by Ger Duany
MAKE ME A WORLD is an imprint dedicated to exploring the vast possibilities of contemporary childhood. We strive to imagine a universe in which no young person is invisible, in which no kid’s story is erased, in which no glass ceiling presses down on the dreams of a child. Then we publish books for that world, where kids ask hard questions and we struggle with them together, where dreams stretch from eons ago into the future and we do our best to provide road maps to where these young folks want to be. We make books where the children of today can see themselves and each other. When presented with fences, with borders, with limits, with all the kinds of chains that hobble imaginations and hearts, we proudly say—no.
Text copyright © 2020 by Ger Duany
Cover photograph copyright © 2020 by Simon Maina/Getty Images
Interior art copyright © by 2020 by Yvan Alagbé
Map art copyright © 2020 by Michael Reagan
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Make Me a World, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Make Me a World and the colophon are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 9781524719401 (trade) — ISBN 9781524719418 (lib. bdg.) — ebook ISBN 9781524719425
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Ger's Family Tree
Part I
Belonging
The Hunt
Life Lost
Like Father, Like Son
What If?
The Messenger
Home
The Trek
Extended Friends, Extended Family
A Small Taste of Education
Back from the Dead
Brothers
Order in the Camp
Christmas
Justice
Reality
Father Figure
Hyenas
Part II
The Bullet Thief
Guns and Thieves
Clean Conscience
A Soldier Is Born
A Soldier Is Dead
Saviors
Good–Byes
Making the Cut
Hospitality
Coming to America
Welcome Wagon
Part III
Misinterpreters
Prisoner
Disconnected
The Loop
A New Family
Suffering in Silence
My Theory of Relativity
Ball‘S in My Court
A Lost Boy
First-Class Treatment
The Model Life
Promotion
Near Miss
A Meaningful Life
Picture–Imperfect
My Own Man
Separation
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To my mother, Nyathak, who never got a chance to go to formal school to learn how to read and write.
For my sister Nyandit, who never got a chance to see sunrise, life. May your spirit live through, and on with, this memoir.
Dear Reader,
Violence is a strange monster. It takes many forms. From climate change and armed conflicts to pandemics and the small desperations that happen inside people’s homes and families. Yet when politicians and pundits talk about trauma or destruction, they most often use the word “war” as a metaphor—wars on poverty, or illiteracy, or disease. But for those who have had to endure actual wars, the small ones or the big ones, the metaphor falls short.
In 2016, I was working with young Syrian refugees in Munich, teenagers who had to flee as the walls of their cities, of their communities, and of their childhoods crumbled around them. They looked at photos from two or three years before and told me that the buildings they posed in front of were no longer there, reduced to piles of bricks and faded photographs. My own understandings of the conflict in Syria, which had to do with everything from global politics to climate change, were useless in the face of these young men and women, who showed me piles of bricks, saying, “This was my home.”
If you pull back the lens, to global economies and climate changes, wars look very different, but up close they are the same. Perhaps the most important thing that unifies all these experiences, however, is not the horrors, but the tools we use to survive them. Walk Toward the Rising Sun, by Ger Duany, is a remembrance of the tools one young man used to piece together a world that was breaking around him. The friendships, the skills, and the belief in oneself that he had to develop in order to escape circumstances beyond his control became the building blocks of a remarkable life that has taken him around the world as an actor and activist.
There are wars everywhere. Some stretch across nations, and miles of wilderness and culture and families like Ger’s. Some smaller and no less important wars rage inside the hearts and heads of young people. There is a temptation to not tell these stories, to provide for young hearts imaginary worlds without conflict. There is also a temptation to assure young people that wars like this happen only in far-off places, to brand anything that is uncomfortable or challenging as “foreign” or “other.” War is scary. One of the bravest things Ger talks about is his own fear.
But there is another path—to pull the lens even closer and see how the conflicts that Ger has endured prepared him for the life he would lead, giving back to the many communities he has called home. To see this story, and stories like it, as providing pathways away from the conflict. To draw maps, for ourselves and our young people, that will lead to a place where no war is too far away for us to care about the people involved—maps that will furnish us all with a safe passage to a world in which all these wars are distant memories.
