DAVID ADAMS finds Songs of a War Boy a powerfully moving and, yes, frustrating, read…
Deng Thiak Adut (with Ben Mckelvey)
Songs of a War Boy
Hachette Australia, Sydney, 2016
ISBN-13: 978-0733636523
“Songs Of A War Boy is not easy reading (although it is well written and includes the necessary background on the history of South Sudan), but it is a powerful story and delivers a close-up look at the horrors faced by children like Deng all over the world today.”
This book tells an extraordinary story of hope…but also a story which will, at the very least, leave you with a sense of frustration.
The hope can be seen in the story of Deng Thiak Adut, a boy born in a small village in what is now South Sudan who became caught up in the ongoing struggles of his nation – as a child soldier, as a refugee and now as a lawyer looking to help those of his community who struggle as he did.
The frustration – or perhaps even despair – lies in the fact that while Deng’s life has changed for the better, for many of his countrymen and women still in South Sudan, violence and fear remain part of their life as the tribal struggles which have defined generations continue to rob the world’s newest nation of a better future.
Songs Of A War Boy is not easy reading (although it is well written and includes the necessary background on the history of South Sudan), but it is a powerful story and delivers a close-up look at the horrors faced by children like Deng all over the world today.
When only six-years-old, he was taken from his home – all that he had known – and forced to join a “ribbon of boys” who were marched away to camps where those that survived the disease, starvation, beatings and general maltreatment were eventually given an AK-47 and made a “soldier”.
Such was the indoctrination of these boys that as Deng writes: “Being issued an AK-47, and then sent off to a place where there was an endless supply of northern men to kill was what every boy in the camp wanted.”
The conflict he became embroiled in was brutal but despite the deaths of so many around him, Deng survived and eventually his brother John, a Christian and a towering figure in his life, had him smuggled out of Sudan to Kenya where, thanks to the help of an Australia Christian, Christine Harrison, and her husband Bob, he eventually came to Australia as a refugee.
The story here tells of Deng’s struggles to find himself again and build a new life in a country which must have been overwhelmingly strange. Yet, as his story tells time and again, Deng is a survivor, and eventually – and remarkably – he emerges – despite the racism and opposition he faced – as a lawyer in Sydney.
Deng, who continues to suffer physically and mentally from all that he has endured, has returned several times to South Sudan since coming to Australia yet while his brother John eventually left Australia to live there again, Deng – despite noting he will “forever be South Sudanese” – sees his future in Australia.
Today he works as a lawyer in Sydney with his own law practice, but he also runs a foundation which includes among its aims a helping hand for refugees who, as he did, wish to go to an Australian university.
But it’s the very end of the book which nails home the sense of frustration as despite Deng’s hopes for South Sudan, we see the country once again slide into war. Yet, just as Deng’s story is not yet complete, neither is that of South Sudan. There remains hope, however slim it may at times look, that the nation will one day rise above the tribalism and conflicts which so beset it and look to a brighter future. We pray it will be so.
