Humiliated Bodies, Resilient Voices
by Gloria Williams
Poems from Guantanamo:
The Detainees Speak
Edited by Marc Falkoff
University of Iowa Press, 2007
84 pages, $13.95
Imagine being 14 years old when you arrive in Pakistan to learn English and study informational technology. Then imagine being arrested, tortured and taken to Guantanamo Bay as an “enemy combatant.”
That is what happened to Mohammed El Gharani, a Saudi-born Chadian national. In January 2002, he became one of the first to be imprisoned by the U.S. at Guantanamo Bay. In “First Poem of my Life,” one of 22 poems by 17 detainees featured in this volume, he writes:
They said to us, “Come out peacefully,
And don’t utter a single word.”
Into a transport truck they lifted us,
And in shackles of injustice they bound us.
Edited by Mark Falkoff, a law professor at Northern Illinois University and an attorney representing 17 detainees, this is no ordinary book of poetry. Along with the poems, stories of the men and the treatment they endure give a heartbreakig context to their verse.
The Saudi national Abdullah Thani Faris Al Anazi was a humanitarian worker in Afghanistan when he lost both of his legs in a U.S. bombing campaign. In “To My Father” he writes:
Oh Father, this is a prison of injustice
Its iniquity makes the mountains weep.
I have committed no crime and am guilty of no offense.
Curved claws have I,
But I have been sold like a fattened sheep.
In his introduction, Falkoff, who also holds a Ph.D. in literature, describes what he found during his first visit to the prison camp. “They were broken down and psychologically tyrannized, kept in extreme isolation, threatened with rendition, interrogated at gunpoint, and told their families would be harmed if they refused to talk.” In an appearance at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, Falkoff said that he would prefer to tell his clients’ stories in a court of law, where they should be heard.
This is not an easy book to read, not because the poems are complex, but because they reveal truths that are painful to hear. And these are only the ones that have passed through the censorship process of the Defense Department. Each line had to be approved by the Pentagon’s Privilege Review Team before its publication was allowed. Some of the poems were originally written in toothpaste or carved with a pebble into a styrofoam cup, with little hope that they would ever be seen by another’s eyes.
They were rendered in English from the original Arabic by FBI-approved translators. After Iowa Press editors read some of the “cup poems” originallly published in Book-forum, they contacted Falkoff about assembling this volume. Though it has not been banned, bookstores in Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, Los Angeles and elsewhere held readings from this slim collection during the annual Banned Book Week in autumn.
The poet Ariel Dorfman writes in his afterword, “Think that we have a chance to help them complete the journey that started in a cage inside a concentration camp, merely by something as simple as reading these poems… If we are troubled enough, it will not be just the verses that are set free to roam the world, but the hands and lips and lungs that composed them.”
Even using the Pentagon’s own dubious documents, a 2006 Seton Hall study reported only 8 percent of the men held at Guantanamo are alleged to be “fighters.” Eighty-six percent were captured in Pakistan or by the Afghan Northern Alliance and sold to the U.S. for a helfty bounty, thanks to U.S. flyers enticing, “Get wealth and power beyond your dreams…” All of the kidnapped and caged have been denied the most basic due process, civil liberties and human rights protections.
Abdullah Thani Faris Al Anazi was released in September; Mohammed El Gharani and more than 300 others are still interned at the U.S. prison camp on Cuba. Royalties from the book will help pay for translators and transportation for the Center for Constitutional Rights’ legal advocates.