Christopher Myers
This book is a memoir; it is a true story based on my best recollection of the events and times with friends and family. Due to the limitations of my perspective as a child and young adult, I was compelled at times to create what I trusted was plausible and likely dialogue to bring the actual scenes to life. Until recent times, South Sudanese people did not keep track of birthdays—or celebrate them in any lavish way—so such dates and ages throughout the story are based on my best assumptions.
I WAS ABOUT SIX YEARS old wh
en I sat in the dirt clearing of Liet Village center in 1983 or ’84, amid a few hundred other villagers, frozen in silence, watching my mother’s youngest brother, Tut, lay his full six-foot, six-inch frame down in the dirt. The wind whooshed through the high grass, sorghum, maize, and tobacco on our subsistence farm, which surrounded our mud huts, and cattle lowed in the distance. Tut crossed his arms over his muscular chest and placed his shaved head inside a depression dug into the earth specially to catch the blood. He lay there without a trace of labored breathing or a single tremble while one of our village elders delivered a booming speech about courage, a man’s responsibility to provide for his community, and his right to take wives.
ELDER 1: This young man will be marked into adulthood this morning. God protected him from many battles so that he might receive this honor in front of his elders and peers.
Another elder rose and gestured with long, graceful arms as he spoke.
ELDER 2: Today is a blessing. It is important in our culture to mark every Nuer man, so when the world looks upon him, they will know he is the bravest of all men and will protect his people at all costs. There have been many courageous warriors throughout history, each one a legend: Muon Kem Joak, Ger Pathot, and Buth Diu, who spearheaded the self-determination of southern Sudan. On this day, Tut will join their storied ranks.
A third elder, known for steady hands, pulled a ceremonial knife from its place among the coals of a small fire (where it was first sterilized). The lines on this elder’s face deepened as he wiped the knife with a cloth, leaned over Tut’s face, and frowned in concentration. The shadow of a hawk in flight flashed across the sunny clearing, and the elder cut a line all the way across the blank canvas of Tut’s forehead.
Due to the knife’s sharpness, the blood did not come right away. It was almost as if its edge hadn’t even slid across his brow. Clean, precise, imperceptibly thin, like a paper cut. Then I saw a line, the line turned red, and after another second, the blood began to drip into Tut’s ears. By the time it started gushing from the wound, the elder had already carved a second line below and begun a third, parallel to the first two. He didn’t stop until he had carved six lines across the brow, and by then torrents flowed into Tut’s eyes and all across his cheeks. The blood darkened the already-black earth beneath his crown and brightened Tut’s dark complexion with a crimson sheen.
Of course I knew he was a living, breathing man, but while the cutting took place, Tut could have been obsidian, or the casket of a pharaoh, he was so perfectly still. Had Uncle Tut shown even the slightest twinge of pain during the ceremony, the entire assembly would have shuffled away in silent shame, but he had been the very embodiment of bravery, so the village exploded into a wild trill.
VILLAGERS: Hulululu!
I wasn’t afraid at the sight of all that blood, for I knew this was only a ritual and Tut was not mortally wounded. My elders were there, my aunties, my uncles, my mother, and my father’s other wives, and if they condoned this rite, I knew it was okay.
Having proven himself by receiving the cuts in silence, Tut stood, hands at his sides, eyes closed behind a curtain of blood. The cuts, which would heal into proud scars, bled out naturally as the elders led the newly initiated warrior into a hut where he would rest and recuperate.
Tut was actually too old to undergo this rite of passage and should have completed it when he hit puberty. But he had recently returned to Liet from Sudan’s Muslim-dominated north, eager to bond with his people and fight for the south in the second Sudanese civil war, which had begun that year. This was his way of proving his fealty to our village, our people, and our cause.
As soon as he entered the hut, men, women, and children alike jumped up and danced in the square, pounding their feet, throwing arms out, swiveling hips, and singing in celebration of this propitious initiation. I joined them, feeling the joy of the whole village in my bones.
At some point soon, village women would deliver food to Tut in grateful thanks for his dedication to the defense of the Nuer, our ethnic group. And eventually, after days or weeks—however long it took Tut to heal alone in the hut—he would finally emerge. And he would emerge a man.
