Poems from Guantanamo Read online

  “At last Guantánamo has found its voice.”–Gore Vidal

  poems from

  Guantánamo

  t h e d e t a i n e e s s p e a k

  m a r c f a l k o f f

  POEMS FROM GUANTÁNAMO

  University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242

  Copyright © 2007 by the University of Iowa Press

  Afterword copyright © 2007 by Ariel Dorfman

  www.uiowapress.org

  All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

  Design by Richard Hendel

  No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach.

  The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources.

  Printed on acid-free paper

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Poems from Guantánamo: the detainees speak / edited by Marc Falkoff; preface by Flagg Miller; afterword by Ariel Dorfman.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-58729-606-2—ISBN-10: 1-58729-606-3

  1. Prisoners’ writings, Arabic—Cuba—Guantánamo Bay Naval Base—

  Translations into English.

  2. Prisoners’ writings, Pushto—Cuba—

  Guantánamo Bay Naval Base—Translations into English.

  3. Arabic

  poetry—Translations into English.

  4. Pushto poetry—Translations

  into English.

  5. Guantánamo Bay Naval Base (Cuba)—Poetry.

  6. War

  on Terrorism, 2001– —Poetry.

  I. Falkoff, Marc.

  PJ7694.E3P56 2007

  892.7'170809729167—dc22

  2007007345

  For my friends inside the wire,

  Mahmoad, Majid, Yasein, Saeed,

  Abdulsalam, Mohammed, Adnan,

  Jamal, Othman, Adil, Mohamed,

  Abdulmalik, Aref, Sadeq, Farouk,

  Salman, and Makhtar.

  Inshallah, we will next meet over

  coffee in your homes in Yemen.

  M. F.

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments ix

  Notes on Guantánamo,

  an introduction by Marc Falkoff 1

  Forms of Suffering in Muslim Prison Poetry,

  a preface by Flagg Miller 7

  They Fight for Peace, Shaker Abdurraheem Aamer 19

  O Prison Darkness, Abdulaziz 21

  I Shall Not Complain, Abdulaziz 23

  To My Father, Abdullah Thani Faris al Anazi 24

  Lions in the Cage, Ustad Badruzzaman Badr 27

  Homeward Bound, Moazzam Begg 29

  Death Poem, Jumah al Dossari 31

  They Cannot Help, Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost 33

  Cup Poem 1, Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost 35

  Cup Poem 2, Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost 35

  Two Fragments, Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost 36

  First Poem of My Life, Mohammed el Gharani 37

  Humiliated in the Shackles, Sami al Haj 41

  The Truth, Emad Abdullah Hassan 44

  Is It True? Osama Abu Kabir 49

  Hunger Strike Poem, Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif 51

  I Am Sorry, My Brother, Othman Abdulraheem Mohammad 53

  Terrorist 2003, Martin Mubanga 55

  I Write My Hidden Longing,

  Abdulla Majid al Noaimi, the Captive of Dignity 58

  My Heart Was Wounded by the Strangeness,

  Abdulla Majid al Noaimi, the Captive of Dignity 61

  Ode to the Sea, Abdullah Thani Faris al Anazi 64

  Even if the Pain, Siddiq Turkestani 67

  Where the Buried Flame Burns,

  an afterword by Ariel Dorfman 69

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This collection would not exist if not for the efforts of the hundreds of volunteer lawyers, professors, paralegals, law stu-

  dents, and human rights advocates who have worked tirelessly

  to restore the rule of law to Guantánamo Bay. Before the law-

  yers began to open it up, Guantánamo was truly a “black hole”

  from which no information—and certainly not the voices of the

  detainees—could escape.

  In this regard, the leadership of the Center for Constitutional Rights has been particularly important. Long before major law

  firms joined the fold, CCR lawyers were spearheading efforts

  to mount habeas corpus challenges on behalf of the detainees.

  For more than five years, past and present CCR lawyers—in-

  cluding J. Wells Dixon, Tina Monshipour Foster, Bill Goodman,

  Gitanjali Gutierrez, Emi MacLean, Joseph Margulies, Barbara

  Olshansky, and Michael Ratner—have been instrumental in

  organizing the legal community’s response to Guantánamo.

  Collecting the poems in this volume required the assistance

  of many overworked habeas lawyers and was no easy task. Special thanks to my former colleagues at Covington & Burling—David Remes, Trisha Anderson, Eric Carlson, Jason Knott, Robert

  Knowles, Gregory Lipper, and Brent Starks—as well as to Pat

  Bronte, Louise Christian, Joshua Colangelo-Bryan, Douglas Cox,

  Buz Eisenberg, Neha Gohil, Sarah Havens, Zachary Katznel-

  son, Neil McGaraghan, Susan Baker Manning, Brent Mickum,

  Gareth Peirce, Anant Raut, Sylvia Royce, Amanda Shafer, Clive

  Stafford Smith, Scott Sullivan, Ian Wallach, Sabin Willet, and

  Elizabeth Wilson. Thanks also to the law students and legal

  assistants who have helped with the project, including Seema

  Ahmad, Jessica Baen, Alysha Beckwith, Elizabeth Braverman,

  Nicole Hillman, Susan Hu, Omolara Johnson, Alissa King,

  Christopher Lynch, Dan McLean, and Greg Welikson.

