Inmates’ Words: The Poems of Guantanamo
The publication of an anthology of works, composed on paper cups by detainees, provides a harrowing insight into the torments and fading hopes of prisoners.
The words of the celebrated Pakistani poet were scratched on the sides of a Styrofoam cup with a pebble. Then, under the eyes of Guantanamo Bay’s prison guards, they were secretly passed from cell to cell. When the guards discovered what was going on, they smashed the containers and threw them away, fearing that it was a way of passing coded messages.
Fragments of these “cup poems” survived, however, and are included in an 84-page anthology entitled Poems from Guantanamo: the Detainees Speak, to be published later this year by the University of Iowa Press.
The verses provide a harrowing insight into the torments and fading hopes of the prisoners. Only two Guantanamo inmates have been charged with a crime.
They were brought to light by Marc Falkoff, a US professor of law with a doctorate in American literature. He represents 17 Yemeni inmates and has made 10 visits to Guantanamo. He dedicates the book to “my friends inside the wire”.
In the summer of 2005 Professor Falkoff was sent two poems from his clients. Written in Arabic, they were included in letters they could legally send. Because all communication with the detainees is deemed a potential threat to national security, everything - letters, interview notes, legal documents - must be sealed and sent to a US intelligence facility for review. The two poems were deemed a potential risk and remain classified to this day.
Professor Falkoff contacted other lawyers and discovered that several had received poems from their clients. Other detainees, like the two released Britons, Moazzam Begg and Martin Mubanga, wrote poetry while in prison and brought them with them on their release.
Censorship remains absolute at the camp however. As far as the US military is concerned: “poetry … presents a special risk, and DoD [Department of Defence] standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language”. The fear, officers say, is that allegorical imagery in poetry may be used to convey coded messages to militants outside.
That is scoffed at by Professor Falkoff. “These are the same military censors who in 2004 tried to stop me receiving allegations of abusive treatment of my clients who were being subjected to intense heat and cold and forced to remain standing.” He added: “If the inmates were writing words like ‘the Eagle flies at dawn,’ the censors might have a case, but they are not. I fully accept their right to stop any coded messages to militants outside. But what the military fears is not so much the possibility of secret messages being communicated, but the power of words to make people outside realise that these are human beings who have not had their day in court.”
The thoughts of the inmates are considered so potentially dangerous by the US military that they are not even trusted with pen and paper. The only exception is an occasional 10-minute period when they are allowed to write to their families via the International Red Cross. Even then the words they write are heavily censored.
The 380 or so inmates of Guantanamo include some avowed Islamic militants and al-Qa’ida fighters. But the majority are there because they were swept up by the police and intelligence services of other countries working on behalf of the US. In their despair many of these detainees have turned to verse to express their innermost feelings.
Others have attempted or committed suicide. One of the poets is a Bahraini man who has been held in solitary confinement since the end of 2003. He has tried to kill himself 12 times while in the prison. On one occasion, he was found by his lawyer, hanging by his neck and bleeding from a gash to his arm.
There are other tragic tales behind the verses. The “cup poems” of Guantanamo speak of the strange absence of flowers in spring, the bangles worn by young women and handcuffs on the militants.
Fragments survived in the memory of the poet Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost after his eventual release, but thousands of lines of poetry he wrote in prison have disappeared.
Dost, a respected religious scholar, poet, and journalist - and author of nearly 20 books - until his arrest in 2001, spent nearly three years in Guantanamo with his brother. Sent home two years ago, the brothers were picked up by Pakistani intelligence and they too disappeared. Nothing has been heard of them since.
Aami al Haj, a Sudanese national, was a journalist covering the war in Afghanistan for al-Jazeera television, when, in 2001, he was arrested stripped of his passport and press card and handed over to US forces. He was tortured at both Bagram air base and Kandahar before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay. The US military says he was a financial courier for Chechen rebels and that he assisted al-Qa’ida but has offered no evidence to support the claims.
“When I heard pigeons cooing in the trees, Hot tears covered my face,” he wrote from his prison cell. “They have monuments to liberty And freedom of opinion, which is well and good. But I explained to them, that Architecture is not justice.”
