No, the title of this post does not refer in any way to this blog, it refers to the latest novel by Dave Eggers (“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”), which tells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. It’s a novel, as opposed to autobiography, because while Deng’s story is told in the first person, it recounts experiences of both himself and others, the effect being to illustrate the general plight of the more than 27,000 young male refugees from the Second Sudanese Civil War who attempted (and to some degree, succeeded) to escape the violence by going to Ethiopia, then Kenya, on foot. This is an interesting facet of the story, as it perhaps reflects a cultural identity as being group-like in nature, as opposed to our western idea of the sole individual path. But I’ll leave those thoughts for another time.
The book was given to me by my uncle, though it has been recommended by others, and he said I’d be hooked almost instantly. I’ve only read about 40 pages, and can already tell you that he was right. However, the reason I’m writing about it now is that something in particular jumped out at me from the first chapter. At this point in the story, Deng has been living in the U.S. for a few years, and although he has been warned about theft and violence in the low-rent community where he lives, he naively opens the door to some strangers and is robbed and beaten. After being intially pistol-whipped and subdued, he begins to take stock of what they might steal:
Lying here, I begin to calculate what they can take from me. I realize with some satisfaction that my computer is in my car, and will be spared. But [Deng's roomate] Achor Achor’s new laptop will be stolen… The records of all the meetings, the finances, thousands of e-mails.
For a victim of civil war, who for years has hidden, been shot at, seen friends killed by planes, soldiers, disease, starvation, even taken by lions, has walked hundreds if not thousands of miles through harsh terrain, then been transplanted to a new and mind-bogglingly different place, a laptop computer is the first thing that he thinks of.
Even for me, having grown up in comfort and stability, a computer is, at it’s root, a metaphysical concept. It is a clever and compact combination of plastics and metals, with the power to hold seemingly infinite amounts of data, project images and sounds, connect to and analyze a limitless amount of information – nearly the sum of human knowledge, an incomprehensible idea in and of itself – that essentially relies on the user’s ability to believe that it exists. It is, as my 91-year-old grandmother might say, magic.
I have absolutely no idea how it works, though I recognize that it is a marvel of human engineering. But somehow, I would have guessed that someone in Deng’s position, having undoubtedly learned firsthand the value of life above all, and the temporary and comparatively meaningless nature of possessions, situations, even information – “stuff”, if you will – would have thought of something else before his computer. What else would he have thought of? It’s hard to say, but perhaps he would have been worried for his own safety; the value of lives in places like Sudan seem to command a lower asking-price than we’d generally be comfortable with. Maybe he’d be worried first that they would steal his paper money, or clothing, or take his food – all things that I would guess have a higher value to those at the desperate edge of survival than a hunk of plastic and metal.
But perhaps I’m underestimating the value of possessions, especially those with the demonstrably “magic” power of a personal computer. Indeed information itself is valuable to people in any situation, and a computer’s most impressive and easily-grasped attribute is that it is the single most powerful, tangible aggregator of information that we come into regular contact with. Though one could perhaps argue that our parents or societies are also immense and powerful conglomerations of information, I think that these quickly become difficult to accurately distill the boundaries of. When one thinks about it, the theft of a computer is more than a theft of a useful machine or expensive toy, but is a theft of the mind and body – memories and creations, the fruits of labors both physical and intellectual.
It makes a pretty good argument to back up your files. Or keep infinite copies on the internet, like this blog.
Of course, I could be reading a little too deeply into this. It could be that Eggers himself, in relating this incident through Deng’s years of dictations and conversations, placed the computer as the first and most important object of value in his character’s mind, and that this entire issue could be boiled down to a first-world author attempting to distill the mind of a third-world refugee. Indeed it would be natural in my own comfortable setting – if my house were burning down, if there was one thing I’d run in to get, or bring with me on my way out, it would probably be my computer (perhaps followed closely by my film negatives, another irreplaceable aggregator of information). What would you take?
Read more about the Lost Boys of Sudan here, and learn about the documentary here.
