New book - 'Don't Look Back': Author Achut Deng's journey of survival from South Sudan to America

After battling COVID-19 and thinking her life might end, Achut Deng came to a realization: her three sons didn’t know the full story behind their mother. 

Deng, 37 and a Sudanese refugee, spent 10 years in a refugee camp at Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya and was a part of the Lost Girls of Sudan, where thousands of children were victims of the civil war in Sudan in the late 1980s. 

“Life in the refugee camp was very difficult. People eat once a day or every other day,” Deng said. “... A lot of people I’m pretty sure were dying from dehydration. There was no water, and malaria (too). There were just a lot of unknowns that I know of now. But back then, no one knew about (it), it would just be sudden death. So life in the refugee camp was like living in a cage. … You just live there.”

Now, the Sudanese refuge is preparing to release her memoir, “Don’t Look Back,” which will be released Oct. 11.

“I didn’t want that to be a guessing game anymore, I was always embarrassed about my past,” Deng said. “So I said ‘No, I want my kids to know who their mother is.’ So that’s when I said ‘OK, I’m going to tell them what I’ve been through as a child and that my past made me a strong person today.’ I’m not afraid anymore, I’m not embarrassed about it anymore. I want the world to know.”  

The book, which will be available across the country in Target stores, Barnes and Nobles, Amazon and more, is a memoir of Deng’s journey through war and survival. She teamed up with Keely Hutton, co-author of the book, which is published by Macmillian. 

“This book is literally about me, everything I’ve been through as a child, growing up in the middle of a warzone, (coming) from a refuge camp, food isn’t a whole lot, then coming to the United States,” Deng said. 

Deng came to the United States as a teenager

Deng first arrived in the United States 22 years ago, she said.

Initially, she lived in Houston for about six months, then in Portland, Oregon and Kansas City, where she graduated from high school. Eventually, she made her way to Sioux Falls, where she has worked at Smithfield for nine years, initially starting on the line, but now dealing with safety procedures. 

Deng wrote her 37-chapter book in English, which isn’t her native language. She grew up speaking Dinka, a Nilotic dialectic common in Sudan.  

“I will say, (English) was the hardest (language). Coming here, I learned from TV and from school. … Plus, I didn’t have a choice but to learn. So school pretty much, and I had to be open-minded and it was very hard,” Deng said. 

Growing up, while watching TV, Deng would translate English by matching up the words to Dinka to understand what was being said. And it worked. 

For the book, Deng wrote a chapter every week and read it to her three sons. She started writing the book in February of 2021, she said. 

“On Sunday, we (would) sit down on the dining table and we’d read it together, cry together every time one chapter was done,” Deng said. “... We cry together, we laugh together, we talk together. It was a surprise, they were very shocked and they responded very positively.” 

While it is a young adult book, Deng omitted content for her eight-year-old, as the book has a sexual assault scene, she said. 

Now, Deng is headed on the road to bigger cities like Washington D.C., Cleveland and Chicago, where she’s talking and giving speeches at book clubs. While the goal was to tell her kids her truth and story, Deng hope it goes beyond her three sons. 

“If I can change somebody else’s life, I’ll be a happy woman. And in doing so, I want to face myself. I want to heal myself,” Deng said.