“Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, Katrina, and the Visualization of Catastrophes”

Hurricane Katrina has been considered as the most devastating environmental catastrophe in US history, whose death toll was reported to be at more than one thousand. Aside from the “toxic gumbo” produced by floodwaters, consequent environmental health hazards included: shortage of drinking water, chemical spills, sewage treatment, food contamination, waste disposal, infectious diseases, and transformation of eco-systems. However, to these unsanitary conditions one should add misappropriation of resources, racial inequality, and governmental and political inadequacies in dealing with this “incident of national significance,” which aggravated the already unhealthy management of an area that ultimately equaled to a war zone. In Dave Eggers’ non-fiction latest work, the description of Bush administration’s intervention sounds more like an invasion than a rescue, thus revealing all the disastrous aftermaths of what Henry A. Giroux defines as “the politics of disposability.” Although almost irritating in its hagiographic overtones, Eggers’ account of Abdulrahman Zeitoun's personal story is a powerful example of how ecocriticism can function as a “survival strategy.”