Reseña de Dignity Through Degradation: Postcolonial Creative Non-Fiction and the Politics of Exaggeration in Dave Eggers' What Is the What and Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place (Report)

Dignity Through Degradation: Postcolonial Creative Non-Fiction and the Politics of Exaggeration in Dave Eggers' What Is the What and Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place (Report) de Traffic (Parkville) Resumen del Libro

The national borders of present-day Sudan were first drawn when the Egyptian proxy authorities of the Ottoman Empire annexed the land around the southern Nile in 1820, and were later adopted by the British when they began ruling Sudan in condominium with Egypt in 1899. (1) But those borders were drawn with scant regard for the cultural complexities of the people within them--Arab Muslims in the Saharan north, African animists in the southern plains--so that political instability has plagued Sudan almost from the instant of its inception. (2) As the mid-twentieth century unravelling of the British Empire precipitated Sudanese independence, speculation arose that north and south might achieve independence as two distinct nations; but ultimately a split between them never eventuated, and in 1956 the borders of the newly-independent nation were virtually identical to the Ottoman borders of more than a century earlier. (3) Consequently, as post-independence sovereignty was vested in the north at the expense of the south, two very distinct cultural groups were left sharing land over which one held legislative dominance but could not enforce its legislation on a nationwide scale--a truth made disastrously evident in 1983 when the north's imposition of a nationwide Islamic legal code plunged Sudan into civil war. (4) Lasting more than twenty years, this was in fact the second civil war to afflict Sudan since independence and arguably the most catastrophic, particularly as northern mercenaries--known as murahaleen (horsemen)--raided and destroyed southern villages and in the process displaced some 27,000 children, mostly boys, who have since come to be known as the Lost Boys of Sudan. (5) One among the Lost Boys was Valentino Achak Deng, who, at ten years of age, fled his ancestral village of Marial Bai and walked thousands of kilometres across Sudan to seek refuge in Ethiopia; then, failing that, he walked further to the UN-administered refugee camp at Kakuma in northern Kenya. After a decade in Kakuma, the USA officially recognised Deng as a refugee and resettled him in Atlanta, Georgia, where over the following years other Lost Boys who resettled in North America came to recognise him as their public representative with responsibility for raising both awareness of their troubles and funds for their futures. Beginning in 2001, these efforts culminated in the 2006 publication of What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, (6) which brought unprecedented public exposure to Deng's own story and the stories of other Lost Boys, and which garnered critical as well as popular acclaim for using those stories to illustrate the personal consequences of Sudan's troubled political history. Yet, in outlining that history here, I have found it necessary to cite five additional authoritative texts because, by Deng's own admission, his 'autobiography' is not his own work and so cannot be taken as authoritative at all. (7)

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