By Beth McCoy
A while back, I wrote about using Twitter to highlight narrative perspectives in Dave Eggers' Zeitoun. Some time after that post, I became aware of news reports that Abdulrahman Zeitoun, the protagonist of Eggers' non-fiction work, had undergone radical changes in behavior since his post-Katrina imprisonment: according to the New Orleans Times-Picayune, he has been "arrested twice on charges of assaulting his ex-wife."
Suddenly, teaching the book has become much more complicated.
But has the complication of "teaching the book"--especially a "non-fiction" book--been "sudden"? Certainly, it may seem sudden amid the speed and proliferation both of information and what passes for information in the digital age of linking, retweeting, and blog commenting.
Really, though, this is an old, old problem. As Saidiya Hartman acknowledges in Scenes of Subjection, narratives that go into archives and narratives drawn from archives are always entangled with imbalances of power. Hartman illustrates her point with a particularly well-known example: the difficulty of determining slavery's "truth" from volumes of white-conducted WPA interviews of formerly enslaved black people. Even the archive that is language shakes up interpretation, she notes, contemplating "freedom" alongside its "failure" to yield after abolitions and emancipations any "absolute distinction" between slave and human (13).
From another (yet profoundly related) perspective, the complication of "teaching the book" is an even older problem, as I have been [re]learning while reading about early Christianity. From battles over heresies to unclear divisions between ecclesiastical and political, archival input and output make truth hard to come by, whether derived from document or, as Toni Morrison's narrator in The Bluest Eye puts it, "timbre."
So the next time I teach Zeitoun, the class will have access to news accounts and police documents stemming from the Zeitoun family's life after the storm. And students will be thus sent off text and into the ether to piece together their interpretations. After all, interpretation itself heralded the appearance and working both of footnote and Pinterest, to return to Erick's and Kathy's most recent posts, respectively.
One of my favorite intellectual questions is "Just what do I think I'm doing, anyway?" Returning to Zeitoun with "news accounts and police documents" in tow will require that everyone ask that question. And although (and maybe because) it's a favorite, the asking of that question is likely to yield unexpected and undesired results for text and for self. As uncomfortable as such results may be, there is no choice but to keep going, to keep making meaning, and to keep making meaning about making meaning. There is no other option.
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