What is the What

by Dave Eggers

  The Lutheran World Federation was the primary administrator of many of the cultural projects, and found their instructors among the Kenyans and the Sudanese. I first joined the LWF’s public speaking and debating club, hoping it would help with my English. Soon after, I joined the Youth and Culture program, and this would grow into a job for me. In 1997 I became Kakuma I’s youth leader. This was a paying occupation, something very few of my friends, and none of the children in my Kakuma family, possessed. Youth was considered anyone between seven and twenty-four years old, so in our part of the camp, this was six thousand youths. I was the liaison between the UNHCR and these kids, and Achor Achor was more impressed by this job than he had been years before, when I was a burial boy.

  —I’ll be here if you need advice, he said.

  Achor Achor had just acquired glasses, and looked very studious and far more serious than before. Everything that left his mouth seemed suddenly to carry the weight of deep contemplation and far-reaching intellect.

  —I will, I said.

  As the youth leader and coordinator of Kakuma I’s youth activities, I came into contact with Miss Gladys, who soon every boy at Kakuma would know and would think about often at night and alone.

  She was assigned to be the instructor for the Drama Club, of which I was a member and the ostensible student director. Twelve members of the group were present on our first day, ten boys and two girls, and for this one meeting I was the director. We were told by the LWF that the group’s adult sponsor and instructor would arrive for our second meeting. It was because I was the director by default that I could try to convince Maria to attend. I went to visit her one afternoon after school, two days before the first meeting. I found her hanging the laundry behind her adoptive family’s shelter.—Hello Sleeper, she said.

  She did not hide her foul mood. She never did. When she was down, her shoulders slumped, and her face frowned almost comically. She had not been to school in weeks; the man acting as her father had decided it was too problematic for her to both attend classes and properly help with the chores at home. His wife was pregnant, and he insisted that Maria be on hand should she need anything. As the baby grew within the womb of his wife, he said, she would need more help as the weeks and months went on. School, he said, was a luxury an orphan girl like her could not afford.

  Neither Maria nor I had hopes that she would be a long-term member of the drama group, but I convinced her to come to the first meeting. We arrived together and, with the other members, we read aloud the first few scenes of a play Miss Gladys had written. Maria, playing the lead, a woman beaten by her husband, took to it immediately. I knew she was a spirited person, for she had saved my life on the night of the spilled stars. But I did not suspect she had the soul of an actress.

  Maria attended the second meeting of the group, but I do not remember much about what she said or did, for this heralded the arrival of Miss Gladys. When Miss Gladys emerged, I ceded all authority and thereafter barely spoke at all.

  Miss Gladys was a young Kenyan, long necked and favoring floor-length skirts that swished flamboyantly as she walked. She immediately admitted that she did not have vast theatrical experience, and yet was in every way a performer, a woman who knew the power of every word she breathed and gesture she made. In her mind and in reality, there were no moments when she was not being watched.

  She was very adept at writing, we learned, having been educated for two years in England, at the University of East Anglia, where she had polished the English she’d learned in Nairobi’s best private schools.

  —What is that accent? we asked each other later.

  —It sounds very well-educated.

  —One day she will be my wife, we said.

  We could not understand why someone as regal and clean as Miss Gladys—she did not perspire!—would spend her time with refugees such as us. That she actually enjoyed our company, and she really seemed to, was too much to contemplate. She smiled at the boys among the group in a way that could only be considered flirtatious, and she clearly appreciated the attention she received. The girls, meanwhile, did their best to like her despite it all.

  The purpose of the club under her stewardship was to write and perform one-act plays that would illuminate problems at Kakuma and offer solutions in a non-pedantic manner. If there were misunderstandings, for example, about the risks of HIV infection, it was not possible to print flyers or air public-service announcements on television. We had to communicate first through dramatizations, and then hope that our messages would be entertaining, would be learned, internalized, and disseminated from person to person, mouth to ear.

  But Miss Gladys could not remember who, among us boys, was who. Among the ten boys was a boy named Dominic Dut Mathiang, who was by far the most humorous boy at Kakuma. The funniest Sudanese boy, at least; I did not know how humorous the Ugandans were. Very soon, at the first meeting of the club under Miss Gladys’s direction, she took to Dominic Dut Mathiang and laughed at every joke he made.

  —Your name is what again? she asked.

  —Dominic, he said.

  —Dominic! I love that name!

  And so the fate of the ten boys of our drama company was sealed, for she could not remember the names of the rest of us. She said she was not good at names, and this seemed to be true. She rarely referred to the girls by name, and it seemed the only name she could access readily was Dominic. And so we all became Dominic. At first it was a mistake. One day she absentmindedly referred to me, too, as Dominic.

  —I’m sorry, she said.—You both have both Italian names, correct?

  —Yes, I said.—Mine is Valentine.

  She apologized, but called me Dominic again the next day. I didn’t care. I did not care at all. I agreed with her that our names were very similar. I agreed very much with everything she said, though I did not always listen to the words coming from her beautiful mouth. So she called me Dominic, and she called the other boys Dominic, and we stopped correcting her. She began to simply call us all Dominic. Not one of us cared, and besides, she didn’t need our names very often. We never took our eyes off her, so she needed only to direct her eyes, guarded by lashes of remarkable length and curvature, to whomever she was speaking.

