Given that I have been suffering from a severe chest infection and a fever for the past week, I hereby decided to talk about suffering, since it is on my mind and I have been thinking about it.
It has been a few weeks since I finished the book Zeitoun and I must say some of the aspects still haunt me till this very day. The book mentions a few horrifying things: the floating dead man, how Zeitoun, the main character treated his infected foot and the discovery of the dead dogs.
The floating dead man appears after hurricane Katrina has struck, and the scene revolves around the canoe passing it and Zeitoun noticing a glistening figure under the sun. Given that this happened in real life, we could only imagine how the character felt when he saw a dead body. It also signifies the level of tragedy that was brought on by this natural disaster, and how life threatening it was for Zeitoun.
I imagine that he must have found himself in a very special position, being able to survive the hurricane must have felt like a blessing; but that was soon taken away from him after the arrest.
Throughout the process of being processed in the badly conditioned jail, Zeitoun mentions the little metal object that got stuck in the sole of his foot, which caused a severe infection that had to be treated right away. He received no medical attention and had to perform a minor surgery on himself by using shards of a broken tabasco bottle to cut inside the wound. That was just nasty and disgusting altogether, considering how inhuman the treatments people received were. There were also mentions of torture in the book, the excessive use of pepper spray by the military and an insufficient supply of food. It was absolutely heart breaking to read about how all of this slowly broke a man, and what it took to break a man such as Zeitoun, who was tough and strong, but ended up living through much more trauma than he deserved in one lifetime.
The last horrific mention was Zeitoun’s discovery of the dead dogs. It isn’t stated directly in the book, but the description of the foul smell is enough to make the readers understand what happened. Although there was an earlier mention of dead puppies in the book, the dogs that were fed by Zeitoun symbolize much more since they embody a certain level of sentiment given and received by Zeitoun, who fed them every single day. Zeitoun was proud of saving the dogs and he was proud of being able to keep them alive. Their death stands out as a metaphor which expresses that a little part of Zeitoun has died after the arrest, and the cruel, heart breaking reality that all promises made were broke, and how nobody tried to help out the poor, suffering animals. It is also an equivalent of how the general population of that area was treated, that received insufficient care and were neglected by the government and rescue crew in so many ways, unable to survive and eventually died off. Similar to the dogs, these were the poor poor souls that suffered the consequences of the hazardous hurricane Katrina.