From Never In Our Names.
Just as the heart beats in the darkness of the body,
so I, despite this cage, continue to beat with life.
Those who have no courage or honor consider themselves free,
but they are slaves.
I am flying on the wings of thought, and so,
even in this cage, I know a greater freedom.
Written - well, actually scratched onto a styrofoam cup using his fingernails, by Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost. Mr. Dost is an Afghani national who was released from Guantánamo in April 2006, after three years of illegal imprisonment.
Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak will be published this fall by the University of Iowa Press.
"Poetry was our support and psychological uplift," said his brother and fellow Guantanamo inmate, Badruzamman Badr, in an interview at the family home in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, where they have lived as expatriates since 1975. "Many people have lost their minds there. I know 40 or 50 prisoners who are mad. But we took refuge in our minds."
Source: SFGate.com.
Poetry's capacity to rattle governments is not exempt from a democracy. A collection of poems by detainees at the US military base in Guantánamo Bay is to be published later this year, but only in the face of strong opposition by suspicious American censors.
Twenty-one poems written "inside the wire" in Arabic, Pashto and English have been gathered together despite formidable obstacles by Marc Falkoff, a law professor at Northern Illinois University who represents 17 of the detainees at the camp.
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."
Source: Harpers.
According to the poet Jack Mapanje, who was imprisoned in Malawi because of his writing and now teaches a course on the poetry of incarceration at Newcastle University, prisoners often turn to writing poetry as a way of "defending themselves".
"People are writing as a search for the dignity that has been taken away from them," he says. "It's the only way they can attempt to restore it, but nobody is listening to them." He was imprisoned himself with many people who were illiterate, he says, but many of them were writing poetry, or singing songs about their captivity - "it's the same impulse that drives people to prayer."
At first, deprived of paper and pen, Dost memorised his best lines or scribbled them secretly on paper cups. He recited a verse:
"What kind of spring is this where there are no flowers and the air is filled with a miserable smell?"
This is Juma Al Dossari. Mr. Al Dossari is a Bahraini national. He is 33 years old and is currently held in the American prison for security detainees, Camp Delta, at the US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay. He has been imprisoned for over five years now due to an outdated FBI report which stated concerns that he might have "ties" to the so-called Lackawanna Six. Defense counsel for Mr. Al Dossari have steadfastly denied any knowledge at all on. Mr. Al Dossari's part.
The Buffalo Six (also known as Lackawanna Six, Lakawanna Cell, or Buffalo Cell) is a group of six Yemeni-Americans who were convicted of providing material support to al-Qaeda. The six are American citizens by birth.
By all accounts I've found, Mr. Al Dossari has never provided a shred of evidence of intelligence to the United States. He's not even considered an "intelligence target," let alone a high value target.
But the question must be asked. What has the U.S. given Mr. Al Dossari in the past five years? And of course the answer to that is torture. Mr. Al Dossari has suffered severe beatings, been burned with cigarettes, been made to walk on barbed wire, shackled, put in stress positions, held in isolation and more. These aren't allegations of torture. There is documentation by videotape and in the form of witness statements. A letter written Mr. Al Dossari corroborates detail:
Until very recently, I had never heard his name. Anyone else? I will remember Mr. Al Dossari and I hope that you will, too.
Excerpt from a letter written by Juma Al Dossari.
Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba - I AM WRITING from the darkness of the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo in the hope that I can make our voices heard by the world. My hand quivers as I hold the pen. At Guantanamo, soldiers have assaulted me, placed me in solitary confinement, threatened to kill me, threatened to kill my daughter and told me I will stay in Cuba for the rest of my life.
What I write here is not what my imagination fancies or my insanity dictates. These are verifiable facts witnessed by other detainees, representatives of the Red Cross, interrogators and translators.
From The Wasteland: The 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."
I know that the soldiers who did bad things to me represent themselves, not the United States. And I have to say that not all American soldiers stationed in Cuba tortured us or mistreated us. There were soldiers who treated us very humanely. Some even cried when they witnessed our dire conditions. Once, in Camp Delta, a soldier apologized to me and offered me hot chocolate and cookies. When I thanked him, he said, "I do not need you to thank me." I include this because I do not want readers to think that I fault all Americans.
But, why, after five years, is there no conclusion to the situation at Guantanamo? I would rather die than stay here forever, and I have tried to commit suicide many times. The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed. I am hopeless because our voices are not heard from the depths of the detention center.
If I die, please remember that there was a human being named Juma at Guantanamo whose beliefs, dignity and humanity were abused. Please remember that there are hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo suffering the same misfortune. They have not been charged with any crimes. They have not been accused of taking any action against the United States. Show the world the letters I gave you. Let the world read them. Let the world know the agony of the detainees in Cuba.
To the judges, to the people of conscience, will you bear witness? Will you remember?