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Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak

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It must be said at the outset that there are no great poems in this collection. Some are not even good, as poetry goes. But who would judge the poetic attempts of children in a hospital? The same sort of sympathy must apply to poems composed in solitary confinement. The publisher could have printed the bars of a cage over each one, for each bears the imprint of prolonged and tormenting isolation. None can be read as a purely artistic composition, without an awareness of the author's biography and suffering. Linguist Flagg Miller, in an analytical preface, relates these works to traditions in Arabic poetry, which is enlightening, but concludes that aside from rhyming couplets they have little in common with formal conventions. Likewise, they do not fall into the category of political or jihadist verse. Rather, they strike a popular and universal chord as cries from the heart, arranged in separate lines. They might simply be called poetical statements.

The analogy with children is not too far wrong, for all of these poets by necessity have been reduced to the most basic wants and desires. Some were poets before their arrest, others not. The translations in English tend to even them out, so that, with one or two exceptions, it appears that all of the poems were written by the same man, a generic man, maybe an Everyman of the Muslim world. This man wants to see his loved ones, to see God's--or Allah's--justice restored, to see--as poet Ariel Dorfman notes in his Afterword--the ocean, which he can smell in his tiger cage and hear roaring out of sight every day. (Think of it: it would drive you mad.) Above all, the "detainee" in "Gitmo," like every other long-term prisoner, wants to step out and breathe the free air, to stop being shackled and confined, to stop being tormented.

One of the poems, "First Poem of My Life," by Mohammed El Gharani, arrested at age 14, tortured by both Pakastani and American soldiers, and confined at Guantanamo since 2002, was obtained and translated by pro-bono lawyer and editor Marc Falkoff, who supplies three notes on the original. These notes are sufficient to indicate untold richness in the Arabic, especially word associations which cannot be converted into English. Possibly the other poems as well were written on a higher level than would appear at first sight. As Falkoff explains in his Preface, the Pentagon feared that releasing original texts would endanger national security, presumably because the Arabic could contain hidden messages. This ruling pertained to couplets written in toothpaste or etched with a pebble on a styrofoam cup. Only government linguists with high-level security clearance were permitted to see and translate the hundreds of poems composed at Guantanamo, and of these only a tiny fraction were declassified and released to the prisoners' insistent lawyers. Other poems were reconstructed from memory by the lucky few who were released.

The result is a book consisting of 22 poems written by 17 prisoners. For the most part, one author is represented by one poem. The "First Poem," mentioned above, tells a story: "They surrounded the mosque, weapons drawn,/ As if they were in a field of war./ 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." Adnan Latif's "Hunger Strike Poem," featured in the Fall 2007 issue of Amnesty International, protests: "They are artists of torture,/ They are artists of pain and fatigue,/ They are artists of insults and humiliation." Jumah Al Dossari's "Death Poem" advises his tormentors to "Take my blood./ Take my death shroud and/ The remanants of my body./ Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely." He wants these sent to "the judges and people of conscience," who must "bear the burden, before their children and before history,/ Of this wasted, sinless soul."

We, the readers, are the judges and people of conscience, who must wonder how the US military authorities, holding a man in absolute confinement and isolation for five years, have been unable to determine whether he is innocent or guilty of anything and should or should not be brought to trial. What they have determined, as Falkoff reports in his preface, is that they are able to accuse fewer than half of the total 775 detainees of committing any hostile act against the United States, a mere eight percent of being members of Al Qaida and a mere five percent of being on the battlefield in Afghanistan. That means that probably eighty percent or more were wrongly arrested or sold out by others for a bounty. The whole thing is a violation of international law, American democracy and human decency. This book is only one of those that will reveal the US national disgrace in the years to come.

The University of Iowa Press is to be highly commended for making this collection available to the world, but I have a small quibble. In a volume of 75 pages there is no reason to print texts in 9 and 10-point type. Miniscule may look chic, but these poems are not dainty and should be printed in standard 11-point or even 12-point type. Let the words released from prison be seen!'

