Zeitoun + 10, Omar Ibn Said

One of the implicit arguments of Dave Eggers' Zeitoun is that Islam is not wholly foreign to America. This message is hard to miss in the almost too perfect American Dream story of the title character and in his marriage to a white, Southern, practicing Muslim. Throughout the book Muslim families and mosques are part of the fabric of the setting, woven into America as often as they are represented as foreign.

In this context, the similarities between Zeitoun's story and that of Omar Ibn Said seem important. Said was born in West Africa in the 1770s and trained as a theologian. He was kidnapped and enslaved in 1807, and lived out the rest of his life in the United States. While enslaved, he wrote an autobiographical essay that has since become an important primary source for the study of antebellum slavery. A fuller exploration of Said's story can be found here, in a great episode of Backstory Radio on Islam in America.

The relevant part of Said's story takes place when he was imprisoned in North Carolina after escaping from the plantation on which he was enslaved. While in prison (and I am drawing heavily here on Backstory's version of events) Said began to write out the Qur'an on the walls of his cell. Crowds came to see the African American man who could write in strange symbols on the wall and, eventually, onlookers figured out that Said was literate in Arabic and was in the process of writing out his holy book.

The image here is strikingly similar to that of Zeitoun during his imprisonment at Camp Greyhound. A Muslim-American immigrant (though I take the point that "immigrant" is not the correct word for an enslaved man), jailed for a "crime" that appears to us as no crime at all, locked in a cell and attracting the attention of his white jailers because of the way he publicly practices Islam. In each case, the Muslim man is confined within America and becomes an object of suspicion as foreign and unusual because of his status as a Muslim.

If there are parallels between Zeitoun and Said, they matter to the text of Zeitoun because of the way they deepen the ideas of Americanness and foreignness that run throughout the book. On the one hand, Zeitoun is rendered foreign, denied his Constitutional rights and forced outside of the American Dream narrative by the events following Hurricane Katrina. The intertextuality with Said's story, though, suggests that this very process of pushing Muslim Americans outside the mainstream itself has a long history in America. Just as Said is imprisoned and rendered Muslim spectacle, so too is Zeitoun. Thus, in a nice twist that gets to the heart of certain jaded liberal view of the Bush era, the un-American act of rejecting religious and racial diversity is, through the resonance with Said's story, itself revealed to be a quintessential American tradition.

Zeitoun + 10, 1

Dave Eggers' Zeitoun is, of course, a book primarily about race and religion. By linking the disasters of Hurricane Katrina and the War on Terror, Eggers draws our attention to the ways Arab and Islamic people came to bear the brunt of American neuroses during the Bush era. Re-reading the book 10 years after Katrina, however, it is clear that the book is also about capitalism, about the way contradictions in our understanding of market forces help shape our understanding of character.

Both proponents and critics of capitalism have long noted a tension within it between creation and destruction. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx, of course, argues at length the case against capitalist exploitation and brutalization. But he begins by noting the enormous productive powers of the bourgeoisie: "It (the bourgeoisie) has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades." Conversely, capitalism's greatest fans routinely cheerlead with a kind of semi-irony for its destructive realities. Joseph Schumpeter, the rightwing, Austrian School economist, derives from Marx the notion of "creative destruction" and uses it as an argument explicitly in favour of free-market capitalism. Thus capitalism pulls intriguingly (and, for some, appealingly) in two directions at once, balancing destruction against creation.

In the character of Zeitoun and the disaster of Katrina, Eggers finds a man whose story he can tell through precisely this tension.

Zeitoun is Americanized through capitalism. His story, at one level a foreign tale of a Syrian Muslim sailor, is rendered instead as a familiar arc of American self-improvement. Zeitoun begins his life in America as a day-labourer, accrues the capital to start his own business, and ultimately becomes the employer of young immigrants like he once was.

Zeitoun's chosen industry is crucial: He is a home builder. (The word "builder" is Eggers' own.) Here Eggers has found a sweet spot in the American class structure: Zeitoun is both a paternalistic boss who looks out for the best interests of his workers and, at the same time, a working-class labourer who gets his hands dirty doing real work. Thus Zeitoun is the best of the bourgeoisie and the best of the proletariat rolled into one.

When Hurricane Katrina strikes, the tension within capitalism between destruction and creation is brought to within an inch of the surface of the text. For Zeitoun the capitalist, Katrina seems an obvious long-term boon. There are thousands of houses that will need to be renovated and many more that will need to be rebuild entirely. This is exactly the kind of work from which Zeitoun profits, and thus the disaster should be to his ultimate gain. Indeed, the closing section of the book describes the financial success to which this destruction has led: "But now things are moving. The city is rising again. Since Hurricane Katrina, Zeitoun A. Painting Contractor LLC has restored 114 houses to their former states, or improved versions thereof" (323). Here is the destruction upon which "creative destruction" relies rendered literal and biblical, and Zeitoun the capitalist is a beneficiary.

Eggers, though, is careful to choose his wording when it comes to the relationship between destruction and profit, and here Zeitoun's trade as a "builder" is crucial. For when destruction is invoked, Zeitoun's work is rendered not in terms of profit but in the non-economic terms of "building." In the midst of the disaster, Zeitoun thinks of "the damage, how long it would take to rebuild" (96). In the months following he thinks of non-competitive, non-financial building: "Every time he sees a home under construction, no matter who's doing it, he smiles. Build, he thinks. Build, build, build" (323, Eggers' italics). Thus what is, in fact, profitable work for a small business owner is described in the almost pre-economic terms of building structures for the psychological satisfaction of doing so: small business as therapy and small business as ritual.

My point here is not that that Zeitoun is a predatory capitalist. Rather, it is that in the wake of the financial crisis, the ways in which Eggers narrates the book reveal fault lines that were less obvious before. The same system of semi-regulated capitalism that built American homes also took them away in the wake of the housing bubble collapse. The same system that created home equity (the most important form of capital for most Americans)  can destroy that same equity through the vicissitudes of its own functioning. Eggers renders that process almost literal in Zeitoun. Here the man who builds homes also makes his living from their destruction. Home renovation is a business working both sides of the fence and, in Zeitoun, that dialectic is rendered visible as creation and destruction are linked in the adventure of a single protagonist.