THE POEMS
Humiliated In The Shackles
by Sami al HajjWhen I heard pigeons cooing in the trees,
Hot tears covered my face.
When the lark chirped, my thoughts composed
A message for my son.
Mohammad, I am afflicted.
In my despair, I have no one but Allah for comfort.
The oppressors are playing with me,
As they move freely around the world.
They ask me to spy on my countrymen,
Claiming it would be a good deed.
They offer me money and land,
And freedom to go where I please.
Their temptations seize
My attention like lightning in the sky.
But their gift is an empty snake,
Carrying hypocrisy in its mouth like venom,
They have monuments to liberty
And freedom of opinion, which is well and good.
But I explained to them that
Architecture is not justice.
America, you ride on the backs of orphans,
And terrorize them daily.
Bush, beware.
The world recognizes an arrogant liar.
To Allah I direct my grievance and my tears.
I am homesick and oppressed.
Mohammad, do not forget me.
Support the cause of your father, a God-fearing man.
I was humiliated in the shackles.
How can I now compose verses? How can I now write?
After the shackles and the nights and the suffering and the tears,
How can I write poetry?
My soul is like a roiling sea, stirred by anguish,
Violent with passion.
I am a captive, but the crimes are my captors’.
I am overwhelmed with apprehension.
Lord, unite me with my son Mohammad.
Lord, grant success to the righteous.
An Al-Jazeera cameraman, Sami al Hajj, a Sudanese, was visiting his brother in Damascus after the 11 September attacks when he got a call asking him to go to Pakistan to cover the impending war in Afghanistan. Instead, he ended up in Guantanamo where he claims he has been severely and regularly beaten, scarring his face.
Death Poem
by Jumah al DossariTake 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”.
Arrested in Pakistan and held in solitary confinement since 2003, Jumah al Dossari’s mental wellbeing is worrying his lawyers. The 33-year old Bahraini national has tried to kill himself 12 times since his incarceration in Guantanamo. On one visit, his lawyer found him hanging in a bedsheet noose, with a deep gash in one wrist. In a letter Mr Dossari wrote in 2005, he said: “The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people and I have been destroyed.”
Is It True?
by Osama Abu KadirIs it true that the grass grows again after rain?
Is it true that the flowers will rise up again in the Spring?
Is it true that birds will migrate home again?
Is it true that the salmon swim back up their streams?
It is true. This is true. These are all miracles.
But is it true that one day we’ll leave Guantanamo Bay?
Is it true that one day we’ll go back to our homes?
I sail in my dreams. I am dreaming of home.
To be with my children, each one part of me;
To be with my wife and the ones that I love;
To be with my parents, my world’s tenderest hearts.
I dream to be home, to be free from this cage.
But do you hear me, oh Judge, do you hear me at all?
We are innocent, here, we’ve committed no crime.
Set me free, set us free, if anywhere still
Justice and compassion remain in this world!
Shortly after 11 September, Osama Abu Kadir travelled to Pakistan to perform charity work in Afghanistan with the Islamic missionary group Tablighi Jamat. The US claims Tablighi was providing fighters for jihad in Afghanistan and arrested Mr Kadir near Jalalabad in November 2001. In his native Jordan, he was known as a dedicated family man who worked as a truck driver. In Guantanamo, he is known as prisoner number 651.
© 2007 The Independent/UK
My heart can only answer with a poem and deep prayers for those who suffer in their Guantanamo cages and for those wherever they are stuck behind walls or in cages of whatever kind, built, designed and created by the truly cruel and callous Madmen and Madwomen of my country, the late — sometimes almost great, United States of America:
OUT-OF-MINDING ON MOTHER’S DAY … 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007 … B.C. or A. D., it’s all the same, except now a planet, called Earth, is teetering between continued viability or continuous death and destruction from wars and ever more sophisticated, lethal weaponry, including new-and-improved U.S. hydrogen bombs, and from pillaging, poisoning, raping of the environment. And if we so stupidly keep it up, for all intensive purposes, we have all accepted and collaborated on the inevitable Fact to come of our own mass suicide and the extinction of our own species, and likely, most other species as well.
