Don’t Look Back: A Memoir of War, Survival, and My Journey from Sudan to America
Don’t Look Back: A Memoir of War, Survival, and My Journey from Sudan to America
Young Adult Nonfiction
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Byr)
October 11, 2022
I want life. After a deadly attack in South Sudan left six-year-old Achut Deng without a family, she lived in refugee camps for ten years, until a refugee relocation program gave her the opportunity to move to the United States. When asked why she should be given a chance to leave the camp, Achut simply told the interviewer: I want life. But the chance at starting a new life in a new country came with a different set of challenges. Some of them equally deadly. Taught by the strong women in her life not to look back, Achut kept moving forward, overcoming one obstacle after another, facing each day with hope and faith in her future. Yet, just as Achut began to think of the US as her home, a tie to her old life resurfaced, and for the first time, she had no choice but to remember her past. In this powerful, and propulsive memoir, Achut Deng and Keely Hutton tell a harrowing and inspiring story showing both the ugliness and the beauty of humanity, and the power of not giving up.
This book for young adult readers (12-18 years old) tells the story of a young refugee from South Sudan who was resettled in the U.S. in 2000. Many books have already chronicled the experiences of the “lost boys of the Sudan,” who made the long and horrid trek from south Sudan to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya to escape the war that raged in their homeland and as many as 20,000 of whom were eventually resettled in the U.S. This book presents the memories of one of the “lost girls,” fewer in number than the “lost boys” and much less documented. About twenty years after her ordeal, this “lost girl,” Achut Deng, now a mother of three boys, decided to share her story publicly and chose as co-author Keely Hutton, a prize-winning author of war novels for young readers. The result of this collaboration is a beautifully narrated and sensitively written book that represents “Achut Deng’s memories to the best of her knowledge” (Author’s Note).
Achut was only six when the war between the Government of Sudan and the Southern People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), which had reignited in 1983, entered a new phase. In 1991, a civil war broke out between two branches of the SPLA, the Nuer-based branch of Riek Machar and the Dinka-based one of John Garang, during which Machar incited communal violence against Dinka civilians, including children like Achut.
The reader gets a brief glimpse of Achut’s life in 1988, when the war with the North was already raging and the men and boys of her village (including her father) were forcibly recruited into the SPLA. However, most of the story is about her long flight from one place to another, as violence followed on her heels. Achut’s flight began in November 1991, when Nuer militias viciously and indiscriminately attacked her village, and ended in August 1992, when she reached the Kakuma refugee camp in northwest Kenya. On the way, many of her relatives and friends, including her grandmother, who had taken charge of her in her mother’s absence from the village, had been killed by the pursuers or died during the long trek, whether from their wounds or from exhaustion, hunger, illness, or wild animals. It was a widowed female friend of her mother who protected and guided Achut as a stream of southern Sudanese refugees worked their way to the Kakuma. Achut vividly, and sometimes even humorously, narrates her experiences in the Kakuma refugee camp, showing us the selfless support of some fellow refugees as well as their occasional greed and aggression. The make-shift school she attended and the friendships she formed made a huge difference in her life and it is together with some of her friends that she applied for, and was in 2000 eventually accepted for immigration to the U.S.
In Houston, Achut was housed with young male refugees – some related to her – one of whom repeatedly raped her without her daring to report him. Eventually the assault was discovered and Achut was moved to another home. This is the end of Achut’s story as told in this book. Only in the author’s blurbs at the end of the book do we find out more about what happened to Achut after this. We learn that she was eventually reunited with her parents and able to bring them to the U.S. At the time of the book’s publication, she was working in human resources at a meat plant in South Dakota, where she lives with her three sons.
The idea for this book emerged after Caitlin Dickerson of the Atlantic had written a story about Achut during the COVID epidemic, when the meat plant at which Achut worked the night shift became a center of infections and Achut almost died. By this time (2020), Achut, who had until then wanted to shield her sons from her war experiences, had come to believe that her sons, as well as others, could perhaps benefit from a story of so much overcoming. In her review of the book, Dickerson put it this way: “Don’t Look Back reminds us why stories about confronting extreme human challenges can have a profoundly positive and even lifesaving impact” (The Atlantic, 26 October 2022). This may be true, but is it also true for young adult U.S. readers who may know very little about Africa?
There is no doubt that Don’t Look Back is an important account of a young girl’s war experience. If Keely indeed stayed as close to Achut’s memories as she indicates, then this is perhaps even an important historical text. However, given that the positive outcomes of Achut’s experiences are not part of the book, and that the book, moreover, begins and ends with fear and rape in Houston (reminiscent of how David Eggers structured his award-winning 2006 novel What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng), this book, in spite of its many great qualities, is also, once again, a book on Africa that focuses on brute and senseless ethnic violence. This reviewer therefore both admires it and refrains from recommending it without reservations. Nevertheless, if carefully chosen and read together with the after-story, and ideally read as one of a range of books on Africa, this book may benefit young adult readers and they may come away with respect for refugees’ resilience and will to live, as well as the crucial contributions they make to the economy and culture of the U.S.
Lidwien Kapteijns, Ph.D.
Wellesley College
Published in Africa Access Review (January 3, 2023)
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