  We boys talked about her during all our available hours. We held special meetings, in the home of the real Dominic, Dominic Dut Mathiang, to discuss her merits.—Her teeth aren’t real, one boy suggested.

  —Yeah. I heard she had them fixed in England.

  —In England? You’re crazy. People don’t do that in England.

  —But they can’t be real. Look at our teeth and then at hers.

  Our first play was called Forced Marriage, and it sought to dramatize and offer alternatives to the traditional Sudanese way. I played the part of an elder who disagreed with the idea of forcing young women into loveless marriages. In the play, my position was opposed by many other elders, who thought the existing system was best. The majority won in the end, and the girl in the play in question was given away. We left it to our youth audiences to decide that allowing this system to remain was unacceptable.

  We performed this first play dozens of times all over Kakuma, and because it was occasionally humorous and in large part because Miss Gladys made an appearance—as the sister to the bride—it was very well liked and we were urged to continue. So we wrote and performed dramas about AIDS and how to prevent it. We wrote a play about anger management and conflict resolution. One play concerned castes and social discrimination in the camp, another covered the effects of war on children. We performed a one-act proposing gender equality—that the boys and girls of Sudan, like those in Kenya, should be treated the same—and to our continual amazement, the plays were appreciated and we received very little resistance, at least overtly, to our message.

  But some elders did not appreciate our irreverence, and the man under whose care Maria lived was one of those who did not support our efforts. One day, Maria did not come to rehearsal after school, and when s
he had missed three days in a row, I went to look for her. I found her at home in the evening, crouching by the fire outside, cooking asida.

  —Not now! she hissed, and rushed inside.

  I waited for a few minutes, and then left. It was not until many days later that I saw her again, by the water pump.

  —He won’t let me, she said.

  Her caretaker had been outraged, it seemed, when Maria was gone in the afternoons, given that it was that time when the women prepared meals and retrieved all the water for the night and the next morning. Women were not expected to venture out of their homes after dark, so the hours between school and sunset were vital for the performing of Maria’s duties.

  —I can talk to him, I offered.

  I had spoken to other families since I had become a youth leader. If there was a gap in understanding between generations, I was often asked to mediate. ‘The boy who keeps his hands clean eats with his elders,’ Gop had taught me, and this lesson informed my behavior every day and served me well. When another girl in the troupe, a rail-thin actress named Adyuei, had been prevented from attending our meetings, I intervened. She first told her parents that I would like to talk to them. When they agreed to see me, I arrived the next evening with a gift of writing pads and pens, and sat with them for some time. I explained that Adyuei was essential to our group, and that she was doing very important work for the youth of the camp. Knowing that her parents, like Maria’s, were depending on the windfall of her bride price, I appealed to their mercenary interests. I told her father that Adyuei would be far more attractive to her future husband with the skills of an actress, and that her increased visibility would only bring a more competitive market for her when she was ready to be married. All of my arguments worked on her father; they worked far better than I expected. Adyuei was not only allowed to attend all the rehearsals, but her father came with her occasionally, too, insisting that she receive prominent roles and specialized instruction from Miss Gladys. All this had worked, and so I thought it would work for the man who called Maria daughter, but she would not have it.

  —No, no. Forget it. He’s not that kind of man, she said.

  Nothing would work for this man, she said. She had no plans to defy her caretaker, for she knew she would be beaten. And anyway, she said, being unable to perform in the troupe was the least of her worries. It was evidence of her openness and trust in me that she told me, that day at the water pump, that only three days prior, she had received her first period. As a youth educator, I had access to a good deal of information about health and hygiene, so I knew what this meant physiologically for Maria. More importantly, I knew it meant that in Sudanese society, she was now considered a woman. When Sudanese girls first menstruate, they are considered available for marriage and are very often claimed within days.

  —Does anyone know? I asked.

  —Shh! she whispered.—Not yet.

  —Are you sure? How could your mother not know?

  —She doesn’t know, Sleeper. She asks me about it but she doesn’t know. I’m too young to have it, anyway. No one else I know has had it. Now shh. I shouldn’t have told you. Forget I said anything.

  And she walked off.

  That day Maria insisted that I not tell a soul of her status; she had not decided how to keep her discharges secret from her caretakers, but she was determined to do so as long as possible. This was not unprecedented at Kakuma, but it was uncommon. Most girls, even if they plan to fight off the prospect of an arranged marriage, do not conceal their womanhood. Most accept it, and some celebrate it. There are certain clans in southern Sudan who celebrate a girl’s first period with a party attended by family and suitors from villages near and far. It serves as a coming-out event, alerting the bachelors of the region that a girl has become a woman. To some men, plucking their bride at that moment is ideal, for it provides for an unquestionable purity.

