Zeitoun

     Zeitoun by Dave Eggers is a novel about the Zeitoun family and their experience during hurricane Katrina. The Zeitoun's are a muslim family living in New Orleans, the father, Abdulrahman (though everyone called him Zeitoun), immigrated from Syria and started a painting and contracting business. The mother, Kathy, a Baton Rouge native, converted to Islam and helps run the business and care for their three daughters and her one son. Since this is a true story about a real family, it goes into great detail about the family themselves, little stories from their past, how Zeitoun and Kathy met, Zeitoun's life in Syria, and how the business is fairing. It alternates between the perspectives of Zeitoun and Kathy. This book would be a great way to introduce that type of writing style.

When Katrina was coming up on New Orleans, Kathy and the kids left for Baton Rouge to stay with a few of her sisters. Zeitoun decided to stay behind. He was able to save a lot of the family's belongings when the levees eventually broke and the city was drowned in about 15 feet of water. My favorite parts of this book are when Eggers is describing how the world looks when covered with water. Zeitoun has a canoe in which he paddles around the city, helping save stranded people and animals. He lives like this for a while, keeping in contact with Kathy through a phone that still works in one of the rental houses he owns. Zeitoun and three other men who are using the phone are later arrested for "looting"...in their own home. They are all taken to a makeshift jail behind the Greyhound station (which was built using man-power imported from the Louisiana State Pen. only days after the storm) , not given a phone call, or read their rights. They are accused of being terrorists and are made to stay in a cage outside containing only a metal rail and expected to sleep on the filthy ground. These conditions persist for several days, when finally they are put on a bus and taken to a prison in St. Gabriel. They are still denied a phone call, and as hard as Zeitoun tries he is unable to convince anyone that he is innocent until finally gets a priest to contact Kathy on his behalf. From there the book covers Kathy's efforts to get Zeitoun out of prison. She is met with people who tell her the location of the hearing is “classified information” and a bunch of other ridiculous things that, had the government been working properly, would never have happened. Though eventually Zeitoun is released from prison, it was apparent that the judicial system was not working for a very long time after the storm, and many people suffered because of that.

Reading this book gave me a lot of emotions. At some points I was disgusted with the actions of people in power, and the actions of the prison system as a whole. Racial and religious profiling are still a problem in America and this book just reinforced the fact that the care and safety of POC and low income individuals are not a priority in this country. It makes me very sad that the people and institutions put in place to protect citizens could do such a botch job. I understand that after the hurricane nothing was working properly, but it seems silly to prioritize building a temporary jail instead of using those resources and money to save the hundreds of civilians who were trapped in their homes. Climate disasters wreck the whole system.

Desert Solitaire

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness by Edward Abbey is the storey of a man (Abbey) who worked as a national park ranger in Utah for Arches National Monument. The book was written in 1968, so it’s a few decades old and the picture Abbey paints of the wild desert is one that I’m sure exists next to nowhere in the current world. In the first few chapters Abbey describes the land that he is living on, the little house-trailer that he is staying in and the many creatures that call the Utah desert home. As someone who loves to read about nature and has a soft spot for personification and descriptive language, so far this book has been a dream. In describing his book Abbey writes, “I believe that there is a kind of poetry, even a kind of truth, in simple fact. But the desert is a vast world, an oceanic world, as deep in its way and complex and various as the sea. Language makes a mighty loose net with which to go fishing for simple facts, when facts are infinite.” (pg XIV)

This book has really made me stop and appreciate things in my own world more. On the first page Abbey states that “Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary.” This got me thinking, and I experienced what I believe to be the beginnings of my perfect place. I was walking home around 11 o’clock the other night, and it was softly snowing, but there was no wind. I was walking through campus and that late I rarely see anyone, maybe a few people at the most. This night however, I got the overwhelming feeling that I was the only person on the whole of campus. All the buildings had their lights shut off, it was so quiet. My footsteps in the snow where deafening. I didn’t even hear cars or snow plows in the distance. It was in this gentle silence that I found my perfect place. It is peaceful, the cold and snow keep it that way. Everything was asleep and I was there to witness it. I love it when books can help me notice moments like that.