THis book is incredibly powerful. Having listened to Robert Pinsky's hesitant, almost apologetic interview about it on NPR's "The World," I was unprepared for the power of the real thing. It is really great, but hard to read. The poem by the 14 year old, the first poem he ever wrote, is heartbreaking. Falkoff, Miller and Dorfman, as well as the U of Iowa Press, are to be congratulated for this amazing, eye-opening service to both the prisoners and the mostly-numbed-out American public.

Although this book is short, it's an incredible glimpse into the thoughts of these prisoners. They had to go through so much and to hear their words is a gift from them. I felt like they were nearly robbed of their voices, but broke through that barrier with their poems. I read from this book recently at an Open Mic Night, and I am so glad that I could use their words to create a greater awareness about what happened to them.

WITH NOTHING at his disposal but a Styrofoam cup and a pebble, the celebrated Pakistani poet Shaik Abdurraheem Muslim Dost wrote poems that passed from cell to cell, lifting the hearts of the prisoners who read its lines.

He wrote in the voice of a son of a detainee:

Eid [Muslim feast] has come, but my father has not
He is not come from Cuba.
I am eating the bread of Eid with my tears.
I have nothing.
Why am I deprived of the love of my father?
Why am I so oppressed?

Dost was released from the now-notorious, high-security U.S. prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in 2005 without being charged with anything. For four hellish years, he languished in what has become a void in the world of international law.

The first prisoners of the U.S. "war on terror" were brought to the Guantánamo prison in 2002. Since then, more than 750 Muslim men and boys (ranging in ages from 14 to 80) from 40 different countries have passed through the prison camp.

Classified as "enemy combatants"--rather than "prisoners of war," which would confer upon them basic rights under the Geneva Conventions--the inmates of Guantánamo live in a legal limbo. They have no right to challenge their detentions in court; they have no legal protections against torture in interrogations; they aren't allowed to know the crime of which they are accused; their cases are heard in secret military tribunals without legal counsel; and they can be held indefinitely without cause.

President George Bush justifies their detention by claiming they are "the worst of the worst." Yet, in the five years of the camp's existence, only 10 detainees have been charged with any crime, 395 have been released and, according to the military's admission, over half are not suspected of committing any violent acts whatsoever.

For five years, these men have been prevented from uttering even a peep that could be heard by the world outside the prison camp. Until now.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

IN POEMS from Guantánamo, the poetry of 17 different inmates have been collected and published for the world to read. They have been translated from their original Arabic and represent the select few poems that made it through a grueling Department of Defense screening, in which hundreds were censored.

Originally, the works in the collection were written by inmates for one other, for themselves or for their lawyers. Most of them never supposed their poetry would ever reach a wider audience, as many of their poems were confiscated by prison guards and destroyed. As the poets would later explain, they wrote simply to maintain their sanity in otherwise desperate conditions.

Starting from this isolated framework, the poetry has a personal, almost confessional, intimacy and beauty. Ranging a broad spectrum of tone and content, the poems display the true variety of humanity imprisoned at Guantánamo.

Some of the poems find solace in deeply held religious conviction. Others express the heightened emotional state of intense loneliness, homesickness, fear and hope. Others rage at U.S. hypocrisy and the oppression of injustice.

One of the poets, Moazzam Begg, was one of a number of British citizens held in Guantánamo. He spent three years there before being released in 2005. In his poem, "Homeward Bound," he expresses the feeling that all detainees face in trying to cope with the reality of their imprisonment: "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."

Jumah al Dossari is a Bahraini citizen who has been held at Guantánamo for five years. Four of those years were spent in solitary confinement. He has attempted suicide 12 times. He writes:

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.

