is what Dave did. He took the basic facts and then created the story from there.”

Deng notes that parts of the book that seem the most incredible and fictionalized are actually true. For instance, he was originally scheduled for resettlement in the United States on September 11, 2001, and was on a plane ready to leave Nairobi. That plane was grounded in the wake of the September 11 attacks, and he and 40 other Sudanese had to deplane and wait weeks for another opportunity to fly to the United States.

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