Eggers, Dave. Zeitoun. McSweeney's Books, 2009. 351 pp.
Solnit, Rebecca. A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster. Viking, 2009. 353 pp.
I don't know about you, but the majority of my focused reading (not including the daily paper, homeschooling my daughter, in line at the post office, waiting at a red light ["Alright, already, I heard the horn the first time]) takes place late at night, after the rest of the family is asleep, between about nine and one 0'clock, depending on my level of fatigue from the day. If the book just doesn't hold my attention (like Dickens' Little Dorritt, which I dutifully, but unsuccessfully, tried to read for one of my book groups), I'm out, the book swaying back and forth in my hands until it drops onto my chest and wakes me up. But give me a riveting story of outrageous injustice perpretrated against an honorable, innocent individual or community by representatives of banal, sadistic, Kafkaesque institutions, and it's like crystal meth for the soul (there's my franchise right there: Crystal Meth for the Cat-Lover's Soul, Crystal Meth for the NASCAR Soul, Crystal Meth for the Auto-Erotic Asphyxiation Lover's Soul, you get the idea).
The two books reviewed here provide exactly that, coming from very different but occasionally overlapping perspectives. Zeitoun is Dave Egger's account of one man's nightmarish experience in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a Syrian immigrant, successful painting and building contractor, devout Muslim and loving husband and father who refused to leave New Orleans as Katrina bore down on the city. After several days spent rescuing neighbors and strangers, staying in touch with his wife Kathy, feeding abandoned dogs and exploring the submerged city by canoe, he and some acquaintances are imprisoned (not formally arrested or charged, mind you) by local police and National Guard and accused of Taliban/Al Quaida membership because of unusual but completely innocent circumstances. He then disappears for several days into a legal system that is utterly dysfunctional on its best days, while his wife and family members frantically try to find out what happened to him. It's an unbelievably infuriating story, told skillfully by a master storyteller who seems determined lately to use his considerable talents and resources (as publisher and editor as well as writer) to draw attention to monumental injustices through the prism of highly personal narratives.
Rebecca Solnit, on the other hand, examines the historical dynamics embodied by both Zeitoun and his persecutors. Analyzing such historical phenomena as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, a 1917 ammunition explosion in Halifax, Nova Scotia, earthquakes in Managua (1972) and Mexico City (1985), and 9-11, Solnit makes the case that, mass media myths to the contrary, disaster tends to bring out not just the best, but downright utopian tendencies in most people, often resulting in far-reaching, long-term social change for the affected society (Nicaragua's Bautista regime and Mexico's PRI party being two of those whose fall Solnit connects directly to the aforementioned earthquakes). As institutions break down, individuals and communities are forced to pool resources and wisdom, and often discover that, despite the tragic hardships which result from the disaster, there is a meaning to their lives that wasn't present previously.
There are always countervaling forces, however, as New Orleanians are bitterly aware. The economic and political elites (at all levels, within and outside of the city), white-flight suburbanites, and police and military personnel are among those Solnit identifies as subsceptible to "elite panic," a condition which can render one incapable of the kind of critical thought necessary to discount rumors like those of babies being raped in the Superdome in the days following Hurricane Katrina: "Disaster sociologist Kathleen Tierney,... itemized its ingredients as 'fear of social disorder; fear of poor, minorities and immigrants; obsession with looting and property crime; willingness to resort to deadly force; and actions taken on the basis of rumor.' In other words, it is the few who behave badly and the many who rise to the occasion. And those few behave badly not because of facts but because of beliefs: they believe the rest of us are about to panic or become a mob or upend property relations, and in their fear they act out to prevent something that may only have existed in their imaginations. Thus the myth of malevolent disaster behavior becomes something of a self-fulfilling prophecy," (p.127).
One factor Solnit doesn't discuss is what seems to me the most obvious difference between Katrina and the other disasters cited. While an earthquake or tsunami or terrorist attack takes its victims by surprise, a potentially disastrous hurricane can be anticipated, in at least a meteorological manner, days before landfall. So while the populations of San Francisco and Managua and Mexico City (and now Port-au-Prince) were struck in their entirety (allowing for construction and location variations), those in New Orleans who bore the brunt of Katrina were mostly the poor, stuck in the city even if they would like to leave, or those, like Zeitoun, who chose to stay for various personal reasons. Does the shared direct experience of the former cities contribute to greater solidarity post-disaster? Are the class differences between those who stayed and those who left in New Orleans too entrenched to allow for the reform and revolution seen in other places? Will the historic connections between New Orleans and Haiti come into play in coming years?
Finally, as one who thinks the importance of popular culture is too easily discounted by most historians and political theorists, will the confluence of New Orleans' globally iconic musical culture and the Saints' victory in what is unarguably one of the most popular sports spectacles in the world have repercussions in the navigation of the post-Katrina political landscape? Time will tell if Who Dat Nation will truly become Utopia.
