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  For my sons, Deng, Kuek, and Mayom. Being a mother to you amazing boys is the greatest gift in my life. Thank you for giving me the courage and strength to share my story with the world, and most importantly, to share my story with you. I love you unconditionally. —Achut Deng

  To those who see reflections of themselves in Achut’s story. You are not alone. —Keely Hutton

  AUTHORS’ NOTE

  Some names have been changed, but the events portrayed in Don’t Look Back are Achut Deng’s memories to the best of her knowledge. The conflict depicted in this memoir is known as the Second Sudanese Civil War. In 1983, civil war sparked in Sudan when the military regime of the Government of Sudan (GOS) imposed laws mandating that all citizens adopt Arab culture, identity, and language. The controversial laws were viewed as a calculated move by the government in the north to control, through Arabization and cultural assimilation, southern Sudan, an area comprised mainly of Christians, while also securing access to the south’s natural resources. Angered by the political ruling and fearing religious persecution, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) and its military wing, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), were formed in southern Sudan. Support for the SPLM/SPLA spread throughout the region, with men and boys, most of whom were cattle herders knows as pastoralists, being recruited from the sixty-four ethnic groups in southern Sudan. The SPLA soldiers fought side by side against the GOS Army for eight years, but over time, tensions grew between SPLA leader Dr. John Garang from southern Sudan’s largest ethnic group, the Dinka, and other SPLM/SPLA leaders, including Riek Machar from southern Sudan’s second-largest ethnic community, the Nuer. Disagreements over the goals of the SPLM caused the group to fracture in 1991, creating two factions of the SPLA, one led by Garang, and one led by Machar. Fighting intensified following the split, resulting in bloody massacres of civilian populations. Although deadly conflicts continue in South Sudan today, the Second Sudanese Civil War officially ended on January 9, 2005, when the GOS and SPLA signed the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). The CPA provided the people of South Sudan the option to vote in favor of secession if unity between the north and south was not made an attractive option for them. Six years after the signing of the CPA, the people of South Sudan voted in favor of secession in the January 2011 referendum, and on July 9, 2011, they became the independent state of South Sudan.

  The twenty-two-year civil war displaced an estimated four million people and caused the deaths of an estimated two million men, women, and children. The conflict forced over twenty thousand children from their families and villages in southern Sudan. The children walked over a thousand miles, through dangerous war zones and across unforgiving deserts, seeking sanctuary at refugee camps in the neighboring countries of Ethiopia and Kenya. Relief workers nicknamed them the “Lost Boys,” after the group of orphaned boys who banded together in Neverland to create a family and take care of one another in J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Despite assistance from the Kenyan government, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the camps struggled to provide basic necessities, such as food, water, shelter, and health care, for the surging number of people in their care. Many refugees, including Achut Deng, walked to Kakuma Refugee Camp in northwestern Kenya. Over the next decade, the number of refugees in Kakuma swelled, making it the world’s largest refugee camp. With their homeland still gripped in war and more refugees arriving daily, conditions grew more dire for the children in Kakuma.

  When the international community learned of the tragic exodus and continued suffering of the war-affected youth of southern Sudan, they demanded help for those trapped in refugee camps like Kakuma. In late 2000, a relocation program was established to help the Lost Boys in Kakuma start new lives in countries around the world. Of the four thousand Sudanese children relocated to the United States between the years 2000 and 2001, less than a hundred of them were girls. Achut was one of the girls brought to the United States with the Lost Boys of Sudan.

  Twenty years later, in March 2020, Achut was interviewed by Caitlin Dickerson, who was working as an immigration journalist at the New York Times. Caitlin was writing an article on COVID-19’s impact on employees at the Smithfield pork factory in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Achut worked at the factory and shared her experiences with Caitlin. The article was read by millions, and Achut’s interview touched the hearts of many readers, including staff at Macmillan Publishers. With Caitlin’s help, editor Joy Peskin contacted Achut to discuss the idea of telling her story to the world.

  Achut is a natural storyteller, but she wanted to be paired with a seasoned author to help tell her story, so in October 2020, Achut interviewed several writers and journalists for the collaboration. After careful consideration, she chose author Keely Hutton to partner with her as a cowriter on the project. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown, Achut and Keely were unable to meet in person over the next ten months, but thanks to Zoom and cell phones, they spent hundreds of hours discussing Achut’s life and her hopes for her memoir. The conversations took time and care. Achut had never shared her story with anyone before speaking with Keely. For many years, her physical and emotional survival depended upon Achut focusing on moving forward, but she realized to tell her story, she would have to look back and face her past. While Achut revisited memories of her childhood in Sudan and Kakuma and her adolescence in the United States, Keely researched Sudan, the Second Sudanese Civil War, the Lost Boys, Kakuma Refugee Camp, and the refugee relocation program by reading books and articles on the subjects and studying videos and photographs depicting the people, places, and events. And when Achut was ready to share her memories, thoughts, and feelings, Keely listened.

