Dave Eggers - What Is The What

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 she 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.