Contents introduction

2.2. Political Floodwaters and the Military City.
At one point in Dave Eggers’ account of Abdulraham Zeitoun’s horrifying experience in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, Zeitoun, encountering a hostile, possibly violent, cadre of police and National Guardsmen, thinks to himself, “what were they doing in the city, if not helping evacuate people” (134). From this moment forward, this question haunts Eggers’ text, compelling readers to reflect on the relationship between civilian life and martial law,⁴ and how the events following Katrina serve as a microcosm for the enduring tensions between civilians and the state. Egger’s text recounts Zeitoun’s experience in the days following the hurricane and the emotional turmoil endured by his wife, Kathy, and their four children, who seek refuge first in Baton Rouge and then Phoenix.
Choosing to remain in the city during the storm, Zeitoun—marked by his ethnicity—finds himself powerless against institutional forces that project onto him a litany of racial prejudices stemming from deeply rooted discourses on 9/11, terrorism, and the Middle East. Along with three friends, all occupying a house under his ownership, Zeitoun is arrested by a group of armed soldiers, taken to a makeshift prison, and finally transported to the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison outside of New Orleans. Assumed to be al Qaeda, Zeitoun and his friends spend the next several weeks in captivity, deprived of communication to the outside world, enduring physical and psychological torture at the hands of their government. Assuming her husband to be dead, Kathy eventually learns of his whereabouts and, breaking through layers of institutional red tape, secures his release.
Eggers’ narrative is predominantly concerned with, first, describing the Zeitouns’ traumatic encounter with institutional power, and, second, addressing the ways in which the city of New Orleans was transformed as a result of the hurricane. The storm and subsequent flooding destabilized the power dynamics embedded in the city’s urban space, power dynamics present in all urban environments and responsible for facilitating cultural and economic exchange. Eggers describes how state power, most directly represented by the military presence in the city, radically imposed itself on an urban space temporarily freed from institutional discipline. Deleuze and Guattari’s writings on “smooth” and “striated” space provide a useful starting point for exploring this process and its implications on the city of New Orleans. The former concept refers to deterritorializing, democratic, heterogeneous space totally free of discourses of control, while the latter describes planned, regimented, homogeneous space often implemented and disciplined by the state (A Thousand Plateaus 371). According to Deleuze and Guattari, these concepts give way to one another as a result of the dynamic relationship between the individual and the state. They write, “we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space”. This process is particularly evident in the aftermath of Katrina, where the destabilized city space of New Orleans quickly became a highly-contested, highly-regimented political zone.
In his first canoe-bound peregrinations into the flooded streets of New Orleans, Zeitoun is confronted by the radically-altered space of the city, a space once responsible for disciplining bodies and facilitating the flow of capitalism, but now completely free of all discourses of control. Eggers writes, “He paddled down Dart Street, the water flat and clear. And strangely, almost immediately, Zeitoun felt at peace. The damage to the neighborhood was extraordinary, but there was an odd calm in his heart. So much had been lost, but there was a stillness to the city that was almost hypnotic” (95). Later, attempting to rescue a man stranded in his own home, Zeitoun thinks to himself, “It was a strange sensation, paddling over a man’s yard; the usual barrier that would prevent one from guiding a vehicle up to the house was gone. He could glide directly from the street, diagonally across the lawn, and appear just a few feet below a second-story window. Zeitoun was just getting accustomed to the new physics of this world” (97). These descriptions of the city immediately following the storm reveal the ways in which the flooding of New Orleans temporarily transformed the landscape of the city, allowing Zeitoun and other survivors to traverse urban space in ways not usually permitted in the regimented space of the city. In his canoe, Zeitoun moves beyond the discourses of control that normally embed themselves in striated space. He enters the homes of his neighbors and moves freely between the public and the private boundaries that traditionally organize and discipline space.
The sense of harmony Zeitoun finds as he negotiates smooth space owes itself to the absence of regimented, institutional power in New Orleans following the storm. It is worth noting the ways that post-Katrina New Orleans perhaps provides a rare outlet from Foucault’s theory of panopticism as a ubiquitous presence in contemporary life. Foucault explains that our society functions on the principle of surveillance. He writes, “Under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces…[We are] in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism” (Discipline and Punish 217). Absent of any modes of institutional control and surveillance, the city streets for a brief moment instill in Zeitoun the sensation of existence beyond the gaze of the law and the state. This, perhaps, explains his sense of freedom and his self-described elation as he paddles through the city streets, in what he calls the “in-between time—after the storm but before anyone had returned to the city” (Eggers 132). It should be noted, however, that the “smoothing out” of space, even as it offers Zeitoun an outlet from the disciplining forces of city space, conversely enabled the widespread violence and looting that took place after the hurricane, suggesting that a society must necessarily strike a balance between the smooth and the striated.
