Zeitoun, non-fiction after all

During the first several hours of the audiobook of "Zeitoun," I was astounded at how mundane and believable this fiction was. Turns out, it wasn't fiction, and all those anecdotes and family idiosyncrasies that made the fictional Zeitouns so endearing, in fact described a real, still very endearing, family. 

Dave Eggers must have been contacted to write this story by Kathy Zeitoun, the wife of the man at the center of the story. Kathy is strong-willed and refuses to be silent in the face of the gross injustices her husband suffered after Hurricane Katrina hit his neighborhood (and the rest of the city of New Orleans). 

Kathy knows how to raise her voice with the right people to get attention. She knows when to call in the newspaper, or attract a journalist, or, in the case of this book, bring in the author for the full length feature. The book is slow-moving, and until about 60% of the way in, when I thought I was still reading a novel, I had not idea it would take a darker turn. 

Well, I'm glad I hung in there. Zeitoun is a Syrian immigrant who was a respected business owner in New Orleans before the storm, and remained so afterward. During the immediate aftermath, he stayed in the city to keep watch over his properties and offer help to those who needed it (there were many, and no one seemed to be getting the help they needed from officials or FEMA. 

I won't explain what happens, because following the story with Kathy and the kids is, I think, an essential ingredient in the experience of the story. 

The book offers one family's saga of the storm. The more overarching narrative of the first year after Katrina can be found in this article, written in 2006 about the first year of recovery. The city faced great pressures to allow the flooded black neighborhoods to be abandoned and rebuild by developers (read: without black people). A recent news search reveals that these tensions still flare, as new apartment buildings open in a neighborhood which was once a bastion of black homeownership. 

One of the most interesting things in the New Yorker article is the description of how the 9th Ward (famously hard hit in the storm) came to be designed with long, "shot gun" houses which flooded easily. Here's the bit from the article: 

Elizabeth English studies the effects of hurricanes on buildings, at the Hurricane Center of Louisiana State University, in Baton Rouge. “You need to think about how architecture helps shape culture,” she said, when I met her at a back-yard dinner party in Baton Rouge. English, who is fifty-two and slight, has the intensity of someone whose career has met its most significant challenge. She is trying to save an architectural feature that is as emblematic of New Orleans as crayfish étouffée: the shotgun house. 

Shotgun house

The shotgun—sometimes four to six times as long as it is wide—catches stray breezes and allows them to pass through every room. The house is too narrow to have a hall, so the rooms are lined up one behind the other. The original plantations in the Mississippi River oxbow that later cradled New Orleans were long, thin strips, starting at the river and running north, toward the lake. “People grow accustomed to the geometry in which they live,” English said. 

When it came to laying out lots in New Orleans, they naturally laid them out long and narrow. That led to the long and narrow shotguns.” The shotguns, in turn, helped develop the close-knit neighborhoods that New Orleanians love. 

A shotgun’s salient feature is its lack of privacy. Getting from the front room to the kitchen, which is usually in the back, means walking through everybody else’s room or around the outside. On the narrow lots, shotguns sit close together, so neighbors are also on top of each other. 

“That communal culture everybody talks about in New Orleans, that warmth, all that life on the street, you could say that originates with the need for every plantation to have a little piece of riverfront,” English said. 

This sense of communal spirit and architecture is absent from new developments, as far as I can see. People want to be secluded, away from each other. I am definitely one of these. But it does feel sad to lose a sense of neighborliness. I walked through a development in my neighborhood tonight which I didn't even know existed. All brand new shiny condo buildings, with protected inner courtyards and access to green-lined walking paths. In the courtyards were chain stores for frozen yogurt and tea. The windows of the lower stories revealed swanky and sleek offices, where teams had written notes and ideas directly on the windows themselves, just like students are encouraged to do at Earlham college. As the last lines of Zeitoun cycled through my head, I wondered, "Do any black people live or work here?"