Getting back on topic, there was a bit of the second section of Desert Solitaire, aptly titled “Solitaire”, where Abbey describes turning on an electricity generator to power his trailer house when the sun goes down. He says that he is “shut off from the natural world and sealed up, encapsulated, in a box of artificial light and tyrannical noise.” (pg 13) I felt that this line really speaks of how we as a civilization are. Disconnected from the natural world with barriers of light emitted from countless electronic devices. Smartphones distracting those from everything going on around them, streetlights choking out the stars, neon everywhere. Abbey continues “I have cut myself off completely from the greater world which surrounds the man-made shell.” (pg 13) Again, this is exactly how we live, except we can’t turn off the generator and return to a peaceful night. One has to drive for hours to reach somewhere void enough of light pollution to even experience true night. Above is a map of Michigan showing its light pollution levels. The great thing about this site is that you can zoom in, below is our lovely WMU campus! It's got the whole world so you can see which countries or areas have the most light pollution. The interesting thing is that it's got data going back to 2010, and if you switch back to that overlay you can see that light pollution used to be way worse, which suprised me.

So far I am really enjoying this book, I can’t wait to read what else Abbey has to say about the desert, nature, and how we are all connected. “We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote, the soaring buzzard, the elegant gopher snake, the trembling cottontail, the foul worms that feed on our entrails, all of them, all of us. Long live diversity, long live the earth!” (pg 34)

Waste Land

     Waste Land is a art documentary with an environmental twist. It follows Brazilian artist Vik Muniz as he works with the Association of Collectors of the Metropolitan Landfill of Jardim Gramacho, a group of people who salvage recyclable materials from the Jardim Gramacho landfill in Janeiro Brazil, the largest landfill in the world. Vik Muniz is a photographer, who makes his work out of found materials. This movie focuses on his series made out of recyclable materials salvaged from the Jardim Gramacho landfill, and the people who work there and recreated their portraits out of the materials they collect all day. The thing that struck me the most about this film is how human everyone is, the garbage pickers, or catadores in Portuguese, are so human it hurts. They are funny, they are raw and real, they have the most important things to say about consumption and waste. One man, Valter dos Santos, while talking about how some people don’t think that recycling makes a difference said “One single can is of great importance. Because 99 is not 100, and that single one will make the difference.” A woman named Magna de Franca Santos said “It’s easy for you to be sitting there at home in front of your television consuming whatever you want and tossing everything in the trash and leaving it out on the street for the garbage trucks to take it away. But where does that garbage go?” She then gave the camera a now-you-think-about-that-for-a-while half smile and nod. These people work for $20-$25 a day, sorting recyclables on literal mountains of garbage. It is breathtaking seeing a whole island of trash, and the humans in scale with it, it is astounding.

This film really speaks of the human’s ability to waste an insane amount of matter, and our talent for casting things undesirable to the side. Muniz put it as “this is where everything that is not good goes, including the people.” Throughout the course of the film, with the people Muniz gets to help make the pieces of art, and to pose for them, you really fall in love with them. Their spirit, their personalities. These are human beings and it broke my heart to learn how some have to live. One woman, Suelem Pereira Dias, has worked in the dump since she was 7 (she was 18 at the time of filming), she is such a beautiful young lady, posed with her two children, immortalized in trash. She said that “If I don’t die, it’s not bad.” One day she found a dead child amongst the trash, “There was a baby there that had been thrown away.” We are a throw away species, it seems like it's all we know how to do.

Although the movie was about this artist working with catadores to create deep, socially charged works of art, for the purposes of this class I think the most important thing to take away from this movie was the sheer amount that is being thrown out, that could have been recycled. The catadores collect 200 tons of recyclable materials a day. That is absolutely insane.

Jardim Gramacho closed in 2012, the site now being used to transform greenhouses gasses into energy to power houses and cars. This still displaced over 1,700 people who used the landfill to earn a living.