Zeitoun: The nail and the hammer

Zeitoun hit me like a ton of bricks.

When it was over, I was really, really sad. Not necessarily sad to stop reading the book, but sad because I knew that the events described within were real, actual, factual events that took place in my own country. To people that could have been me, or friends.

I remember being in college at the time that Katrina hit, and I was entering my senior year. I was busy thinking about where I was going to end up after school was over; what would I do? Where would I live? Would I be able to live near Matt? What would happen to all my friends? I was attending mock-interview sessions, and even talked to (gasp) someone at the career center once or twice. I was asked at a Walgreen's to contribute to Katrina rescue efforts by adding an extra few dollars onto my purchase. I think I did, but I can't really remember.

I can't believe that I didn't know the reality, the REAL reality of Katrina, until Zeitoun. I think, until this book, I had someone shielded myself from the pain of knowing that people are capable of such horrible cruelty. I shielded myself from the racially charged, uncomfortable media circus surrounding the hurricane. Reading Zeitoun opened my eyes to the reality of what really happened after Katrina, and what that means for America, and our futures. The fact that it's been brushed under the rug as it has is shocking. The neglect, the rage, the de-humanizing, the numbing to the suffering of thousands of people.

Read the book and you'll know what I mean.

The book quotes, I believe, Mark Twain, who says: "To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." I believe this is true - and this is resurfacing now, and could resurface in a very ugly way at any time. Zeitoun was the nail, the scapegoat. What will happen in the next huge disaster? I can't help but wonder who will be the next nail, and who will be the next hammer.

I need to stop reading such heavy books.

Our broken system - and two memoirs to prove it.

Whew!

I haven't posted in a long time - I've been reading up a storm, however. Since I last posted I finished a book called Orange is the New Black, a memoir about a woman's year in prison, and I am now almost finished Zeitoun by Dave Eggers, a harrowing non-fiction account of a family and their hell-ish experience during the aftermath of Hurricaine Katrina.

The books are so different in tersm of writing and perspective - one, written by a upper-class, college educated white girl, experiencing the system and having the luxury of viewing it as almost an observer or voyeur (Kerman can lean back and observe the goings on with a critical, almost journalistic eye, and this is sometimes unsettling - but the real bonds she makes with the other prisoners makes up for this strange perspective); and a Syrian man, innocent just the same, but thrust into the system and being forced to experience all of it in a very real, very deliberate way.

But wow, do they both show the horrors of our nations dark under-belly that is the judicial and prison system. For most of us law-abiding, productive members of society, prison represents order, safety, and peace of mind. I know better, because I have worked in San Quentin and in two juvenile prisons in Michigan - but still, even so, I look at the prison system and somehow, inherently, trust it. After all, there are parts of it that work, and it's pretty much out of sight, out of mind, right??

Both of these accounts show, in a brutal, real, raw way. It's an exposure of a system that generally doesn't work, filled with papers, people, frustration, and debacles like the ones the Zeitouns or Piper Kerman were subjected to are everywhere. It's enough to make me not want to get out of bed each day.

Reading Orange is the New Black, I was brought back to my time in San Quentin. The men that I met there mirrored the women that Kerman showcases in her memoir - their individuality, their humility, their strength. But what the book did that I couldn't do was delve a bit deeper - I only got to see the surface in a few hours, once a week.

More on Zeitoun as soon as I'm done - only a few pages away.