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 When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business.
In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared.
Abdul was first imprisoned in Camp Greyhound, the makeshift facility at the bus terminal, then moved to the Elayn Hunt Correctional Facility in St. Gabriel. Even as his family searched for him from their exile -- first in Baton Rouge, then Arizona -- and his extended family did what they could from Syria and Spain, he was denied contact with them, as well as other civil rights.
"I knew how deeply Zeitoun's wrongful incarceration would affect the extended family," Eggers said in a New Orleans Times Picayune article. "When I talked to people during the research, many of them said, 'Oh, he did less than a month, that's not such a big deal,' but there's a sort of callousness in some circles about the effect of incarceration on the extended family. And I really wanted to try to reflect that. When you don't know where somebody is, the logical thing is to presume them dead."
Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research -- in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria.
Eggers' book is available on Amazon.com. Proceeds will go to the Zeitoun Foundation, which will serve as a grantor to various post-Katrina rebuilding initiatives
Posted July 24, 2009
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