AMERICA:A stupid bureaucracy inflicted a harrowing ordeal on the Zeitouns after Hurricane Katrina, writes LARA MARLOWE
AMERICA HAS a way of hurting people, then making them famous.
Zeitoun is one such story; a harrowing tale of what happens when civilisation breaks down and ordinary people are caught in the cogs of a stupid, insensitive bureaucracy.
It is also about being Muslim in America.
US writer Dave Eggers has transformed Abdulrahman and Kathy Zeitoun’s torment in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina into a national bestseller. PBS television is making a documentary about them, and the Academy award-winning director Jonathan Demme plans an animated film, in which Meryl Streep is to read Kathy’s voice.
Zeitoun, a Syrian immigrant who runs a thriving painting business in New Orleans with his American-born wife Kathy, stayed home to protect their property when the hurricane struck. He woke up on the morning of August 30th, 2005, to hear water lapping against the house; the levees had broken.
For nearly a week, Zeitoun paddled around in a canoe, rescuing elderly neighbours and feeding abandoned pets. On September 6th, armed men in a swamp fan boat detained him and three other men at an apartment that Zeitoun rented out. He’d been going there daily to ring Kathy and the children, who’d taken refuge with friends in Arizona.
Zeitoun and his companions were taken to the Greyhound bus station, which had been transformed into a prison, with chain-link fence cages built on the lines of the bus parking spaces.
“A half dozen men jumped on each of us, as if we were wild animals,” he recalls, sitting in his living room in New Orleans’ Broodmoor district.
Zeitoun was forced to strip naked, subjected to rectal searches and thrown into a cage without sheets, blankets or furniture.
“People were drowning and needed help, and they spent their time building cages,” he says, shaking his head, almost five years later.
“You guys are al-Qaeda,” one of the soldiers at “Camp Greyhound” taunted Zeitoun and his companions. “Taliban,” another muttered.
Zeitoun is convinced he would not have been detained if he had not been an Arab Muslim. After three days and nights in the cage, he was transferred to the Hunt Correctional Centre near Baton Rouge, where he was repeatedly strip-searched and forced to wear an orange Guantánamo-style jumpsuit.
Overnight, Zeitoun went from being a family man and upstanding, respected member of his community to a prisoner held incognito without due process of law. “I was at the wrong place at the wrong time, and I had no one to turn to,” he says. “I felt as if I’d been shipwrecked at sea.”
Kathy Zeitoun had no news of her husband for two weeks, and feared he was dead. An African-American who was distributing Bibles in the prison gave in to Zeitoun’s pleas and called her. Homeland Security called soon after. “They said, ‘We’ve never had any interest in your husband’,” she recalls.
“Since September 11, we assumed they monitored our phone . . . I don’t want to have this fear, but it’s being forced upon us.”
Honours have showered upon the Zeitouns because of Eggers’s book. A folder under the television holds a gold-embossed certificate from the outgoing mayor: “In recognition of your outstanding and dedicated services to the citizens of New Orleans”. There are scrolls from the Arab-American Institute and the California state legislature.
The couple are donating all proceeds of their fame to the Zeitoun Foundation, which is dedicated to rebuilding New Orleans.
In 2006, the Zeitouns had a fifth child, a boy named Ahmad. Their painting business is thriving. But the difficulty of being practising Muslims in the US still weighs on them.
“I don’t want to be prejudiced, because two wrongs don’t make a right,” says Abdulrahman. “I try to put it behind me, to forget it.”
“I used to love gourmet cooking, gardening, embroidery, video games,” Kathy says.
“I don’t do those things anymore. It’s as if life had drained out of me. I keep waiting for it to get better, but it doesn’t. Part of me is empty. When I see suffering on television, for example the earthquake in Haiti, it affects me 10 times more than before.”
Kathy converted to Islam before she met Abdulrahman. Her family always objected to her wearing hijab. “After September 11, my brother Eugene said to me, ‘Which side are you on’?” she recalls. “A few Muslims do evil things, and all of us suffer for it,” she says, referring to Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani who has admitted to attempting to detonate a car bomb on Times Square a week ago.
“He lost his house and his job,” says Abdulrahman, struggling to find an explanation for Shahzad that does not involve Islam.
“It’s very dangerous when a human being gets to the point where he has nothing to lose . . .” Fox News asked the Zeitouns to host a “spiritual reality show”, but they refused.
“Muslims have such a bad rap; I’m afraid we’ll be put on a pedestal and smashed down,” says Kathy.