Suppose you are at home, sitting down to dinner with your family or spouse. It's been a hard day and long day and it took a lot of work to get the two of you or the six of you together.
The doorbell rings. A person is at the door and they have something to offer you. You can take something that may make your life easier in some ways, but you can't know what it is until you choose it. If you don't want the what, the other option is that you will be assured of that dinner will be served this way again for you and yours.
Most people, by common sense, would stay with the promise of dinner again this way.
Some of the rest of us crazies would take The What.
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I briefly talked about Dave Eggers's "What Is the What" in a previous post, but I finished the book this week and just wanted to take in a quick note of goodbye. The title of the book comes from a African Dinka creation story--God addresses the Dinka upon their creation and offers them a choice: they can have a plentiful supply of cattle as an agricultural nation, or they can have the What.
The Dinkas choose the cattle.
Problem is, what is the What?
The book never tells us that, but by the last page of the book, you know full well what the What is, and, as scared as you are, you are ready to embrace it yourself. The story of this Sudanese refugee depicts tolerance unfathomable by some of us--of America and its culture. And this world, where so much is the What, suddenly turns from a rotting, festering orb to a honed jewel with slick trip of the wrist.
Okay, not slick. But I can't tell you the transition point, so it was an artful one.
And for more on the book's protagonist, see: http://www.valentinoachakdeng.org/
And I feel a little better reading this book after having chose the What more than my share of times in my life.
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