Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers
It’s not about a hurricane, but it is about a storm.
I just finished reading Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers. It is this year’s One Book, One Community selection otherwise; I never would have picked it up. I don’t read many biographies because the ones I have read were more like lists of names to drop in-between anecdotes and daily schedules. Some are not even authorized by person who the book is about! We already know what happened during Hurricane Katrina anyway, right?
This book totally caught me off guard. I had no idea that the government had a secondary mission while sending emergency aid to New Orleans. The fact that ordinary citizens were pre-selected to be rounded up and treated as hostiles, while other survivors remained trapped without clean water and food is appalling.
As the saga unfolded, I connected to Kathy Zeitoun early on. She has a career-driven husband, children and pets. She’s a business partner and works hard to keep it all balanced. Yet when the storm it, life as she knew it collapsed. She was haunted by a sense of terror overcoming her while doing the most mundane house chores. Feelings of isolation while being in a house full of people, the recurring thoughts and scenarios that seemed so far-fetched during waking hours - kept her mind in turmoil through the nights. I experienced this during my husband’s two deployments to Iraq in 2004 and 2008. If Eggers had interviewed spouses of soldiers who had been deployed to a war zone, he would have gotten similar descriptions.
And this is where the irony lies. We really need to take a good look at ourselves as Americans and how our actions are perceived around the world. As a country proud to be born of a melting pot of cultures, Americans are perceived as not to accept foreign cultural traditions, religious differences, or respect values different to our own. It is so sad that so many Americans are missing out by not embracing their own countrymen rich with the world’s diversity. Americans are branded in Europe for creating loud storms of uneducated opinions and flooding the media with them. Is this who we really are?
Zeitoun is not to be missed.
--Kristin
