The Revised Essay

Aly Higgins

Professor Leake

WRIT 1733

May 3, 2013

Expanding Truth, Pain, and Love: How to Tell a Human Story

            What is the What by Dave Eggers is a novel that accounts the story of Valentino’s refugee journey from a small village in South Sudan to a suburb of Atlanta. The story is filled with many periods of triumph and many times of suffering; however, Eggers’ commitment to a new standard of truth allows the story to come alive even when it is “difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen” (O’Brien).  The contradictions and skewed timeline in the novel allows the reader to become immersed in the emotional validity of Valentino’s story and calls for a critical assessment of how stories are received in our world. Through a unique narrative viewpoint, Eggers challenges the reader’s perceptions of truth and pain, and aims to break up the traditional opinion of how a ‘refugee’ story should be told.

Truth, a target often sought but rarely defined, is hotly debated in reference to the validity of a story. Facts, events, and locations seem to matter greatly to the public; it is if we have evolved into a mechanic lie detector, only expressing signs of interest when we feel as if we have been deceived. “Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit of puffery, pure Hollywood” (O’Brien). However, is truth truly nothing more than the legitimacy of data? Must our stories be put to a technical test? Authors de Sousa and Morton argue in their article “Emotional Truth” that “it is accuracy rather than truth itself that is valuable” (265). The distinction between the two lies within the distinction between relaying belittled pieces of information and delivering something whole that contains value. To better clarify the distinction, “truth comes in many forms, some cheap and some valuable” (de Sauso and Morton 265). For example, a cheap truth is one that has factual legitimacy but is plagued by vagueness; a cheap truth could refer to a description of a flower as colorful. While that description may be true, it conveys nothing of great value about the event.

Thus, accuracy, rather than truth, can come from malleable roots yet still contain a profound calling to the heart of the matter. In What is the What, the unique narrative structure of the novel illuminates a deeper truth. In the novel, Eggers alternates between the present-day robbery in Atlanta and Valentino’s journey from South Sudan as a child. The story is told in an illogical order, yet the connections between Valentino’s different periods of suffering allow Eggers to create a cyclical pattern that uncovers a deeper truth. If the story had been told in the factually correct order, Valentino would have existed as two distinct versions of himself: the refugee fleeing his hometown and the refugee trying to make it in the United States. The disruption of factual truth allows Valentino to share “the whole truth of [his] existence” since “the stories [can] emanate from [him] at all the time [he is] awake and breathing” (Eggers xiii, 29). He can be perceived as human rather than labeled a ‘refugee’. Demanding a higher standard of ‘truth’ that may exist in a disrupted form evokes a “rich a body of beliefs and desires, fitting the person’s situation and its possibilities” (de Sauso and Morton 272). In other words, adhering to a commitment to accuracy creates more creative space for the author to tell the story how it is remembered rather than how it happened because in reality, “happeningness is irrelevant” (O’Brien).

The effectiveness of incorporating valuable truth in a story directly influences how well pain and suffering, key elements of a many stories, are communicated. Pain is complex and originates from a primal source rather than a linguistic conscious. As a result of this difficulty, “the communicability of pain is frequently questioned; any expression of pain is considered … deficient and incomplete, … [because] it defers meaning” (Hron 35). Pain has the tendency of being swept away into a “universal ‘suffering form’” (Fadlalla 80). It is a trait that can come to define an entire mass of undistinguishable faces rather than a poignant attribute of an individual story. For example, Valentino criticizes the United States’ reaction to the stories of the Lost Boys, the group of South Sudanese refugees that walked from their home towns to the asylum of the Kakuma refugee camp. In the United States, the people avidly listen to the accounts of lions, military shootings, and unfathomable moments of suffering. They are riveted by the prospect of young boys being forced to drink their own urine when that detail is “apocryphal, absolutely not true for the vast majority of [them]” (Eggers 21).  

