Yet Another Katrina Injustice

This blog is turning into a Dave Eggers Fan Club (see below). I just finished his latest book, a nonfiction story called Zeitoun about a man whose particular Katrina story makes you wonder how many different ways people can suffer from one cause. Well, no, from at least two causes: natural disaster and human failure. The first, the hurricane itself, was bigger, but it's the second that breaks your heart.

When Katrina hit, Syrian-American Abdulrahmen Zeitoun was running a successful contracting business and raising a family in New Orleans. As the storm approached he sent his wife and kids out of the city but stayed to protect his home and other properties he owned. After the levees broke he paddled around the city in a small canoe rescuing people, feeding abandoned dogs, and trying to keep his buildings from complete ruin. His wife, who eventually landed with a friend in Phoenix, kept urging him to leave the city, but he refused, feeling safe and useful. They talked daily, until the day she abruptly stopped hearing from him.


It took almost a month to find Zeitoun. He'd been arrested on no grounds and with no charge and imprisoned in a makeshift jail on the Greyhound bus parking lot. Later he was transferred to a state prison administered by FEMA bureaucrats who were clearly, and I'm trying to be kind here, in over their heads. He was never given a charge, a lawyer, or even a phone call, and the prison authorities denied he was even there. What Zeitoun and his family endured in those weeks and later, as they struggled to recover and rebuild their lives, may not be the most tragic story of the many that unfolded, but it robbed me of any faith I had left in the ability of government to handle a catastrophe. The careless indifference of the cop who arrested him, the numb incompetence of those who imprisoned him, and the futile, labyrinthine processes of the bureaucracy set up to assist him--these human weaknesses leveled as many hopes and dreams as Katrina did. Zeitoun was for me a profoundly disillusioning story.

But while I'm despairing, the Zeitouns are rebuilding their lives, in spite of continued insults like the FEMA trailer left in front of their ruined home--without a key. For months. In spite of Kathy Zeitoun's un-diagnosable illnesses, probably symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome. In spite of huge financial and personal losses and a dangerous, dysfunctional city, they came back, and they rebuilt. And Dave Eggers found them and wrote about them, and set up a foundation to funnel the book profits to the rebuilding of New Orleans--the same thing he did when he wrote What Is the What? about a Sudanese refugee.

So now you know why Eggers is my hero. It's not because he writes pretty sentences. This book's style, as a matter of fact, is wooden and monotonous. Reconstructing facts and conversations years after they took place, especially when you are a stickler for truth like Eggers, makes it hard to dress up your sentences in literary garb. But no matter--the stripped-down, nuts-and-bolts prose suits the subject. There was nothing pretty about the disaster that was Katrina. Except the spirit of people like the Zeitouns who refuse to drown.