Don't Look Back: A Memoir of War, Survival, and My Journey from Sudan to America

By Achut Deng and Keely Hutton

In this propulsive memoir from Achut Deng and Keely Hutton, inspired by a harrowing New York Times article, Don't Look Back tells a powerful story showing both the ugliness and the beauty of humanity, and the power of not giving up.

I want life.

After a deadly attack in South Sudan left six-year-old Achut Deng without a family, she lived in refugee camps for ten years, until a refugee relocation program gave her the opportunity to move to the United States. When asked why she should be given a chance to leave the camp, Achut simply told the interviewer: I want life.

But the chance at starting a new life in a new country came with a different set of challenges. Some of them equally deadly. Taught by the strong women in her life not to look back, Achut kept moving forward, overcoming one obstacle after another, facing each day with hope and faith in her future. Yet, just as Achut began to think of the US as her home, a tie to her old life resurfaced, and for the first time, she had no choice but to remember her past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 11, 2022
• ISBN: 9780374389710

Achut Deng

Achut Deng was born in South Sudan and came to America as a refugee when she was sixteen years old, a story she recounts in her memoir, Don't Look Back. She is now an American citizen and works in human resources at a meat-packing plant in South Dakota, where she also resides. She is the mother of three sons.

Book preview

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 suffocating 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.

When will Uncle Abraham be home? I asked Koko.

"Your uncle Garang, Koko corrected me, using her son’s traditional name, will be home at the end of the dry season." She placed her empty basket in the dirt path between two rows of cassava plants.

During the wet season, when he wasn’t talking about Adit, a girl from our village who had caught his eye, Abraham regaled Monica and me with stories of cattle camp. Although I’d never left our home or Wernyol, the stories of Uncle Abraham’s months spent walking the southern Sudanese savannas with our herd gave me exciting glimpses of life outside our village. As he described his adventures, I’d imagine myself waking early each morning to pray and milk the cows before heading out with the herds in search of grazing ground. I would daydream of what the world outside Wernyol was like and what adventures and lessons might await me beyond its borders.

When will that be? I asked.

Koko drove her hand hoe deep into the ground. He will return home when the rains come.

Shielding my eyes from the glare of the rising sun, I looked up at the cloudless blue sky. When will that be? I repeated.

Koko smiled. He will be gone for three months.

I slapped at the narrow, palmlike groupings of cassava leaves crowding the sides of the path with my hand hoe. The leaves bobbed and swayed with each strike, but my dull blade left no damage on the plants. That’s too long.

When Monica and I would accompany Abraham to the fields as he tended to our herd, he would lift us onto the cows’ backs and show us what he’d learned on his trips, from rubbing the ashes of cow dung, burned in the previous night’s fire, into the hides of the cattle to protect them from flies and mosquitoes, to cutting and grooming their horns to grow into the Dengs’ signature shape so everyone would recognize them as ours. When his friends visited, we’d listen to them discuss the markings on each bull and cow, and we’d laugh as Koko and Mama scolded the boys when their boastful arguments over who’d won the most wrestling bouts during the last camp devolved into rematches in our gardens. Before we retired to our huts at the end of the day, Abraham would reminisce about the nights he’d spent staring up at the stars, lying beside the crackling fire and the calves of our herd. His face would light up with such joy as he talked, I couldn’t help but hope someday, when I was old enough, Uncle Abraham would take me with him when he ventured far from our home. But I would have to wait until I was ten before I would be allowed to join Abraham or any older male family member at cattle camp, and for a restless toddler, seven years felt like an eternity.

I smacked the cassava leaves again and wondered what exciting new things my uncle was experiencing without me.

Patience, Achut, Koko said. The wet season will arrive soon enough, and Garang will be home again. She handed me a cassava she’d freed from the soil. I dropped it into her basket.

But it was so hard to be patient, not when I knew Uncle Abraham would return home with another gift for me.

I named him Majok, Abraham had told me when he’d returned home from his second cattle camp with a small clay bull he’d sculpted for me. It had the signature long, curved horns of the Deng family’s herd. After your baba’s favorite bull.

As I watched Koko harvest another cassava tuber, I wondered if Abraham was making me a new clay animal, maybe a cow or calf to go with my bull.

With a frustrated huff, I slapped my hand hoe against another grouping of cassava leaves. Three months was such a long time to wait.

I know you miss him. We all do, but your uncle had to leave to help our family and village, just like his brothers, including your baba. So, until we see them again, we will hold them in our hearts, just as they are holding us in theirs. Koko wiped away clods of dirt clinging to a cassava she’d dug up and handed the long brown root vegetable to me. "And leave my poor plants alone. Beating on them won’t bring the rains or your uncle home any

Reviews for Don't Look Back

[jennybeast · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a very hard read -- about the war in Sudan, about what it's like to be a refugee child, to lose your family and the life you knew, to spend years in camps and experience abuse in your journey and to survive when everything around you is destroyed. It's very powerfully told, and the strength of Achut's story is beautifully evident in this collaboration. Very moving.