1
Out-of-minding on Mother’s Day
I am immobilized
with new dreams
shattered
by old horrors
bloodying the careless eye
of tv network news.
Life turned trash again
with U.S. righteous wars.
A disguise grown thinner
and less sturdy than a Frito-lay potato chip
while ignorance embeds thicker
in meaningless monuments to God.
Solemn-walking eggheads
and strutting throne pretenders
exchange the latest bits of news
on polls of public sentiment,
their shriveled hearts immune
to piercing agonies
of soldiers, prisoners,
the tortured and the maimed.
Such familiar conversations
such tired testimonies
such evident fact
that laid out on a table
the rotting brains of brutes
in leopard skins or natty business suits
glow bloodlessly the same
all smooth and soft
and convoluted gray.
2
And the mothers keep on keening …
wailing
gnashing all their teeth.
Scrunched down in rocking chairs,
they clutch the ragged heads
of Johnnys’ one-eyed Teddy bears
as meagre comfort
for empty-cradle laps
now crushed with ghosts of silent, stone-cold bodies
eerily whispering, eerily crying, eerily, eerily, eerily …
MOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
3
Out-of-minding for Mothers
is our planet’s daily fare.
This little orb called Mother endures
… temporarily at least …
the rape and pillage and ripping of her skin
whilst The White House Chicken Hawk cabal
play specious games of Must-do Wars
to wage on every country, big or small,
to bruise and bomb and kick some butt
to grab, possess, and Mother-fuck
with GOTCHA! WINS and Rich Boy luck.
Despite spread-ego, brain disease
–a virus from the Chicken Hawk,
how zealously they play and chant:
I gotta’ have it all …
I gotta’ be on top …
I gotta win …
gotta’ … gotta’ … gotta’
Oh Yeah. …
Lie. Manipulate. ATTACK!
COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!
TO YOU! AND YOU! AND YOU!
4
Sterilized hi-tech cable ceremonies,
courtesy of wizened corporate men
safe in their office bunkers and
at the top of their money game,
offer the unwitting losers
familiar stiff-armed salutes
in front of wooden folding chairs
where the stone-cold mothers sit
numb and hollow-eyed
absently fingering
the surgical folds
of lifeless tri-corner flags
born and raised on the 4th of July.
By uniformed couriers, by first-class mail
come ribbons
with purple hearts
packaged in plastic-pine boxes
to pin
with trembling fingers
to the damp, fraying chests
of Johnnys’ one-eyed Teddy bears.
5
Hearts hang like stones on the crosses
in Arlington.
Stones bury the dead and dying
in Fallujah.
6
Out-of-minding on Mother’s Day
lively, leaping children pelt U.S. tanks,
a stone’s throw from sandy gardens
outside the kitchen doors,
the searing lessons not yet learned
that Freedom … Equality … Justice for All
ring hollow
when might still makes right
for oil-barrel booty
and War Games for God.
Too soon the invincibilities of childhood’s daring-do
in wiry little-David bodies taking on Goliath
reap a harvest of revenge
from impersonal missile fire that flowers
skinny little chests with sticky, sun-baked blossoms
… colored Red-State-Red.
Burka-draped
Mothers
shout
from their doorways
Then
Run
See
Shriek
Fall
among the stones.
Behind aprons clutched to faces
Howls squeeze through twisted lips
Through the weave of apron cloth
Through fingers frozen to foreheads.
Begging-and-beseeching climbs
into the blackened, sooty sky
that has always carried
the sounds of grief
to no one in particular.
And oh, back home,
here are gleaming, lace-edged cards
wishing the keening mothers
a proud day
in offering up their sons and daughters
as sacrifice
for the ever-potential paradise
of earthly peace.
7
Out-of-minding on Mother’s Day,
I hear the devil president with his lop-sided grin
tell us
we are winning the latest war.
Winning peace and freedom …, he says,
stumbling through another’s oil-slicked words,
For the Iraqi people to know the glories of DEMOCRACY!