Ostensibly as a means of bringing order back to the city, the federal government and the Louisiana state government authorized the militarization of New Orleans. Stretched thin by wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, however, the U.S. military could hardly spare the kind of troop presence necessary to regain order in the city. In fact, many of the Army and National Guardsmen who would eventually find their way to New Orleans had recently served in the Middle East and were ill-prepared for dealing with civilian conflict (Lee). The American military, then, seasoned by brutal warfare in the Middle East, was stuck with the job of instilling order in a major American city populated entirely by civilians. To complicate matters, media representations of violence and looting in the city all but authorized the military to utilize force wherever necessary. Clearly influenced by this rhetoric, Governor Blanco at one point stated to the press, “I have one message for these hoodlums… These troops are fresh back from Iraq, well- trained, experienced, battle tested and under my orders to restore order in the streets. They have M-16s and they are locked and loaded. These troops know how to shoot and kill, and they are more than willing to do so if necessary, and I expect they will” (Dyson 114). Thus, the military had turned into a blunt instrument of force whose prime imperative, rather than saving the lives of those stranded in the city, was to neutralize threats, both real and perceived.
Zeitoun’s wrongful imprisonment results directly from the institutional reaction to New Orleans’ transformed city space. Lacking its conventional modes of control and discipline,⁵ the smooth space of New Orleans opened itself to radical institutional redefinition. Upon his arrest and imprisonment in Camp Greyhound, a makeshift jail constructed on the site of the Greyhound bus- terminal, Zeitoun is alarmed by the state’s impulse to imprison, rather than protect, the residents of New Orleans. Eggers writes, “Zeitoun had been brought into the station on September 6, seven and a half days after the hurricane passed through the city. Even under the best of circumstances, building a prison like this would have taken four or five days. That meant that within a day of the storm’s eye passing over the region, officials were making plans for the building of a makeshift outdoor prison”. Rather than facilitating an evacuation plan and proffering aid to the ailing inhabitants of New Orleans, the federal government set as its primary focus the capture and detention of anyone engaged in suspicious behavior. This, as many studies on Hurricane Katrina have already noted, opened the door for widespread racial profiling. What has received less attention, though, is the state’s immediate effort to discipline urban space as a means of bringing order to the city. Eggers writes, “The parking lot, where a dozen buses might normally be parked, had been transformed into a vast outdoor prison”.
Urban spaces were now being appropriated as material sites of institutional discipline. Whereas prior spatial analysis might have addressed the parking lot as a site for facilitating commerce and bolstering capitalism, here we see the institution imposing itself on city space in more radical ways; disciplining bodies no longer refers to the abstract socio-economic relationship between the individual and the institution, but rather to the very material imprisonment that many innocent New Orleanians experienced following the storm. In the streets of New Orleans, institutional power, as a disciplining force that had theretofore remained transparent in the city’s infrastructure, became temporarily visible.
Foucault’s famous study on the machinery of the modern penitentiary system and its political dimensions proves fruitful for this discussion. Indeed, the state’s immediate construction of “Camp Greyhound” indicates the reversal or dissolution of the panopticon as the disciplining force in modern life. Foucault describes the evolution of the panoptic prison apparatus, beginning in the 18^th century, noting how this model for the modern prison would influence the modes of discipline present in factories, barracks, and other sites of institutional power. In contemporary America, institutional discipline has become naturalized to the extent that—with the exception of rare cases like the one described above—it is impossible to function beyond the perception of the panoptic gaze. With the erasure of the modes of control embedded in New Orleans’ city space, the state naturally reverted to more primitive means of establishing order, which we see in Blanco’s virtual declaration of martial law and, more specifically, in the construction of Camp Greyhound. One of the critical features of incarceration that Foucault describes is the concept of delinquency. As a means of ensuring their survival and extending their influence on civilian life, prisons must produce and encourage delinquency (Foucault, Discipline 267).⁶ By making visible and incarcerating those subjects existing outside of the law, the prison effectively controls and disciplines—through the constant threat of incarceration—those subjects existing within the law. In Zeitoun’s case, this process manifests itself in a particularly sinister form, as his delinquency is connected to his ethnicity.