While the villagers danced, I heard a powerful bovine bellow cut short as my uncle Reat leaned forward and, with a single stroke, sliced the throat of a favorite cow. The animal kneeled, its head drooped, and finally it collapsed on its side with a great thud. I nearly cried out when I saw its once-powerful horns resting on the ground like two useless sticks, but taking my cue from Tut’s bravery, I held back my tears.
My father had warned me that a cow would be sacrificed as part of the ceremony, but still, when its blood gushed out and the majestic animal fell to its knees, my stomach turned sour, almost as if I were watching an auntie or uncle pass away. A cattle herder already, I had named each of my father’s cows and knew their personalities by heart. I could identify which were easily led or rebellious, which were playful or slow-moving. Cows, for the Nuer people, are kin and currency: killing one is like losing a family member and lighting a wad of hundred-dollar bills on fire. But this significant occasion called for a sacrifice, a nod to the traditional animism that still colored our mostly Christian belief system.
My father did not require his sons to participate in the ritual scarification to which Tut had submitted, perhaps because it would brand us as villagers and declare inferior tribal status to Sudan’s ruling elite, even more than our black skin already did. “Arabs” was what we called the northern Sudanese because they spoke Arabic; however, they weren’t actually Arabs. They were a light-skinned African ethnic group that practiced Islam. Their side of this war was funded by allies in the Arab world, while Russia funded ours, indirectly, through communist Ethiopia. I’d grown up hearing stories about my older brother Oder, who was said to be a great soldier like my father, which had made my father immensely proud.
DAD: You boys should not participate in this serious initiation without full knowledge of what it means, do you understand?
Yes, I did understand the implications, as well as the honor of being declared a man, and I secretly wanted to receive the marks when I reached puberty.
Like Uncle Tut, I too had once lived in the northern-controlled area, and even attended preschool in the city of Malakal. But for our safety, my father set aside his business interests there and brought the family home again to this quiet village. Liet was nestled among the grasslands of rural Akobo County, in fertile Jonglei State, in the vast river valley of the Greater Upper Nile region of Sudan. Then the largest country on the African continent, Sudan was bordered by the Red Sea to the northeast, Egypt to the north, Chad to the west, and, to the south and east, six other countries professing varying degrees of friendship or hostility to the renewed fight of the southern Sudanese for equality under the repressive laws imposed by the government in the north.
Of course, during that day’s ceremony, I knew nothing of such complex issues and faraway countries. I only knew that I felt whole, joyful, and safe in Liet and hoped never to leave our collection of mud huts set upon a swath of cleared land. I planned to forever herd cattle in the high grass that stretched to the horizon, dotted with termite mounds and stately, flat-topped acacia trees. In fact, the trees’ inverted-triangle shape seemed to point deep into the grasslands as if to say, Here is the spot where you belong, Nuer boy. Right here.
EACH DRY SEASON, MY FATHER would choose a camp in Upper Nile State for the entire family to travel to, based on which region seemed safest. That year’s dry season, we drove the cattle to a vast grassland known as Luääl. There, every morning, a herd of antelope would come to drink, and our men would wake up before the dawn to hunt them. These were our few months to fatten ourselves up before returning to a meager diet of maize and sorghum, back in the village. We killed and ate as much meat as we possibly could in order to endure the long spell of scarcity, our continent’s yearly reminder to be ever grateful for
whatever the earth saw fit to provide.
Southern Sudanese people tend to be quite tall and lanky, and my uncle Reat, my mother’s brother, was six feet nine, which is even taller than me. I thought he looked like a carved and sanded-smooth tree trunk. It was from him that I picked up an interest in keeping people and facts alive through storytelling. His tales were so animated and detailed, you felt you were inside them with whomever he was skillfully bringing to life with the sound of his voice, like a goddess of limitless fertility.
One evening, as my older brother Duany Thabach Duany (named after my grandfather), my cousin Wunbil (technically my stepbrother because my father had inherited his mother as a wife), and I prepared for bed, he came into our hut and spoke with authority.
UNCLE REAT: Boys, tomorrow morning you will learn how to be men.
DUANY: I am nine years old, Uncle. I’ll be fighting in wars soon. Does that not already make me a man?
UNCLE REAT: Babies fight for milk. Girls fight over hair combs. Fighting does not prove one’s manhood. Ger, do you know what makes a boy a man?
I was too embarrassed to say what I was thinking. I think Uncle Reat picked up on that.