Yet, New Orleans, for all the lingering repercussions of the disaster, still attracts visitors and wanna-be visitors who explore the city and tradition through its food. Last night my boyfriend and I celebrated his recent success on a graduate-school placement test at Coastal Kitchen on Capitol Hill. This month, the restaurant is “touring” New Orleans cuisine. We devoured a cast iron pan-delivered jalapeño-peppered cornbread. Then, oohed and ahhed over blackened redfish atop a creamy crawfish remoulade and a smoked pork butt rubbed with brown sugar and cayenne pepper, served over bacon-roasted turnips and pork juice and garnished with potato skins. This is the New Orleans in my mind.
Not the unimaginable one that forever changed Abdulrahman Zeitoun, husband, father, and owner of Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor, LLC, in the days after Hurricane Katrina. He stayed behind to care for the house and the rentals while Kathy, his wife of 11 years, and his four children evacuated the city with other New Orleans residents. Before emigrating to New Orleans, Zeitoun was a seaman. He was born and raised in Jableh, a fishing town on the coast of Syria. But he left with his brother, Ahmad, to explore the world by ship.
New Orleans was inundated with a tide of water from the collapsed levees, destroying homes left behind by evacuating residents. Zeitoun was able to move valuables upstairs to the second floor. And a second-hand canoe he had purchased on a whim years before became his mode of transportation in the water-logged city. Day after day, he set off, rowing his canoe along submerged streets, rescuing trapped residents and bringing them to safety. Day after day, he fed pairs of dogs that lived in neighboring houses with his stores of frozen steaks. Fiercely religious, Zeitoun refused Kathy’s plea to join her first in Baton Rouge and later in Houston. He felt it was Allah’s calling, to stay and help.
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| New Orleans, Louisiana in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (2005:08:29 17:24:22), showing Interstate 10 at West End Boulevard, looking towards Lake Pontchartrain. Photo credit |
Electricity was gone, cell phone service useless. Food refrigerated and frozen soon to be inedible. Certainly not creamed corn, bacony collard greens, red beans and rice, Southern coleslaw or white cheddar cheese grits--the food I enjoyed last night at Coastal Kitchen was far different than the leftovers and canned foods Zeitoun was eating.
And then the awful turned to nightmarish. Zeitoun disappears for weeks without word, and Kathy fears he’s been murdered. Zeitoun’s family in Syria and his brother Ahmad call daily, worried sick.
His family found out later that Zeitoun had been taken at gunpoint, arrested, locked in one of the open cages at a hastily erected prison in the bus station. He was never charged with a crime, never received a phone call, and was called Taliban. His foot was swollen from a metal splinter and his side gave him splitting pain, but he received no medical attention. He lost weight quickly, served food he could not eat as a devout Muslim.
How could such ignorance, such overt racism, such injustice, clearly a violation of civil rights, happen within the borders of the U.S.? At the hands of law enforcement brought in to protect and bring order to the destroyed city? Instead, Zeitoun is taken to a high security prison outside of New Orleans, where he remains for weeks. Zeitoun's situation evokes similar atrocities at Guantánamo Bay.
I think about Zeitoun’s treatment post-Katrina as I sip bourbon after the meal last night. Aged twelve years, the oiliness tickles my tongue and just after the heat slides down my throat, I raise the glass, look at the golden color. What does it say about our country when in a destroyed city, we could have allowed such things to happen to an innocent man? Was Zeitoun stigmatized by his religion, by his accent, by his dark hair or skin? Would it have been better if he had left when his wife left? Perhaps. But at least three people he saved might have died.
Zeitoun and his wife, Kathy’s story, is one needed to be told. It’s a story of a man with a rich history, who like so many of us hope to lead a happy life, raise a family, work hard, and succeed, get ahead. Zeitoun is a story that peels the layers away and exposes a side of “what can happen” that is most terrifying.
“I felt cracked open,” Kathy says in the book. “It broke me.”
And shattered my illusions as well, that all in New Orleans will be well and be taken care of, given time. The impact of these incidents have changed Kathy and Zeitoun forever, and in telling the story, Eggers has affected his readers, too.
Is knowing the truth for the better or for the worse? I wonder, placing my linen napkin back on the table at Coastal Kitchen. A hurricane won’t happen so far north in Seattle. But disasters can happen, and I’m not at all prepared to face a city shattered and shaken. It scares me, too, that the people within this country’s borders have so much we share, and yet, it’s the differences that are brought to the surface and focused upon, especially in times of crisis.
Perhaps it takes a man like Zeitoun to show us that our relationships with each other are vitally important, that they cross language, culture, religion, and you-name-it-differences. That we need each other. And that’s gives power to hope.
"An in-depth interview between Abdul Rahman and with Ambassador Akbar Ahmed in New Orleans. Abdulrahman's heroic story of saving lives turned tragic and shocking after he was arrested and held for three weeks in a prison, fed only pork, sleep deprived, strip-searched, and then questioned for being terrorist. Dave Eggers' new book Zeitoun centers around this man's experience." journeyintoamerica — March 10, 2009 — http://journeyintoamerica.wordpress.com/
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