While pain may be universal, it cannot be generalized because it cannot be restricted to the confines of language. Pain is often reduced to a “ghostly shadow” because it is difficult to linguistically “describe their pain, convey its intensity, explain its cause, or specify its location” (Hron 39, 41). Pain, just as truth, can never be portrayed with total correctness; it can only be expressed from memory with emotional accuracy. Valentino’s story only exits within the “diary of his dreams”, and he can tell us the pain of seeing men killed before his eyes, of losing his friend Noriyaki, and of having his “voice and movements … restricted by the things [he owned]” during a robbery” (Eggers 29, 26). It is impossible to recount these sufferings with complete integrity, but factual integrity does nothing to recount pain accurately. Only maintaining the commitment to tell a story through the individual framework of one’s memory can make pain expressible and accountable. Thus, accuracy is just as vital to illuminating human pain as it is to displaying real truth.

The question I am trying to answer today is, how do I tell a refugee story? First, however, I must address the definition of a story. A story is a tool of human communication that has been molded for a variety of purposes. Throughout history “the story was used to preserve the culture of a civilization” and as time passed, stories were “used as means of instructing others” (Stein 489, 490). Thus, a story was merely a bare skeleton used to serve a functional purpose. What is the What disrupts this definition. Valentino tells his story because he believes that “to do anything else would be less than human” (Eggers 535). In other terms, the purpose of Valentino’s story, and potentially other refugee stories, is not to serve a purpose to the outside world, but rather, to serve a duty to oneself. In a refugee story, a story is not told to “instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior” (O’Brien). A refugee owes nothing to the outside world for it was that world that reduced the refugee to merely a soul controlled by outside, unfair circumstances. Stories entrenched with the horrors of mental and emotional displacement have the responsibility to adhere to a deeply personal truth- one that is contradictory and not relevant to the moral codes of the readers.

I would argue that the way to tell a refugee story is to tell it with no greater purpose at all. The truth should only consist of the emotional and mental interpretation of the situation; it is more functional to recount a blurred compilation of fragmented memories from the most remote corners of the mind. It does not have to make sense. “A true story, it truly told, makes the stomach believe” (O’Brien). In other terms, the truth of a story, rooted in the juxtaposition of horror and beauty, should evoke a primal, incommunicable reaction- the same sort of reaction that precursors pain. A real truth cannot be validated by the suffocating limitations of the written or spoken language. A story cannot be categorized in an ‘other’ category. Thus, maybe the way to tell a refugee story is to not really tell it as a refugee story at all.

In the famous literary piece How to Tell a True War Story, Tim O’Brien stated that his story “wasn’t a war story. It was a love story”. Through horrific accounts of death beneath the canopy of the Vietnamese rainforest, O’Brien reminds us that war is a conglomerated contradiction “because war is also mystery and terror and adventure and courage and discovery and holiness and pity and despair and longing and love” (O’Brien). Thus, a war story, or a refugee story, or a story of suffering is never really about the suffering. In What is the What, Valentino was not telling a story of his horrors; he was telling the story of his mother, of Tabitha, of William K., and of his father. Therefore, a refugee story is really no different than a love story because it includes boundless emotions, periods of elation and depression, and a truth that is more than a set of facts. So, how do you tell a refugee story, you may ask? I’d start with a commitment to refuse to categorize it as anything other than a human story. A human story about the most humane of truths: love.          

Works Cited

De Sousa, Ronald. "Emotional Truth: Ronald de Sousa." Aristotelian Society Supplementary                      Volume. Vol. 76. No. 1. Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2002.

Eggers, Dave. What is the What: A Novel. San Francisco: McSweeney's, 2006. Print.

Fadlalla, Amal Hassan. "Contested Borders of (In)Humanity: Sudanese Refugees and the Mediation of Suffering and Subaltern Visibilities." Urban Anthropology and Studies of Cultural Systems and World Economic Development 38.1 (2009): 79-120.   Print.

Hron, Madelaine. "'Suffering Matters': The Translation and Politics of Pain." Translating pain: immigrant suffering in literature and culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009. 33-62. Print.

O'Brien, Tim. "How to Tell a True War Story." The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction.                   Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990. n/a. Print.

Stein, Nancy L. "The definition of a story." Journal of pragmatics 6.5 (1982): 487-507.