  Don’t Look Back depicts the life of Achut Deng, one of thousands of children whose lives were irrevocably changed by the Second Sudanese Civil War. Although many of the experiences Achut shares in her memoir may be similar to those of other Lost Boys and Girls of Sudan, her memories and story are uniquely her own. In Achut’s journey, we hope readers find the strength to persevere when facing obstacles in their own lives and the confidence to remember, despite where life takes them, to never forget who they are.

  CHAPTER 1

  Houston, Texas—March 2001

  They said I’d be safe here. They lied.

  As I hid in the back corner of my bedroom closet, my breath seized at the sound of approaching voices outside our apartment building. They scrambled over one another, pushing and shoving, wrestling for control of the conversation and straining to be heard over the raucous peals of laughter punctuating their dialogue. As they drew closer, the voices charged through the open window of the second-floor bedroom, where I hid, throwing themselves against the worn plywood of my closet door. I considered sneaking out of my sanctuary to peek through the window to see who was coming and assess any potential danger they might pose, but my muscles refused to budge. So I remained in my corner of the closet, paralyzed in fear of the unknown, as well as the known.

  I closed my eyes and listened, straining to determine whether the muffled, male voices used English or Dinka and praying they did not come inside. They spoke English. I recognized only two words in the jumble of their laughter and shouting: no and home. Finally, the unfamiliar voices, speaking their unfamiliar language, moved past our building and dissolved in the din of evening traffic.

  I took a deep breath before easing open the closet door. The apartment was quiet. I peeked out to check the digital clock sitting on the plastic nightstand squeezed between the two single beds that crowded the narrow room. It was 5:53 P.M., almost two hours since I’d arrived home from school. I’d been hiding longer than I’d thought. The others would be home soon.

  He would be home soon.

  Time was running out. I had to make a decision before the decision was made for me. Again.

  As I closed the door, echoes of my grandmother’s voice whispered in my mind. “Not so fast, little one,” my koko had cautioned me when, at five years old, I had slipped my small hand from hers and run through the open gate of the wooden fence encircling the thatched-roof huts, fields, and gardens of our home in southern Sudan. I had wanted to follow my uncle Abraham as he led our family’s herd of cattle to drink from the lake outside our village. As I hurried after him, Koko scooped me into her arms before I accidentally startled a large black-and-white Ankole-Watusi bull, with long, curved horns and little tolerance for small children who did not heed their elders’ warnings. “Achut, you must think before you move.” She pressed a gentle finger against my forehead. “Good decisions take time and care. Always use both.”

  A suffocatin
g ache radiated through my chest, and hot tears escaped my eyes and burned down my cheeks. Even my happy memories were accompanied by pain.

  They had called us Lost Boys when the others and I had arrived in Houston three months earlier from Kenya’s Kakuma Refugee Camp, but I was not a boy, and I was not lost.

  I knew exactly where I was and exactly how I’d arrived here. What I did not understand was why. But the why no longer mattered. Death had taken so much from me over my sixteen years, but life had taken more.

  Bit by bit.

  Piece by piece.

  It had stolen everything until there was only one thing left to take.

  CHAPTER 2

  Wernyol, Sudan—1988

  The first thing they took was my name.

  Achut.

  It had been passed down in my father’s family for three generations to honor his great-grandmother, the first Achut of many. My great-great-grandmother had been the only child of seven to survive infancy.

  “Let the name Achut be a blessing for all the children we have lost,” my great-great-grandmother’s parents announced when death did not claim their youngest child. Achut became revered in our family and village. Her name graced the lyrics of songs chanted at family gatherings in celebration of not only her life but, years later, the lives of her twelve children, including three sets of twins. For so much life to come after so much death, my great-great-grandmother Achut had truly been blessed. And so every firstborn daughter in our family to follow was given her name, including me.

  Achut was the beautiful, vibrant note at the beginning of my song. A promise of life carried across the boundless blue Sudanese sky, on the voices of the Dinka people. It sang out with strength and clarity, sure of its place in the lyrics of my life.

  Achut.

  Spoken in soft, loving coos by my mother, it called to me.

  Achut.

  Its melody resonated through my soul with the echoes of my ancestors, binding me to my past and their future.

  Achut.

  For the first three years of my life, Achut was my name. And then, one day, it wasn’t.

  It was replaced by a strange, new name.

  Rachel.

  Discordant. Harsh. Off-key.

  I tried to ignore it, but everyone in my family and village insisted on the new name. Everyone, except my koko.

  Despite our family’s constant reminders, my baba’s mother, Abul Deng Goch, refused to call me Rachel.

  “I am taking Achut to the garden,” she would announce to Mama.

  “Her name is Rachel,” Mama would say for the hundredth time, but no annoyance or anger sharpened her tone. Mama loved and admired her mother-in-law. Mama and Baba had married in 1982, a year before Baba was conscripted into the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA). Baba was Koko’s firstborn child, and during his long deployment, Mama and Koko had grown close, working the land together, caring for my baba’s younger siblings, and maintaining the Deng family homestead in his absence.