  ix

  Finally, a word of appreciation to the translators, who were frequently working under extraordinary conditions both at

  Guantánamo and in a “secure facility” in Virginia, where our

  clients’ letters and other classified materials are stored. They provided us with translations of our clients’ writings, often

  under tight deadlines and without access to the usual dictio-

  naries and other tools of the trade. Among them are Marwan

  Abdel-Rahman, Felice Bezri, Luna Droubi, Abu Jalal, Mahmoud

  Khatib, Flagg Miller, Khalid al Odah, Clive Stafford Smith, and Fuad Yahya.

  x

  A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

  POEMS FROM GUANTÁNAMO

  NOTES ON GUANTÁNAMO

  MARC FALKOFF

  The twenty-two poems in this volume were written by men held

  in the United States military detention center in Guantánamo

  Bay, Cuba. Like all the prisoners in Guantánamo, the poets are

  Muslim. A number have been released to their home countries,

  but most are enduring their sixth year of captivity in near-total isolation, imprisoned without charge, trial, or the most funda-mental protections of the Geneva Conventions. Their poems,

  all written “inside the wire,” were composed with little expectation of ever reaching an audience beyond a small circle of their fellow prisoners. But now that the poems have been declassi-fied and collected, they offer the world a unique opportunity to hear directly from the detainees themselves about
their time in America’s notorious prison camp.

  My colleagues and I—all volunteer lawyers—first visited

  Guantánamo in November 2004, after receiving “secret” level

  security clearances from the FBI. What we learned from our

  clients on that trip was shocking. During the three years in

  which they had been held in total isolation, they had been re-

  peatedly abused. They had been subjected to stress positions,

  sleep deprivation, blaring music, and extremes of heat and

  cold during endless interrogations. They had been sexually hu-

  miliated, their physical space invaded by female interrogators

  who taunted them, fully aware of the insult they were meting

  out to devout Muslims. They were denied basic medical care.

  They were broken down and psychologically tyrannized, kept

  in extreme isolation, threatened with rendition, interrogated

  at gunpoint, and told that their families would be harmed if

  they refused to talk. They were also frequently prevented from

  engaging in their daily prayers (one of the five pillars of Islam) and forced to witness American soldiers intentionally mishan-dling the holy Qur’an.

  1

  At first, there was little we could do with this information.

  Anything our clients told us, the military explained, represented a potential national security threat and therefore could not be revealed to the public until cleared by a Pentagon “Privilege Review Team.” The review team, in turn, initially used its power

  to suppress all evidence of abuse and mistreatment. Our notes,

  returned with a “classified” stamp, were deemed unsuitable for

  public release on the grounds that they revealed interrogation

  techniques that the military had a legitimate interest in keep-

  ing secret. Only when threats of litigation forced the Pentagon to reconsider its classification decisions did the public finally begin to hear, albeit in a mediated way, from the detainees

  themselves.

  This volume represents another step in our struggle to allow

  our clients’ voices to be heard. In truth, it is something of a miracle that the collection—or the poetry that comprises it—

  even exists. The psychic toll that Guantánamo has taken on the

  detainees is unfathomable. They remain entirely isolated from

  the rest of the world, kept ignorant of all current events. All references to contemporary world events are excised from the

  occasional letters they are allowed to receive from family mem-

  bers, and their lawyers may not tell them any personal or gen-

  eral news unless it directly relates—an arbitrary standard, to be sure—to their cases. It is difficult to see how hope can flourish in such an environment, where the only contact with the outside world is an occasional visit from a lawyer or an infrequent and heavily censored letter from a relative. Indeed, dozens of

  prisoners have attempted suicide by hanging, by hoarding and

  then overdosing on medicine, or by slashing their wrists. (The

  military, in truly Orwellian fashion, has described these sui-

  cide attempts as incidents of “manipulative self-injurious be-

  havior.” When three detainees successfully killed themselves in June 2006, the military called the suicides acts of “asymmetric warfare.”)¹

  2

  N O T E S O N G U A N T Á N A M O

  Many men at Guantánamo turned to writing poetry as a way to maintain their sanity, to memorialize their suffering, and to preserve their humanity through acts of creation. Confined indefinitely without any meaningful judicial oversight, they fol-

  low in the footsteps of prisoners who wrote in the Gulag, the

  Nazi concentration camps, and, closer to home, the Japanese

  American internment camps.

