For my second blog, I'll be writing about the book Zeitoun (pronounced zay-toon) by Dave Eggers. It's about a family that lives in New Orleans and their struggles during and after Hurricane Katrina.
This book is a little different from other books I've read. For starters, it's a true story. Abdulrahman Zeitoun and his wife and four children are real people. The book isn't written in chapters either. There are five parts and instead of dividing each part into chapters, it is divided into days. For example, Part I starts on Friday, August 26, 2005 and ends on Tuesday, August 30, 2005.
First some background on the Zeitouns. Most people just call Abdulrahman Zeitoun by his last name because his first name is too hard for most people to pronounce. Zeitoun is from Jableh, a fishing town in Syria. He has thirteen siblings - thirteen! His oldest brother (Mohammed) died in a car crash when Zeitoun was six, one of his other brothers (Ahmad) lives in Spain, and the other eleven live in Syria. He grew up sardine fishing and then became a sailor. He came to the US in 1988 and married Kathy Delphine a few years later. Zeitoun was born into a Muslim family and Kathy converted to Islam. They have three girls and a boy. Zachary is the oldest at fifteen and is Kathy's son from a previous marriage. Their girls names are Nademah, Safiya, and Aisha. Nademah is ten, Safiya is seven, and Aisha is five.
The days leading up to the hurricane are normal for the Zeitoun family. Zeitoun and Kathy own and run a contracting business called Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor LLC in New Orleans, Louisiana. Zeitoun and his workers went to the various jobs they had. They knew that a tropical storm near Florida had recently become a category one hurricane and was headed towards New Orleans. At first, Kathy isn't concerned by the storm, but when it grows to a Category 3, she becomes worried. She tries to persuade Zeitoun to leave, but he stays to watch over the house and company while Kathy and the kids went on to Baton Rouge to stay with Kathy's two sisters. I thought that Zeitoun was pretty brave to remain in New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina was a Category 5 storm with 150 mph winds by the time Kathy reached Baton Rouge and the mayor of New Orleans had also just issued the city's very first mandatory evacuation. But he felt that if stayed, he could fix leaks before they became too serious. He also wanted to protect all of their belongings since they had recently canceled their property insurance.
At 11:00 at night on August 28, Zeitoun got his first taste of Hurricane Katrina. Leaks started in the bedrooms and the hallways. The master bedroom window broke "as if a brick had been thrown through the glass" (Eggers 83). Last year's Hurricane Irene was only a Category 1 where I live, but that had still prompted my dad to board up one of our larger windows and to cause the two large pine trees outside our house to shake. Luckily nothing was damaged at my house, but if I thought Irene seemed bad, I can't even begin to imagine what Katrina was like.
The next day Zeitoun went outside to inspect the damage. There were windows broken and downed trees everywhere. There were eighteen inched of rain water on the ground, so Zeitoun went out and paddled around in his canoe for a little bit. He decided (and I agree with him) that he probably shouldn't be doing that. There were downed power lines everywhere and he didn't know what would happen if he touched one with his aluminum canoe. He goes back to his house and falls asleep. He dreams about his family's ancestral home of Arwad Island. The book describes Zeitoun and his brother Ahmad as children exploring the beaches, chasing seagulls, and looking at the ships. Arwad used to be a military possession for the Phoenicians, the Assyrians, the Achaemenid Persians, the Greeks under Alexander, the Romans, the Crusaders, the Mongols, the Turks, the French, and the British. As a result, plenty of stone walls and battlements were scattered around the island. There are two small castles on the island that can be explored. It sounds like such a beautiful place, that I actually really want to visit there now.
Unfortunately, his dream is interrupted by a "dissonance" that is a wall of lake water rushing through Uptown.
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