Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
352pp,Hamish Hamilton,£17.99

Dave Eggers's account of one man's ordeal at the hands of US military officials in the wake of hurricane Katrina is a grim indictment of the Bush regime
Valerie Martin
The Observer, Sunday 21 March 2010

On 19 September 2005, Kathy Zeitoun answered the phone at her friend Yuko's house in Phoenix, Arizona. The caller identified himself as an official in the Department of Homeland Security. He informed her that her husband, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, was a prisoner at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Centre in St Gabriel, Louisiana.

"He's fine, ma'am. We have no more interest in him."

"You have no interest in him? Is that good or bad?"

"That's good."

Dave Eggers's latest book, Zeitoun, patiently unravels the harrowing tale of how Kathy Zeitoun, a Louisiana native who grew up in a southern Baptist family in Baton Rouge, came to be on the other end of that phone call in Phoenix, where she learned that her husband, who had been missing for two weeks, was still alive, and not, as she'd feared, murdered or drowned in the floodwaters still inundating the city of New Orleans. She had last seen him on 27 August, when she and their four children evacuated the city before the approaching hurricane. Zeitoun insisted on staying behind to look after their various properties. As the children waved to their father, Kathy experienced a sense of déjà vu.

A dozen times they had lived this moment, as Kathy and his children drove off in search of sanctuary or rest, leaving Zeitoun to watch over his house and the houses of his neighbours and clients all over the city. He had keys to dozens of other houses; everyone trusted him with their homes and everything in them.

The hurricane, as everyone knows, was Katrina, and it battered the city with the expected wind and rain, while Zeitoun and many thousands of his fellow citizens – some jammed into the comfortless shelter of the Superdome, some in their own beds – stayed awake and listened. His house sustained minor leaks he contained in buckets. Electrical power went out. The next day passed quietly, as did another night. On 30 August, Zeitoun woke to the sound of running water, which he first took to be a broken pipe.

His ordeal had begun.

Zeitoun is an odd book, not beautifully written and not always entirely credible. It was produced with the assistance and approval of the Zeitoun family, and all author proceeds go to the Zeitoun Foundation, which is dedicated to rebuilding New Orleans. David Eggers is a serious good-doer, a writer of enormous energy, determined to make the world better by virtue of the stories he investigates and puts forward. He first read a short version of Abdulrahman Zeitoun's story in a collection titled Voices from the Storm, part of the Voice of Witness series published by McSweeney's, the publishing company Eggers founded and directs.

Zeitoun's account so fascinated Eggers that he met the family and persuaded them to undertake an expanded treatment of their experience. In a print interview, Eggers confessed that he "fell in love with the whole family", which accounts for the queasy-making hagiographic tribute that occupies the first 80 or so pages of the book. The style is cloying. Reading it is like being fed spoonfuls of sweetened condensed milk, but if you just keep swallowing, you'll get some interesting family background, useful information about Islam, and a fair idea of what daily life for a Syrian painting contractor and his family in New Orleans is like.

Once the family is separated and the waters rise, the story takes off, and even the style improves. What happens to Zeitoun in the days after the flood is spellbinding, and gradually you see what Eggers is after – nothing less than an indictment of the entire Bush era, of its whole xenophobic, anti-Islamic, militaristic, and belligerent take on the world beyond our sacred shores.

Zeitoun, a devout Muslim who spends the first days after the flood rowing around in his canoe rescuing people in distress and feeding dogs left trapped inside flooded houses, feels he is called by God to do this good work. Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: "God has a plan." As the waters turn toxic and the city empties out, a group of heavily armed men burst through the door and arrest Zeitoun for looting his own house. After that, things get much worse for him, and for his family, who are condemned to getting news from the media, which is spewing exaggerations, falsehoods and paranoid fantasies with the concentrated force of, well, a hurricane. A war-crazy populace is encouraged to believe a drowned city is a war zone. The governor goes on TV to inform the miserable survivors who may consider looting that she has called in more National Guardsmen, and that "they have M16s and are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill and I expect they will."

In a Salon interview, Eggers described the descent of the armed upon a suffering population as "a legacy of the war on terror, this mentality that an overwhelming military response was the solution to a humanitarian crisis". At one point, poor Kathy desperately searches the internet to find out how many gun-toting law enforcement officials have been turned loose in a city in which perhaps 30,000 people are left, struggling to survive. The figure Kathy comes up with is 28,000.

I thought her figure might be a little high, so I did a bit of internet research myself. Between 29 August and 10 September, the number of National Guard troops sent to manage the chaos in New Orleans went from 7,841 to 46,838. This doesn't include the scores of privately hired Blackwater mercenaries, as well as an Israeli commando group called Instinctive Shooting International. It wasn't a rescue operation the government was running; it was an invasion.

As for Zeitoun, he roasts for awhile in a Guantanamo-style cage behind the bus station, where the guards inform him that he is al-Qaida. When he is finally returned to his family he has lost 20 pounds and looks to his wife like "a sad old man". He's still convinced God had something to do with it. "It was a test," Zeitoun thinks. "Who among us could deny that we were tested?"

He's right about that. Hurricane Katrina was a test. But it wasn't sent by God to test the devotion of a Syrian painting contractor in New Orleans. It was a test of the ability of a nation to protect its people, and that nation failed the test, big time. Abdulrahman Zeitoun's grim saga is a testament to this disturbing and depressing fact.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/mar/21/zeitoun-dave-eggers-book-review