  The obstacles they have faced in composing their poems are

  profound. In the first year of their detention, many of the de-

  tainees were not allowed regular use of pen and paper. Unde-

  terred, some would draft short poems on Styrofoam cups they

  had retrieved from their lunch and dinner trays. Lacking writ-

  ing instruments, they would inscribe their words with pebbles

  or trace out letters with small dabs of toothpaste, then pass

  the “cup poems” from cell to cell. The cups would inevitably

  be collected with the day’s trash, the poetic inscriptions con-

  signed to the bottom of a rubbish bin. Two of these poems—by

  Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost, a Pakistani poet who was

  released from Guantánamo in April 2005—were reconstructed

  from memory and are included in this collection.

  After about a year, the military granted the detainees access

  to regular writing materials, and for the first time they could preserve their poems beyond the end of a meal. The first poem

  I saw was sent to me by Abdulsalam Ali Abdulrahman Al-Hela,

  who had written his verses in Arabic after spending extended

  periods in an isolation cell. The poem is a moving cry about the injustice of arbitrary detention and a hymn to the comforts of

  religious faith. Soon after I read it, I learned that Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif—another of our clients who has been mercilessly

  abused while in Guantánamo—had composed a poem of his

  own called “The Shout of Death.” (I cannot comment more on

  these poems, because the Pentagon has refused to clear them

  for public inspection.) After querying other lawyers, I learned that Guantánamo was filled with amateur poets.

  N O T E S O N G U A N T Á N A M O

  3

  Many of the poems I have seen address aspects of the men’s detention experiences, laying bare their anger at the pain and

  humiliation they have suffered at the hands of the United States military. Other poems reveal a sense of betrayal and disbelief

  that Americans—the “protectors of peace,” in the words of

  poet Jumah al Dossari—would deny the detainees even the

  semblance of justice. But all the poems attest to the humanity

  of these men, who have been vilified by our government as “the

  worst of the worst” evildoers on the planet. The administra-

  tion’s sloganeering has effectively disguised the fact that, according to the military’s own documents, only eight percent

  of the detainees are even accused of being al Qaeda fighters,

  only five percent were captured by United States forces on the

  battlefields of Afghanistan, and fewer than half are accused of committing a hostile act against the United States.²

  As a consequence of the restrictive context in which this

  volume was assembled, the collection inevitably suffers from

  some flaws. It is not a complete portrait of the poetry com-

  posed at Guantánamo, largely because many of the detainees’

  poems were destroyed or confiscated before they could be

  shared with the authors’ lawyers. The military, for instance,

  confiscated nearly all twenty-five thousand lines of poetry composed by Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost, returning to him

  only a handful upon his release from Guantánamo. “Why did

  they give me a pen and paper if they were planning to do that?”

  Dost asked a reporter after his release. “Each word was like a

  child to me—irreplaceable.”

  In addition, the Pentagon refuses to allow most of the de-

  tainees’ poems to be made public, arguing that poetry “presents a special risk” to national security because of its “content and format.” The fear appears to be that the detainees will try to
r />   smuggle coded messages out of the prison camp. Hundreds

  of poems therefore remain suppressed by the military and

  will likely never be seen by the public. In addition, most of the 4

  N O T E S O N G U A N T Á N A M O

  poems that have been cleared are in English translation only, because the Pentagon believes that their original Arabic or Pashto versions represent an enhanced security risk. Because only lin-guists with secret-level security clearances are allowed to read our clients’ communications (which are kept by court order in a secure facility in the Washington, D.C., area) it was impossible to invite experts to translate the poems for us. The translations that we have included here, therefore, cannot do justice to the subtlety and cadence of the originals.

  Despite these and many other hurdles, this book has now

  been published. Representative voices of the detainees may

  now be heard by more than the lawyers who are fighting on

  their behalf. As the courts move sluggishly toward granting

  the detainees fair and open hearings, and as politicians bicker about whether to extend Geneva Conventions protections to

  the detainees, the detainees’ own words may now become part

  of the dialogue. Perhaps their poems will prick the conscience

  of a nation.

  NOTES

  1. There have been dozens of press accounts documenting suicide attempts such as these. See, for example, “Detainees Attempted to Hang Selves,” Boston Globe, January 25, 2005, which cites military documents released through the Freedom of Information Act. After thirty-two such attempts, the military began to reclassify them in September 2003.

  2. See Mark Denbeaux and Joshua W. Denbeaux, “Report on Guantá-

  namo Detainees: A Profile of 517 Detainees through Analysis of Depart-ment of Defense Data,” Seton Hall Public Law Research Paper no. 46, www.cfr.org/publications/9838, accessed February 14, 2007.

  N O T E S O N G U A N T Á N A M O

  5

  ​forms​of​sufferinG​in​​

  ​muslim​Prison​Poetry

  Flagg MIllEr

  Poetry is born of suffering, as an old Arabic saying goes. Ara-

  bic poetry—or shi` r—is also held to be a vessel of insight and perception, one whose rhythms are attuned less to measured

  thoughts than to wellsprings of raw human feeling, shu` uur. In

  “Ode to the Sea,” Abdullah Thani Faris al Anazi draws upon a