We must complete The Mission …
We must stay The Course …
COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!
TO YOU! AND YOU! AND YOU!
And for those who have been killed already
… to know they have not died
in vain.
8
The burnt and limbless freeze-frame on The News
with camera cuts to ads
for sleeping pills and cheery oats and
toenail fungus cure.
Spinning to vacation-time with Camp David’s scenic views,
the 3,000-dollar, presidential mountain bike
is tenderly debarked
and carried to the waiting limo-van
by stalwart, straight-backed soldiers
assigned to Air Force One.
Spewing black carbon and other affronts
to the dying skies of earth,
a cortege of armored security vehicles
in ridiculous numbers surround
a limousine
gliding to Maryland and a path to ride
for one singular, sorry ass
perched atop a mountain bike
on a balmy day in May.
One of us is crazy, little peacock president.
Even though, I am
OUT-OF-MINDING ON MOTHER’S DAY
I KNOW
IT IS NOT ME.
[(C) ckl]
*****************************************
It surely is easy now to feel a certain kinship with the brain-washed German people, whose mantra at the end of WWII and after the revelations of The Holocaust was: “We didn’t know. Oh, we really didn’t know.”
But WE do know, don’t we?
And what is it going to take?
ACTIVISM THROUGH ART!
Though so much of the poetry seems like fragmented prose (sorry, shortie critique), I still want to read all of those prisoners’ poems! I want to write the screenplay about that one, man! Whata story, but we all know, when the “regime” changes, all kinds of new movies will emerge, the horror story of “Gitmo” sure to be a crowd pleaser.
These poems sear into the hearts and minds of all of us who have not surrendered our souls to the numbing, demoralizing pablum of our political circuses and bantering TV talking heads and radio jockey-jokesters. Perhaps the most telling observation in the introduction was this quote from a military official:
“poetry … presents a special risk, and DoD [Department of Defence] standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language”
Poetry, indeed, presents a “special risk” in the writer and the reader–it calls forth the best in both, bares layer after layer of truth to the world, wounds us with truths until we either heal ourselves with new truths and new awareness of the suffering, poignancy and lost beauty of our fleeting lives, or retreat into the “safety” of numbness, mythologies and stupor.
Leonard Doyle and Marc Falcoff deserve special kudos for bringing these “cup poems” and heart-cries to the attention of the general public. These poems embrace one of the great dimensions of Art–the Art of Witnessing. It is art in the tradition of Goya witnessing the French occupation of Spain; Picasso’s cri de coeur about the bombing of Guernica; Wilfred Owen’s piercing poetic commentaries on the horrors of “The Great War.”
When will humanity learn the lessons of humanity from those who have suffered most keenly, most unbearably, to express their humanity?
The cup poetry may well be a lasting legacy akin to “The Diary of Anne Frank.” Those oft maligned voices are important to our nation recovering its humanity.
Extraordinary renditions.
Rending father from son, husband from wife, heart from body, soul from mind. Rending mundane truth, deposit extraordinary lies.
William Carlos Williams said
“It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably
every day
for lack of what is found there.”
Even as they are tortured every day, they produce beauty in poetry.
Even as they torture every day, Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Gonzales look for more blood-letting.
Iran next, perhaps?
I fear that they will close Guantanamo and take these prisoners off to be hidden again in Afghanistan. There only problem with Gitmo is that it is too visible.
These people must be tried by civilian courts — not military — not imprisoned indefinitely.
They are being tortured as they try even to starve themselves — with nutrition being administered brutally.
They have tried to kill themselves — many have succeeded.
Let’s say clearly to the world that those who torture others are without conscience, without humanity.
Today, America’s flag should be the photograph of the young Iraqi boy with two arms and two legs missing.
America was wrong at Hiroshima, wrong at Nagasaki and we are wrong with Iraq and Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo.
Let’s have an end to violence — !!!!
In the name of God, the All-Merciful, the Mercy-giving
Here are a few prayers the Prophet Muhammad, peace on him, would make to God when adversity struck him:
“O God, your mercy I do request. So do not leave me to myself even for the blink of an eye. And set aright for me all of my affairs. There is no God but you.”
