Declassified poetry from Guantánamo Bay
Jumah al-Dossari, originally from Bahrain, was seized by Pakistani security forces in late 2001 and turned over to the United States. The U.S. military brought him to the Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, where, he claims, he was beaten, his life was threatened, and he was isolated from other prisoners for long stretches of time. Dossari, who denies any connection to Al Qaeda or terrorism, and has never been charged with any such crime, has repeatedly attempted to commit suicide while imprisoned. His most recent attempt, according to Amnesty International, was in March 2006, when he tried to slit his throat.
Death Poem
By Jumah al-Dossari
Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.”
That poem will be included in a collection of poetry by Guantánamo detainees that is being assembled by Marc Falkoff, a law professor at Northern Illinois University and an attorney for seventeen clients at the prison camp. Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak will be published this fall by the University of Iowa Press and will include essays by several prominent literary and cultural figures. Most of the poems were written in Arabic and translated by non-professionals.
Falkoff, who has a doctorate in literature, was intrigued when several of his clients began sending him poems. “I didn't think much of it,” he told me, “until I was reading a terrifically moving volume of poems called Here, Bullet by Brian Turner, an Iraq War vet. I started thinking about the power of topical poetry, and it occurred to me that the public should read the poetry that my clients wrote. I was curious if other lawyers had clients who'd written poetry, so I asked around and learned that there was a lot of it in their files. It hit me that we could pull a lot of this stuff together as a collection so the public could, yes, hear the voices of Guantánamo, and perhaps move [[beyond]] the administration's sloganeering.”
Falkoff won't be able to include all of the works he had hoped to, because the Pentagon has classified some of the poems. In a September 18, 2006 memo, a Pentagon official explained that several poems submitted for declassification had been rejected because poetry “presents a special risk” due to its “content and format.” It was not made clear whether the Pentagon believes the danger lies in the power of words or in the risk that detainees could send coded messages to terrorist operatives through their poems. “As much as I'd like to think it's the former, I presume it's the latter,” Falkoff replied when I asked him about the military's thinking on the matter.
Of the work that has been cleared for publication, Falkoff plans to include “Ode to the Sea” by Ibrahim al Rubaish (“Your beaches are sadness, captivity, pain and injustice whose bitterness eats away at patience/Your calm is death, and your sweeping is strange and a silence rises up from you, holding treachery in its fold”) and “Even if the Pain” by Saddiq Turkestani. The latter is one of nine ethnic Uighurs whom the Pentagon long ago determined not to be “enemy combatants” but continues to hold because they would likely be tortured and killed if sent home to China. The Bush Administration won't allow them into the United States, and no other government has volunteered to take them.
Several of the poets in the volume were released from Guantánamo after long periods of incarceration, without ever having been charged. They include the Moazzam Begg of Britain (“Freedom is spent, time is up/Tears have rent my sorrow's cup/Home is cage, and cage is steel/Thus manifest reality's unreal”) and Abdur Rahim Muslim Dost of Afghanistan (“Those who argue or reason unjustly and foolishly with Dost the Poet/They can't help to surrender or runaway”).
Dost's brother, Badruzzaman Badr, was also detained at Guantánamo and later freed (his work, too, will appear in the collection). Both men returned to their home in Peshawar, Pakistan, and last September published The Broken Shackles of Guantánamo, which describes their experiences there. The book is also critical of the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence agency, and its collaboration with the United States in the “war on terror.” On September 29 of last year, Dost was arrested as he left a local mosque; he has thus far not been charged but has been prevented from seeing an attorney or his family. His brother has reportedly gone into hiding.
By Ken Silverstein.
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