  At five feet eight inches tall, my grandmother was considered short among the Dinka women in our village, but she carried herself with the confidence and courage of a woman who would never permit others to look down on her. Like most Dinkas, she was a devout Christian. She attended mass, recited her daily prayers, and paid her tithes, but she had refused a Christian name at her baptism and insisted on calling her family members by their traditional Dinka names. Her short hair, bleached in the Dinka custom from cow-urine rinses, hugged her head in a cap of tight sunset-orange curls. Her dark eyes, glistening with intelligence and curiosity, missed nothing. One stern glance could silence children and men alike, and one warm, dimpled smile could thaw the coldest heart.

  “Come along, Achut,” Koko would say, picking up her hand hoe and basket.

  Mama would smile and shake her head as Koko pushed open the gate to the fence that enclosed the four huts and land that made up the Deng family compound. Two of the huts, with their round mud walls and steeped, conic straw roofs, housed our family, including our two dogs, as we slept at night. The third hut, identical in size and shape to our sleeping huts, served as a kitchen, where we stored our food and prepared our meals. The fourth, larger hut housed forty-one heads of cattle, which our family used for milk and currency.

  Our compound was one of thirteen Deng family compounds located a thirty-minute walk from the center of the town of Wernyol. Each parcel of Deng land, with their thatched-roof huts, gardens, fences, wells, and grazing fields, created another link in the chain of family properties encircling a central family meeting area. Dozens of other Dinka families had similar groupings of family compounds situated in clusters around the town of Wernyol. Like crooked spokes on a wheel, well-worn dirt paths meandered from each family compound to the center of Wernyol, where thousands of villagers would meet to share meals, news, and gossip, as well as gather for prayers, dance, music, and important ceremonies celebrating rites of passage, such as boys reaching manhood, weddings, and baptisms.

  “Be a good girl, Rachel,” Mama would say, giving me a small, dull-edged version of Koko’s sharp hand hoe, which my grandmother had crafted for me to use during our mornings spent in the garden.

  “My name is Achut,” I would tell Mama.

  “Not anymore,” Mama would say.

  “My name is Achut?” I would repeat, confusion bending my words into a question.

  With a patient sigh, Mama would place down the okra pods she was drying to use in soups and stews during the rainy season. Wiping her hands on her milaya, a colorful, beautifully embroidered sheet she wore wrapped around her body, she’d kneel and cup my small face in her hands. “Your name is Rachel now, little one. Rachel Achut Lual Deng.” She’d say my full name, including my baptismal name, my great-great-grandmother’s name, my baba’s name, Lual, and his baba’s name, Deng. Every Dinka child was gifted the names of their babas and their babas’ babas. Even after a woman married, like when Mama married Baba, she did not take her husband’s name. She retained the names of her family. You could trace a person’s paternal lineage through the names that followed their first name. And the names that followed mine were Lual and Deng. Each name created another link to my family, forging an unbreakable chain through the generations that came before me and the generations that would follow.

  “Rachel Achut Lual Deng,” I repeated. My face scrunched up at the strange, new first name.

  “You will get used to it soon enough,” Mama would say, and then with a warm smile and no further explanation, she would send me to help Koko harvest potatoes and cassava.

  It wasn’t until years later that I heard stories of the white men who’d come to southern Sudan decades before I was born, preaching their God’s word and persuading the Dinka people that worship of our creator, Nhialic, and our family names would never earn us a place in their God’s heaven. They warned the villagers if they did not abandon their names, beliefs, and god, they would be damning themselves and their children to an eternity in hell. The key, they explained, was to choose a name from their holy text, for only biblical names could save us from such a horrible fate. Achut, much to Mama’s dismay, was not a name found in their Bible.

  So, when I was around three years old, in a baptismal ceremony I was too young to understand or remember, they replaced my great-great-grandmother’s honored name with the name Rachel, which my aunt Elizabeth had plucked from one of the many stories found in the missionaries’ holy book.

  One afternoon, not long after I’d received the name that would grant me access to the Christians’ heaven, Koko and I were working in the garden while Mama helped my aunt Amam, whose baptismal name was Monica, milk one of our cows in the cattle hut. Only five years older than me, Monica, who was eight, was more like an older sister than an aunt. Her older brother, my uncle Abraham, had taken the rest of the family’s herd to cattle camp, a three-month-long cattle drive, during which time the men and older boys of our village accompanied their herds as they grazed the savannas of southern Sudan. The cattle camps offered an important education for the boys of our village. The majority of children in Wernyol did not attend schools to study reading and arithmetic. Occasionally, families would send one of their children to northern Sudan to receive a formal education, but to afford the schooling, they had to sell their cattle, which for most families was not an option. Girls, who stayed in Wernyol, were educated in gardening, cooking, and child-rearing by the women in their families to prepare them for their futures as wives and mothers, while the boys were taught how to hunt, fish, and care for their families’ herds by the men of the village. Cattle camp provided intensive training for the boys and taught them how to be men. Uncle Abraham had left days earlier with our herd. It was his third time attending the annual cattle camp. As the oldest of my baba’s younger brothers, Ab- raham, who was barely thirteen, had been the only father figure I had known in my three years of life. Despite Koko’s and Mama’s reassurances he would return home, I missed my uncle every time he left.