“O God, nothing is easy except what You make easy. And, if You will, You make what is difficult easy.”
“O God, to you I complain of my weakness, my lack of facility,
my helplessness before people.
O most merciful of the merciful, You are the Lord of the weak, and You are my Lord.
To whom will You entrust me?
To strangers who will ill-treat me or to foes whom You have given authority over me?
So long as You are not angry with me, I care not.
Yet the well-being You give is ever enough for me.
I seek refuge in the light of Your Face, by which all darkness is illuminated
and the affairs of this world and the next are set aright,
lest You make Your wrath descend upon me or Your anger beset me.
Still it is Yours to reproach until You are well pleased.
There is no strength or might except with You.”
“O God, I ask You for pardon and well-being in this life and in the Hereafter.
O God, I ask You for pardon and well-being in my religion, my life, my family, and my wealth.
O God, cover my faults and soothe my fears.
O God, protect me from whatever is before me and from whatever is behind me, and from my right and from my left, and from above me, and I seek refuge in You from being seized from beneath me.”
The Guantanamo situation reminds me of the H-Blocks in the 1970’s in the North of Ireland. It was a British prison used for political prisoners who fought against British occupation of their land and the oppression they had to endure.
Because their political status was taken from them by the Thatcher regime they went on a protest which lasted 5 years (called the Blanket because they refused to where prison uniforms and so donned their blankets instead). The H-Blocks was a place of torture and brutality. The prisoners finally won their political status after the death of 10 hunger strikers in 1981.
May God have mercy on all these people, past and present, and accept them with a gracious acceptance.
Here are two poems/songs written about the interment of Republican Volunteers in the North of Ireland in the 70’s. The first is about the general internment of these men (without fair trial — or any trial — mind you) and the second is about the Blanket Protest in the H-Blocks.
THE MEN BEHIND THE WIRE
Armoured cars and tanks and guns
Came to take away our sons
But every man must stand behind
The men behind the wire
Through the little streets of Belfast
In the dark of early morn
British soldiers came marauding
Wrecking little homes with scorn
Heedless of the crying children
Cragging fathers from their beds
Beating sons while helpless mothers
Watched the blood poor from their heads
Not for them a judge and jury
Nor indeed a trial at all
But being Irish means you´re guilty
So we´re guilty one and all
Round the world the truth will echo
Cromwell´s men are here again
England´s name again is sullied
In the eyes of honest men.
Proud we march behind our banner
Firm we´ll stand behind our men
We will have them free to help us
Build a nation once again
On the people step together
Proudly firmly on their way
Never fear never falter
Till the boys are home to stay
THE H-BLOCKS SONG
I am a proud young Irishman.
In Ulster’s hills my life began;
A happy boy through green fields ran;
I kept God’s and man’s laws.
But when my age was barely ten
My country’s wrongs were told again
By tens of thousands marching men
And my heart stirred to the cause.
[Chorus] So I’ll wear no convict’s uniform
Nor meekly serve my time
That Britain might brand Ireland’s fight
Eight hundred years of crime.
I learned of centuries of strife,
Of cruel laws, injustice rife;
I saw now in my own young life
The fruits of foreign sway:
Protesters threatened, tortured, maimed,
Divisions nurtured, passions flamed,
Outrage provoked, right’s cause defamed;
That is the conqueror’s way.
Chorus
Descended from proud Cannacht clan,
Concannon served cruel Britain’s plan;
Man’s inhumanity to man
Had spawned a trusty slave.
No strangers are these dark H-Blocks,
Black Cromwell lives while Mason stalks;
The bully taunts the brave.
Chorus
Does Britain need a thousand years
Of protest, riot, death and tears,
Or will this past decade of fears
Of eighty decades spell
and end to Ireland’s agony,
New hope for human dignity;
And will the last obscenity
Be this grim H-Blocks cell?
So I’ll wear no convict’s uniform
Nor meekly serve my time
That Britain might brand Ireland’s fight
Eight hundred years of crime.