After long periods of seclusion and powerlessness, it's natural for a person to begin to assign human agency to nature or inanimate objects. In one of the more beautiful poems in the collection, Ibrahim al Rubaish attempts to win the sympathy of the sea away from his captors:

O Sea, do our chains offend you?
It is only under compulsion that we daily come and go.
Do you know our sins?
Do you understand we were cast into this gloom?
O Sea, you taunt us in our captivity.
You have colluded with our enemies and you cruelly guard us.
Don't the rocks tell you of the crimes committed in their midst?
Doesn't Cuba, the vanquished, translate its stories for you?
You have been beside us for three years, and what have you gained?
Boats of poetry on the sea; a buried flame in a burning heart.

Some critics have questioned the extent to which this collection of poems constitutes "art" as opposed to "propaganda." But one need not do more than open the book to any random page and read the chance selection to see such accusations as baseless prejudice.

Nonetheless, this work is inherently more than art. It is unavoidably political in that it expresses the humanity of a group of people who the most powerful government in the world wants to be depicted as anything but.

It is in this regard that the editor of the anthology, Marc Falkoff, says of the detainees' writings, "perhaps their poems will prick the conscience of a nation." We should only hope so.

[...]

While "Poems" isn't something I'd ordinarily pick up for light reading or outside of a classroom assignment, there was something oddly compelling and universal about the poems contained here. Granted, most people will not want to read this collection solely based on who created it, but that is their loss. I expected to hear nothing but anti-American and anti-Western rants but instead came to see a familiarity with other prisoner created poetry. Most of the poems here are laments to loss of freedoms, which at times can be quite moving. There is certainly anger and animosity, some of it directed both specifically and vaguely. None of these are what I would call great works of poetry, but then again I'm neither a poet nor a literary critic, so I'll leave that to the professionals. They are more memorable for the emotions they evoke and what they have to say than for how they are said, which is the hallmark of poetry. If you believe the detainees represent a clear and present danger to Western Society, then there's little here that will change your mind. In fact it's doubtful you'd pick this up in the first place or if you did it would re-enforce your beliefs that they should be detained indefinitely. Thinking of the target market for "Poems" it is clearly for people of conscience who believe that anyone falsely imprisoned and detained their rights should be freed. For them "Poems" is a must have and a rallying cry for why these detainees should be released.

In the push to strip these detainees of their humanity "Poems" seeks to return some of that to them. The poems are grouped by their author, along with a thumbnail sketch of who they are, where they were captured, and other details and facts about them, that certainly is done to reconstruct some degree of their identity and humanity. And that ultimately is the point of "Poems." Rather than becoming faceless nameless numbers warehoused at Guantanamo, they regain some semblance of their humanity here. Granted, some will criticize that these poems got out or complain that these detainees are somehow profiting off their terroristic acts or using "Poems" as propaganda. I can't speak to the veracity of any of that or to the artistic merit of the poetry. What I can say is that the poetry contained here showed universality with prisoners of many different places and ages, and that it helped to humanize the detainees. That said, there's little here that will affirm your faith in humanity or give you a warm fuzzy feeling.

very beautiful...Most honest and captivating poems I have ever read. very good that someone published such raw work..

Poems from Guantanamo should be required reading in high schools. Students need to read the effects of this administrations policy on human lives. When the history books are written, this country will have to apologize for creating a concentration camp with dehumanizing and life-crushing strategies. The poems are simple, clear, heartrending. No self-pity, no lashing out. They have historical merit for their culture and ours.

...as if that's really possible with this book, but oh well.

Having read extensive amounts of Arabic and Persian poetry, I feel comfortable dismissing this without riling my political beliefs and I encourage other potential buyers to ask themselves what they are looking for in this book. Do you want to change the policies at Gitmo, or shut it down? You have a vote and a right to assembly (and maybe some extra cash to toss towards your preferred party); use them.

This is terrible poetry, and it's terrible that the contents are being passed off as remotely poetic. Regardless of your position on the detainees in Guantanamo--some of whom no doubt do belong there, some of whom no doubt do not--and their treatment, it is poetry that is being detained unfairly here, and the whole field of poetics that is suffering torturous abuse.

