Zeitoun

“They existed before, and they exist again, in the city of New Orleans and the United States of America. And Abdulrahman Zeitoun existed before, and exists again, in the city of New Orleans and the United States of America. He can only have faith that will never again be forgotten, denied, called by a name other than his own. He must trust, and he must have faith. And so he builds, because what is building, and rebuilding and rebuilding again, but an act of faith?”

A couple weeks out from my first trip to New Orleans, I thought I would read this book to learn more about Hurricane Katrina from a more personal perspective. It happened when I was in middle school. I remember hearing a lot about it on the news, but as with most distant tragedies, the details have since faded from my memory. This book details the journey of a man named Abdulrahman Zeitoun before, during, and in the aftermath of Katrina. Zeitoun, originally from Syria, is a successful contractor, business & property owner. He is also a caring father, dutiful husband, and devout Muslim. While his family evacuated to stay safe from the storm, Zeitoun stayed behind hoping the warnings were overblown and to watch over his various properties. When the city flooded, roofs of homes barely peaking out over the expanses of increasingly putrid water, Zeitoun did not mourn his luck but rather pulled up his canoe and took this as an opportunity to help those who had been even less fortunate than him. In an unfortunate twist, he is assumed to be a looter/possible terrorist and is detained at a make-shift mega prison, and it only gets more disgusting from there.

Paced beautifully, this reads like a fiction and is an absolutely riveting read. It exposes not only the devastation of the storm, but how the botched response exposed incredible injustices in our justice system. Yet, as in the quote above, both Zeitoun and the book end with a glimmer of hope about what it is to be American, and what it is to be resilient. Wonderful book.