As an account of one family's experience of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath,
Zeitoun is also a testament of the profound connection that Voice of Witness and related social justice projects had
on Eggers' work in his writing's second decade.
Zeitoun's imprisonment after Katrina was first told through his own brief oral history in a Voice of Witness volume,
Voices from the Storm; and, perhaps fittingly given the focus of much of Eggers's related K-12 work, the collection was recently adapted into a
theatrical production for schools.
Unlike
What Is The What, here Eggers had both a source's adult experience, as well as adult peers and legal records, to draw upon in explaining just what had happened. The narrative itself is more chronologically structured, though with evocative flashbacks of a Syrian childhood. It also relies on irony in the classical sense of the word: we know, in ways that Zeitoun and his neighbors do not, the sheer magnitude of what is about to befall them and their city. This allows for a slow buildup, both of showing just what is about to be lost in New Orleans, and of the immigrant experience in a local business.
Yet
Zeitoun has also become, quite without meaning to, an example of what happens when a work of nonfiction has the ground shift from underneath it after publication. The Zeitouns had a subsequent acrimonious divorce, amid charges of domestic violence (which he was then
cleared of, though the court disputes and allegations have continued). As a work of nonfiction focused on a single individual, versus the ostensibly more fictive
What Is The What, the book is more vulnerable than most to this kind of retrospective awkwardness.
And yet
Zeitoun remains a powerful social document in its own right, and subsequent events have colored and complicated but perhaps not fundamentally altered that. That may be because, in spite of the title itself,
Zeitoun is less about its protagonist
than about Hurricane Katrina, its chaotic aftermath, and the growth of a security state fed by the country's continuing and dismaying paranoia. The Italian economist
questioned for doing math on an American Airlines flight from Philadelphia last week is only the most recent and ludicrous example of how little it can take, in the generation after 9/11, to find oneself snagged in the gears of this same societal machinery.