And I hate to throw a wet blanket on the fiery who's-innocent-who's-guilty debate going on here, but the simple truth is, we, the readers, don't know (it appears our government doesn't really, either, but, again, vote and assembly, see above). I would never presume an inmate guilty without trial, but I see no reason to presume his verse honest. Especially given the low-quality of the contents, it does not take a leap of the imagination to see why any inmate would quickly scratch on the side of a cup and toss it to a lawyer to try and improve his position. There are abysmal conditions in our continental prisons, too--containing our own citizens. Toss everyone a styrofoam cup and a toothpick, tell them that you want to collect verses for a book to try and free them, and every murderer, rapist, and cocaine dealer will come up with something just as impassioned as the framed or racially targeted prisoners who truly don't deserve their sentence. Is that really to be called poetry?

This is not poetry. It's a political agenda chopped up into lines. Another reviewer has remarked that an opposite-extreme equivalent to this would be a series of Pentagon poems, and I think that'd be a great idea--so that we can decry that as a waste of time as well and everyone can feel equally irate while those of us who extract joy in honest verse can all feel doubly cheated.

As it is, this book hurts its cause more than advancing it. If they wanted to use these writings effectively, they should have embedded them within an essay or an expose, not offered them as standalone poems--they lack the strength to stand alone. Context alone has never been a strong enough pair of legs to carry any art form far along time's path--and for those that want a lasting stamp of American indecency to warn and instruct future generations, this will not be it.

By failing on any poetic terms, Poems From Guantanamo muddles its already murky message and threatens to push an already unjustly disinterested America into the realms of disdain where we pick up the remote and change the channel.


**As an aside, I take particular offense at the editor's incessant jabs at the Pentagon and Defense Department for withholding or censoring poems for security reasons--an excuse Mr. Falkoff balks at with incredulity. This shows an ignorance of military and poetic history that is not too surprising given the shallow credentials (if not well-intentioned aims) of the editorial staff. Poetry has a long-storied tradition of containing military codes and instruction, dating back (at least, as far as I know) to the Greeks and seeing extensive use as recently as the secret services during and after WWII.

The current state of poetry can be deduced from the fact that one of the most talked-about collections in recent times was borne of a marriage between terrorists and lawyers. "Poems from Guantanamo" is a slight book containing 22 "poems" authored by detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The majority of the pages, however, comprise the accompanying introductory materials, biographies, and an afterward, which were written by others in an attempt to supply an aura of gravitas to the whole affair and to indicate the reason these poems were published at all, and the specific agenda of those responsible for it.

The Acknowledgements page is telling. This collection of poetry, we are told, would not exist were it not for the efforts of "hundreds of volunteer lawyers." The bulk of the page is a recitation of the names of many of those counselors. As an afterthought, a short list of translators is provided at the end.

The Introduction by Marc Falkoff, a lawyer representing a number of the detainees, portrays them in devout religious terms, never once uttering the word "terrorist." But these people didn't find their way to Gitmo because they spent all their time in mosques praying for the welfare of people of all faiths. He outrageously compares the Gitmo detainees with the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag. Most of the verses composed at Gitmo have not been released by the Pentagon, apparently for fear that they might contain secret messages. Falkoff admits the translators are not experts and that the translations "cannot do justice to the subtlety and cadence of the originals," he writes, but when we look at the wretched poems themselves, Falkoff's suggestion that they possess a superior quality in the original becomes ludicrous. It's an absurdity only an advocate for terrorists would think to spout. He paints the Pentagon as an evil entity censoring many of the poems which still remain classified, but even so, "Representative voices of the detainees may now be heard."

