ZEITOUN - Dave Eggers - Nonfiction

When I initially saw this book in stores, its illustrated tri-tone cover, inviting and off-beat packaging, and authorial affiliations had convinced me that this was going to be a very McSweeney's book--a hipster account of a quirky family (they're Muslims! they're entrepreneurs!) who survived the Katrina disaster and lived to tell a personal tale about New Orleans during the hurricane. Nothing on the cover or the flap blurbs gave me any real indication that the book was recounting an immediate and horrible case of social injustice, in which immoral authorities took advantage of a crisis situation to institute martial law and imprison innocent people indefinitely. And for all the book's power, for all the rage and sorrow it inspired in me, the fact that this book is not marketed as a piece of social justice reporting every bit as relevant as Alex Kotlowitz's explorations of inner-city slums, is a failure. This story needs to be heard, and it needs to be heard by exactly the type of people who haven't seen an issue of McSweeney's, and aren't going to know beforehand about Dave Eggers's Voice of Witness project.

The Zeitouns are a prototypical American family, even in their foreignness--Abdulrahman Zeitoun is from Syria and his wife, Kathy, is American; both are Muslim and raising four children, three daughters and a son from Kathy's first marriage. Kathy and Abdulrahman own and manage a painting and contracting business, and the family is prosperous and well-liked. Abdulrahman grew up around the sea, taking risks and learning trades, and it is in his nature to be obstinate, so when others begin evacuating New Orleans, he chooses to stay behind and secure the business and the rental buildings he manages, while Kathy and the children take shelter with Kathy's relatives in Baton Rouge.

Then, the storm hits. Abdulrahman is cut off from communication, electricity, and transport aside from a canoe he bought on a whim years ago. Nevertheless, he enjoys the peacefulness of a city partially submerged, and begins taking daily reconnaissance trips around the neighborhood, rescuing people trapped in flooded houses, bringing food to dogs left behind during evacuations, and scouting conditions. One of his rental properties still has working phone service, so he calls Kathy from the house every day at noon, along with his family in Syria and abroad, who are hearing reports of the devastation on the news.

Until, that is, one day when he fails to contact Kathy. By this time, Kathy's religious disagreements with her family have provoked her to take her children and escape further, to her best friend's home in Arizona. Both Kathy and her best friend are converted Muslims, and Kathy feels more accepted there. While waiting more than a week for any contact from her husband, Kathy fields the increasingly worried phone calls of Abdulrahman's relatives overseas, and tries any way she can to find a means of communication with the waterlogged city of New Orleans. Eventually, she hears from a traveling evangelist that Abdulrahman is in a jail outside New Orleans, for seemingly no reason.

The shift back to Abdulrahman's perspective marks the beginning of an enraging and deeply affecting story of one man's prejudicially-motivated arrest from inside a building he owns, his imprisonment at the hands of heartless guards in an outdoor asphalt-floored cage, his inability to place a phone call or receive medical attention, and his completely dehumanizing treatment at the hands of prison guards at multiple penal institutions. I deeply hope that everyone involved in Abdulrahman's treatment has been fired and court-martialed, and it is an understatement to say that reading this story makes me ashamed of my country's judicial system. As is seemingly always the case, people will perform ridiculously cruel acts when no one is looking, or when they can claim that they were just following orders, and it takes an extreme amount of strength to even try to move past descriptions of prisoners being maced at random, denied lawyers and means of communication, placed in overcrowded cells and given inadequate meals, and stolen from at every opportunity. It is frankly amazing, given the events recorded, that Abdulrahman even was released from prison, and the fact that he was able to rebuild his business and establish a fund meant to prevent his ordeal from happening again is amazing.

The two downsides to the narrative's focus on Abdulrahman personally are that his children's opinions and views are never consulted, and that the frequent mentions of Kathy's religion and her commitment to it come off as faintly perplexing, because we are given her perspective and justifications only sparingly. We understand that she is committed to her religion and values it over her family in Baton Rouge, but we don't particularly know why. Also interesting to me would have been a deeper explanation of how closely the Zeitouns' relationship mirrors that of more traditional Muslims in the Middle East, and to what extent they force their children to participate in the religion, but that mainly speaks to my interests in religious freedom, and distaste of forcing religion on children and minors. These concerns pale in comparison with the absolute necessity for more people to hear Abdulrahman's story, and Dave Eggers accomplishes the retelling sparely and masterfully, pushing me to finish the entire second half of the book in one sitting, entrancing me as effectively as if it were a thriller. In fact, it's more of a horror story.