The narratives of institutional racism in the immediate wake of Katrina are by now well known to many Americans, but these narratives mainly focus on racism perpetrated against African Americans. Zeitoun’s Syrian identity complicates this discussion, as his ethnic identity engages post-9/11 xenophobic anxieties and, more specifically, the fear of Muslim men as terrorists. Whereas African Americans were subject to racist stereotypes amplified by media generated narratives that focused on looting, violence, and a morally-bankrupt lower-class culture,⁷ Zeitoun’s identity defines him as an ideological enemy of the state. Associated with ideological delinquency, his ethnic identity justifies not only incarceration, but also gross violations of constitutional and, more generally, human rights. During his month-long captivity, Zeitoun endures strip-searches, verbal and physical abuse, solitary confinement, deprivation of medical attention, starvation, and many other subtle forms of torture. Eggers writes, “Zeitoun was in disbelief. It had been a dizzying series of events—arrested at gunpoint in a home he owned, brought to an impromptu military base built inside a bus station, accused of terrorism, and locked in an outdoor cage. It surpassed the most surreal accounts he’d heard of third-world law enforcement” (218). Of course not the only ethnic “other” to endure this kind of treatment, Zeitoun’s imprisonment occurs as a result of the state’s policies on the defense of the homeland detailed in the previous chapter. As a Middle-Eastern man, Zeitoun’s presence in an American city perceived to be under imminent threat represents, in the eyes of institutional power, an intrusion of political violence on the fortified space of the homeland. In order to neutralize this threat, the state enacts violence from within, regimenting the city’s streets as a means of ideologically cleansing the perceived contagion. Here, again, we see how violence is embedded in and intrinsic to the symbolic locus of the “home.”
Paradoxically, Zeitoun’s imprisonment justifies itself. Placed in sub- human conditions and forced to “urinate and defecate wherever they could” (251), prisoners were perceived to be guilty by virtue of their incarceration and, more specifically, by the abject conditions produced by it. Suggesting the possibility of Zeitoun proving his innocence to a prison nurse, Eggers writes, “Professing his innocence to her was futile, as professions of innocence were likely all she heard all day. In fact, he knew that his very presence in a maximum-security prison likely proved his guilt in the minds of all who worked at the facility” (254).
Applying Foucault’s writings, Zeitoun’s predicament here can be extended to race as a marker of delinquency; particularly in a post-9/11 environment where the enemy of the state is identified as an outside threat (not only an internal ideological “other,” as was the case in the Cold War, but an ethno-religious “other” with identifiable physical characteristics), one’s ethnic coding inherently implies guilt. Camp Greyhound, therefore, a physical production of the state situated in the physical place of the city, facilitates the material production of institutional discourse; whereas the discourses of marginalization attached to Arab-American identity had obviously existed prior to 2005, the prison demonstrates the enduring ability of the state to discipline bodies in space and thereby bring these discourses to bear on New Orleanians in real, material ways.
The prison furthermore falls in line with Georgio Agamben’s writings on the modern state as an increasingly invasive presence in American life. In much the same way that discourses on homeland security served to erode the boundaries that traditionally separated the public from the private and the state from the home, the modern state has engrained itself in fundamental aspects of human life through biopolitics and what Agamben calls “the state of exception.” Agamben, who uses biopolitics as his starting point, sums up Foucault’s concept: “at the threshold of the modern era, natural life begins to be included in the mechanisms and calculations of State power, and politics turns to biopolitics” (3). As the modern state increasingly exerts itself over fundamental issues of life and human existence, it likewise politicizes these concepts, rendering them susceptible to the manipulations of the state. From this position, Agamben describes the state of exception, a modern apparatus that creates a condition of “bare life” in which civilians are perpetually in a position of political vulnerability and are therefore susceptible to the most violent and egregious offenses perpetrated by the state.
Agamben goes on to say, “The paradox of sovereignty consists in the fact the sovereign is, at the same time, outside and inside the juridical order.” This paradox, he explains, is at the heart of “the structure of the exception” (15), in which the state, by virtue of its absolute sovereignty, is authorized to transcend the very laws that it creates. The intersection of biopolitics and the state of exception, of course, generates a very precarious political position for civilian subjects. Agamben writes, “There is no clearer way to say that the first foundation of political life is a life that may be killed, which is politicized through its very capacity to be killed” (89). Exposed to “bare life,” civilians (Agamben uses the term homo sacer) are deprived of basic human rights, which exist only as an illusion for the preservation of social and political stability.
The radical politicization of urban space in New Orleans illustrates the precarious, traumatic relationship between the civilian and the state here in the twenty-first century and the ways that this discourse has embedded itself in city space, transforming the urban—traditionally figured as a post-Marxist site of production—into an extension of a highly-politicized, highly-policed, state apparatus. Zeitoun frequently compares Camp Greyhound to Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, two military prisons operating both “outside and inside the juridical order” of the United States. To be sure, his imprisonment by the state demonstrates gross violations of constitutional rights here in America and, more broadly, violations of human rights endorsed by the international community.
Describing the state of exception in terms more specific to our post-9/11 environment, Eggers writes, “Usually the story was similar: a Muslim man came to be suspected by the U.S. government, and, under the president’s current powers, U.S. agents were allowed to seize the man from anywhere in the world, and bring him anywhere in the world, without ever having to charge him with a crime” (255). What Eggers describes here is the foundation of a modern political apparatus that can justify all manner of human rights violations in the name of national security; in fact, justification—however it is rhetorically-figured—might be understood more appropriately as a red-herring created to divert attention from the fact that the state of exception needs no justification for its transgressions.