But before we see the literary output of the terrorists, we are confronted with another introductory piece, a Preface by Flagg Miller, who is described as a "linguist and cultural anthropologist." Miller constructs a history of Muslims who responded to oppression with poetry, and places the detainees in that long tradition, but the Gitmo detainees are not oppressed without cause; they are terrorists and deserve incarceration. Many who were released subsequently resumed their terrorist activities. This alone guarantees a risk that any future detainees who are released would do the same. Few countries will accept any of the detainees: who wants terrorists in their midst? And since there is no legal smoking gun for some of them, affording them legal due process risks acquittals and setting free the likes of Khalid Sheikh Muhammad (no poetry of his in this volume--perhaps the Pentagon has it).

One is left to wonder what poetry the victims of 9/11 would have written, if they had had the time, as they jumped from the Twin Towers, or as they smashed into the Pentagon. The Gitmo poets surely approved of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Perhaps they wrote a few lauding the 9/11 terrorists. Only the Pentagon censors know for sure.

As for the poems, they all have a banal sameness about them, leading me to conclude that we can speak of a Gitmo School of Poetry. The distinguishing features of which are: a profession of innocence, their captors are the criminals, anger at infidels, belief in Islam, Allah will one day destroy their oppressors, threats of revenge, no mention of 9/11 or Al Qaeda, absence of remorse or any sort of mea culpa, and a total lack of any poetic talent whatsoever. There is nothing unique here and little in the way of personalities. Any sad person or any inmate at any prison could have written some of the poems. The entire collection can rightly be dismissed as worthless. This book wasn't published because someone thought the poetry possesses any intrinsic value. Perhaps we will see a future college course on the Gitmo School of Poetry coming soon to the University of Iowa English Literature studies department, as well as many other like-minded colleges? It's doubtful we will see the University of Iowa Press publish a volume called "Poems from the Pentagon."

Reading through the poems, one feels like a beggar rummaging through a garbage can looking for a diamond but finding nothing but rotten tomatoes. The entire enterprise--from the words carved in cups or written on paper, to the translation, to the editing, to the publication--is a complete fraud. This book was published to serve as a political tool as part of an ongoing effort by anti-war activists to shut down the Gitmo prison. Falkoff and the others believe the detainees are innocent of any crime--or that there isn't enough evidence to convict them in a US court of law. So this book portrays them as the opposite of what they are: innocent poets who were somehow in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sympathy for terrorists and terrorist-wannabes is the order of the day. They're poets! Political prisoners! Let's turn reality on its head and see who gets dizzy.

It would be a nice touch if one of the Gitmo Poets wins the Nobel Prize for Literature based on the "strength" of his poems in this volume. The Nobel committee is in the habit of handing out its awards based on politics, and this book fits their bill. Falkoff and his cohorts have apparently won the propaganda battle, as the US government and military seek to close Gitmo due to its unsavory reputation, as detailed in the world news media. We're a long way from poetry but so is this book.

Here is MY pome that I wrote about how bad Bush is. Here it is.

=====

Oh Bush, you are so bad
And U look like a chimp..
And you stoled the election
and you are like a pimp.
With you're blood for oil
and Hallibardton too
and Chaney is evil
and so are you to.

====

That is the poem that I wrote that is about Bush and how bad he is.

And I read about the detanees in Guantanimo in this book. Where they are torchered. And the innosent Muslem victim's of American there write poems too. And here is one to of the pomes from this book of pomes that I red. Here it is, but it is not MY pome.

===

America sucks, America chills,
While d'blood of d'Muslims is forever getting spilled ...
American justice, American pigs,
American soldiers, American wigs.
Yes I'm feeling angry, yes I'm feeling pissed,
An' it's about time that the JIF got dissed.

===

Its not as good as my good pom, but it is a good poem too. And here is another good poem from the torture victims of American at "Guitmo."

===

I have observed the youths of Mohammed
What splendid, righteous young men they are!

Bush, beware.
The world recognizes an arrogant liar!

===

That is so good. I like the exclamaton piont.! So here is another poem of mine!

===

I did watch the kids of Islam!
They are such grandeloquant, sanctimonious guys!!

Look out? Tough guy!!!
The Cosmoes observes a hauty disembler!!!

===

I will send it to the new York review of Books!

J