  If I were to guess Maria’s age at that time, it would have to be fourteen. But in Sudan it is not the age that is important, but more so the shape and maturity of a woman’s body. And even I, who had known Maria since she was a twig of a girl, had taken notice of her signs of womanhood. In another life, one where she was not under the care of an angry man expecting a return on his investment, I might have sought to romance her. There was no girl with whom I had such understanding, no girl who felt so like an extension of my own soul. But unaccompanied minors like me were not considered viable mates for young women like Maria. We only complicated the plans of their caretakers; if there was a young man like me circling a girl like Maria, questions of her virginity inevitably arose. People like Maria and I could be friends only, and even then, friends of occasional meeting.

  SPLA soldiers and commanders were among the busiest of those who shopped Kakuma for a desirable young bride. They would sweep through the camp, ascertaining through rumor and sight which young women they might add to their families. The rebels also came to Kakuma, and other camps in the countries surrounding Sudan, looking for recruits. Thousands of potential soldiers lived peacefully at our camp, and this fact created some consternation on the part of the rebels, and no limit of handwringing on the part of men my age.

  The Dominics of the drama group had begun to talk seriously about the possibility of joining the SPLA; many felt useless at Kakuma. This happened periodically, especially when there were great advances won or great losses incurred by the rebels. The young men attending school or simply idling at the camp would discuss, with varying degrees of intensity, enlisting, either to bolster the flagging efforts of the rebel army, or to be there when the job was ready to be finished.

  As if fully knowing the minds of the men my age, a phalanx of soldiers and commanders arrived in Kakuma one day, looking for as many young men as they could carry to war. Officially, there was not to be an SPLA presence at the camp, but former and current commanders moved through without check. They came with enough troop trucks to carry hundreds of young men away, if they could be persuaded to leave the camp and return to southern Sudan to fight.

  A meeting was called for ten o’clock one night, in a building made of corrugated steel and mud. There were five SPLA officers sitting at a table, and before them, two hundred young men who had been asked and coerced to attend this informational meeting. The SPLA had a very bad reputation among many young men, and so many were skeptical of their presence. Some felt betrayed because though the SPLA recruited heavily from northern Bahr al-Ghazal, they had done little to protect the region from attack. Others disapproved of their use of child soldiers, while still others were simply dissatisfied with how long it was taking to win the war against the government of Sudan. And so Achor Achor and I, and all of the young men we knew, came to the meeting that night, in part out of sheer curiosity about what they would say, what angle they might use in trying to persuade us to take up arms and leave the relative safety of the camp. The room was crowded, and though Achor Achor found a seat near the front, I did not, and instead stood by the window. And while the room was full that night, many young men stayed as far away as they could. For many years, the SPLA dictated that deserters were to be executed on sight, and there were certainly a good number of deserters at Kakuma.

  The commander in charge that night, a squat and imperious man named Santo Ayang, walked in, sat at the blue wooden table before us, and addressed this particular point first.

  —If there are boys here who have left the army, do not worry, he said.—The laws about desertion are different now. You will be welcomed back to the army without penalty. Please tell your friends.

  This sent an approving murmur through the audience.

  —This is a new SPLA, a united SPLA, Commander Santo said.—And we are winning. You know we’re winning. We have won at Yambio, Kaya, Nimule, and Rumbek. We now control the majority of what’s important in southern Sudan, and we need only to finish the job. You have a choice, boys…Well, you are not boys any longer. Many of you are men, and you are strong and have been educated. And now you h
ave a choice. How many of you young men would like to stay in Kakuma for the rest of your lives?

  None among us raised their hands.

  —So then. How do you think you will leave this place? No one said a word.

  —You expect to return home when the war is won, I suppose. But how will this war be won? Who will win it? Who is fighting this war? I ask you. You are here in Kakuma, having your food provided to you, buying expensive shoes…

  Here he pointed to a boy standing on a chair in the corner. He was wearing new sneakers, of immaculate leatherette, white as bone.

  —And you are waiting here, in safety, until we finish the work. Then you will return and benefit from the shedding of our blood. I take it from your silence that this is indeed your plan. It is a shrewd plan, I admit, but do you think we are an army of rabbits and women? Who is fighting this war, I ask you! Men are fighting this war, and I don’t care if they call you Lost Boys here at this camp. You are men and it is your duty to fight. If you do not fight, this war is lost, southern Sudan is lost, and you will raise your children at Kakuma, and they will raise their children here.

  A young man named Mayuen Fire jumped up.

  —I will go!

  The commander smiled.—Are you ready?

  —I am ready, Mayuen Fire shouted. We all laughed.

  —Quiet! the commander barked. The room grew quiet, in part because the commander had demanded it, and in part because we realized Mayuen Fire was serious.—At least there is one man among all these boys, Santo continued.—I’m very happy. We leave in three days. Thursday night there will be trucks outside the west gate. We’ll see you there. Bring your clothes and other belongings.

  The new recruit, in his excitement, did not know what to do at that point, and so walked out of the building. It was awkward, given the room was so crowded that it took him a few minutes to step over all of us to reach the door. Then, realizing he might miss important information at the meeting, he returned and watched from a window.