An Interview with Dave Eggers about Zeitoun

56 ANIS SHIVANI AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVE EGGERS ABOUT ZEITOUN Z eitoun (McSweeney’s, 2009) is the rare post-9/11 narrative that accepts that life in the United States has fundamentally changed, not just for immigrants or Muslims, but for everyone. It sees the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans as part of a continuum of fundamental cultural change that extends to this day, regardless of superficial political changes. Dave Eggers was struck by the story of Abdulrahman Zeitoun , a Syrian immigrant married to a white American Muslim, Kathy, who together ran a well-known painting and building contracting business, Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor llc, and raised four children. Zeitoun was forty-seven at the time of Katrina . While Kathy and their children left for safety in Baton Rouge and then Phoenix, Abdulrahman, like many New Orleans residents, stayed behind, despite warnings of a flood, to watch over his own house on Dart Street, as well as his office and other properties. A canoe he owned came in handy when rescuing people from his neighborhood who were in imminent danger, not to mention feeding starving dogs and otherwise being useful, even as his own and others’ houses were drowned in many feet of water. Abdulrahman was able to survive quite well, because of his physical skills, on the roof of his home, until one day when the police and military arrested him and three other men at a home on Claiborne Street, treating them as criminals and, soon, as terrorists. Along with Abdulrahman, a Syrian friend, Nasser, and two white men, Todd and Ronnie, were held without being charged with a crime, though not allowed a phone call or access to legal help—they were simply “disappeared,” apparently with hundreds of other innocents, into a black hole of no information . They were treated as we imagine Guantánamo Bay prisoners are treated, at “Camp Greyhound,” the makeshift open-air facility of cages built at the downtown New Orleans Greyhound 57 Shivani station. While people were dying because of lack of help, the government found the time and resources to build the prison as its first order of priority, completing it in a few days after the arrival of Katrina. Gone for more than three weeks, Kathy presumed Abdulrahman dead, as did Abdulrahman’s frantic family in Syria and his concerned brother Ahmad in Spain. Eventually, Abdulrahman ended up at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, where he was separated from normal prisoners into special isolation, presumed as he was to be an al-Qaeda or Taliban terrorist. At no point during his torture was an attempt made to check up on his bona fides as a prominent New Orleans businessman. Though Abdulrahman was eventually released —without any apology, without any recognition of government wrongdoing, and without any explanation of why he was rounded up along with other innocent men—his life, and that of his family, cannot possibly be the secure existence it was before Katrina. Eggers has constructed a riveting narrative of Abdulrahman’s odyssey from beginning to end, making it one of the most important cultural documents to emerge from this period. Shivani: It seems to be a long road for a writer, from the Eggers of 2000, who gave us A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which defined irony, self-consciousness, detachment, and cool for members of a certain generation, to the Eggers of 2009, who gives us commitment, political engagement, objectivity , and heat, meaning dissatisfaction with how procedures of justice and fairness have fallen by the wayside. Define for us, please, how you crossed from where you were as a writer to where you are now. What were some of the important way stations , and did you encounter resistance in yourself to broadening your scope to the extent you have? Eggers: I’ve definitely moved around a lot, I guess. I was trained as a journalist, and in and out of college I did everything from straight news to features to editorial cartooning and art criticism . When I wrote my first book, I was twenty-nine, and that was sort of a miracle for me; I had no previous expectations that I would ever write or...