“We’ve lost a city,” I remember a coworker saying.
Hurricane Katrina began as any other hurricane, its ominous
potential barely registering as a low-level drone at the back of the
collective American consciousness. By the time the news had broken
about how truly fucked a major American city had become, it was too
late—all we could do, 2,600 miles away, was listen to Oprah talk
about the Astrodome, read Michael Brown’s dumbshit emails, watch
footage of people on rooftops and overpasses, and talk, idly and
numbly, of losing a city.
I can’t imagine that even now, four years later, New Orleans is
anything approaching ideal—or even anything approaching what it
once was. It’s hard to know: As if it were a deep, unexpected wound
that was nonetheless kind enough to promptly heal, America—or at
least, the America beyond the South—doesn’t talk much about
Katrina anymore.
Which is partially why Dave Eggers’ latest, Zeitoun, is so
profoundly affecting. The true story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian
American with four children, a wife, Kathy, and a successful business,
Zeitoun chronicles Abdulrahman’s then-reasonable decision to
stay put in New Orleans, Kathy’s attempts to evacuate with the kids,
and Zeitoun’s fortunes in the midst of catastrophe. Zeitoun’s
post-storm exploits are spurred, in the beginning, by a strange sort of
boredom: “When he had eaten, he felt restless, trapped,” Eggers writes.
“The water was too deep to wade into, its contents too suspect to swim
through. But there was the canoe. He saw it, floating above the yard,
tethered to the house. Amid the devastation of the city, standing on
the roof of his drowned home, Zeitoun felt something like inspiration.
He imagined floating, alone, though the streets of his city. In a way,
this was a new world, uncharted. He could be an explorer. He could see
things first.”
See things first he does, but once he’s past the eerie placidity of
his newly submerged suburb, Zeitoun also sees—and is subjected
to—things that inspire awe, confusion, and terror. “The flood,
and now the fire: It was difficult not to think of passages in the
Qur’an that recounted the flood of Noah, the evidence of God’s wrath,”
Zeitoun thinks, not long after he first starts paddling his canoe
around his neighborhood, and later, he is forced to a brutal
realization: “Every piece of machinery—the police, the military,
the prisons—that was meant to protect people like him was
devouring anyone who got close. He had long believed that the police
acted in the best interests of the citizens they served. That the
military was accountable, reasonable, and was kept in check by
concentric circles of regulations, laws, common sense, common decency.
But now those hopes could be put to rest.”
Zeitoun is Eggers’ first book of straight-up
nonfiction—unlike his partially fictionalized biography of
Valentino Achak Deng, What Is the What, and his memoir, A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Zeitoun is entirely
a work of journalism, a straightforward, deeply researched “account of
one family’s experiences before and after the storm.” Here Eggers
simply reports, bringing his sometimes lyrical, always earnest voice to
the events at hand—with an intense and moving clarity, the focus
is always on Zeitoun, a man whose experience in New Orleans veers from
routine to surreal to excruciating. If Katrina was an unexpected wound
that seemed, for most of us, to heal too quickly, Zeitoun is the
sort of thing that forces our eyes downward, to the ugly scar.
