'Inside_the_wire':_poetry_by_Guantanamo_Bay_detainees

Thanks to David Baptiste-Chirot for pointing out the below Guardian article
on the Poetics list.

ja

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'Inside the wire'
http://books.guardian.co.uk/poetry/features/0,,2021897,00.html

The pressures of confinement in Guantanamo Bay have led many in the
controversial detention camp to turn to poetry. But, as Richard Lea learns,
the American authorities are very reluctant to let the world see them.

Monday February 26, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

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Poetry's capacity to rattle governments is not, it appears, confined to
totalitarian regimes. A collection of poems by detainees at the US military
base in Guantanamo 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. The collection, entitled Poems from Guantanamo: The
Detainees Speak, will be published in August by the University of Iowa Press
with an afterword written by Ariel Dorfman.

It all began when he turned up at the secure facility in Washington DC where
all communications from detainees are sent, and found a poem waiting for
him.
"The first poem I saw was sent to me by Abdulsalam al Hela," he says. "It's
a moving cry about the injustice of arbitrary detention and at the same time
a hymn to the comforts of religious faith."

"It was interesting to me because I did a PhD in literature, but I didn't
think too much about it."

A second poem from another client followed soon after, and Falkoff began to
wonder if other lawyers also had clients who were sending poetry. It turned
out that Guantanamo Bay is "filled with itinerant poets".

Many of the poems deal with the pain and humiliation inflicted on the
detainees by the US military. Others express disbelief and a sense of
betrayal that Americans - described in one poem as "protectors of peace" -
could deny detainees any kind of justice. Some engage with wider themes of
nostalgia, hope and faith in God.

But most of the poems, including the lament by Al Hela which first sparked
Falkoff's interest, are unlikely to ever see the light of day. Not content
with imprisoning the authors, the Pentagon has refused to declassify many of
their words, arguing that poetry "presents a special risk" to national
security because of its "content and format". In a memo sent on September 18
2006, the team assigned to deal with communications between lawyers and
their clients explains that they do not "maintain the requisite subject
matter expertise" and says that poems "should continue to be considered
presumptively classified".

The defence department spokesman Jeffrey Gordon is unsurprised that access
to detainees poetry is tightly controlled. "It depends on what's being
written," he says. "There's a whole range of things that are inappropriate."
Of course poetry that deals with subjects such as guard routines,
interrogation techniques or terrorist operations could pose a security
threat, but Gordon is unable to explain why Al Hela's poem is still
classified, saying "I haven't read any of these [poems]".

As with prisoners within the American justice system, he argues, there are
constraints on their first amendment rights. "I don't think these guys are
writing poetry like Morrissey," he continues.

"The fear appears to be that detainees will try to smuggle coded messages
out of the camp," explains Falkoff, a fear that has often allowed clearance
for English translations only - Arabic or Pashto originals being judged to
represent an "enhanced security risk". In many cases even Falkoff has only
seen the translations prepared for the volunteer lawyers by the few
translators with the requisite security clearance.

Because of security restrictions, Falkoff cannot give any further details
about Al Hela's poem, or about other poems sent to him by his clients that
have not been cleared for publication by the department of defence. He is
not allowed to see about 20 poems sent to other lawyers that have not been
cleared for publication.

Many poems have also been lost, confiscated or destroyed. Falkoff is unable
to even offer an estimate of how many poems have been written in the camp.

"To start with," he says, "there are probably 200 detainees who either don't
have lawyers or have not been allowed to communicate with their lawyers.
Even for those clients who have lawyers, I really don't know how many poems
they've written or whether they've been confiscated. Communicating back and
forth with our clients is a very, very difficult process."

Only one of the authors in the forthcoming collection wrote poetry before
his incarceration. The religious scholar Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost wrote
25,000 lines of poetry during his time in the camp, only a handful of which
have been returned to him. A poem he wrote on a Styrofoam cup and
reconstructed from memory after his release appears in Poems from
Guantanamo. The other detainees were not poets before their incarceration,
but have turned to poetry under the particular pressures of their situation.

Moazzam Begg, who spent three years in Guantanamo Bay before being released
without charge in January 2005, began writing poetry as a way of explaining
what he was going through. He knew that everything he wrote would be
censored, so used poetry to try to describe his situation to his family.

"The idea was to say it without saying it," he says, "and to explain to my
interrogators that it was a farce."

The formal constraints of poetry gives the writer control over their
material, he says, "the ability to say the words without going into a rant".

Poetry was also a way of engaging with the system.

"I knew that everything I wrote would be censored," he continues, "and that
the person censoring it would have to read the poem." By writing in English,
a language rarely used by detainees in the camp, he was able to communicate
directly with guards, and perhaps those higher up in the US military.

It was also a way of "showing anger" and "channelling frustration".

According to Falkoff, detainees are writing poetry because "they're trying
to keep hold of their sanity and humanity".

"They have really, really nothing to do there," he says. "They get, now, an
hour of exercise every other day or so. They don't have access to books,
apart from a Qu'ran - which they get whether they want it or not - and a
little book cart with some Agatha Christie novels and some Harry Potter.
They're not allowed to interact with the other prisoners. There are no
communal areas. The recreation area is like a chimney with 30ft high walls."

"They're writing poetry because they need some kind of mental stimulation,
some way of expressing their feelings, some outlet for their creativity."

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."

"Poetry talks to the heart," he continues, "there is something immediately
passionate about it." For Mapanje, poetry is a more "natural" means of
expression than prose, a means of communication that "anybody who hasn't got
any craft will come to".

The poet Tim Liardet, whose Forward prize-shortlisted collection Blood Choir
deals with the time he spent teaching poetry at a young offenders' prison,
agrees there's an "instinctual" urge to reach for poetry in extreme
circumstances.

"They're feeling things they've never felt before, or never with so much
intensity," he says. "They've never had to try to match such an intense
experience with language before."

Many of the offenders he worked with resisted his efforts to get them to
write poetry, he continues, but "the ones who ended up writing it were the
ones who found it themselves. They weren't following an example from me."

Falkoff is hoping the collection of poems from Guantanamo Bay will put a
human face on people branded by the former American defence secretary Donald
Rumsfeld as "among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the
face of the Earth".

The quality of the poems in the collection is "variable", says Falkoff, but
"there's some really good stuff there". He stresses that because of security
restrictions he has often been unable to see anything more than translations
prepared without "poetry in mind". Nevertheless some of the poems transcend
their extraordinary circumstances, he says, and "just knock me over".

With the courts moving slowly towards fair and open hearings, he continues,
"the detainees' own words may become part of the dialogue. Perhaps their
poems will prick the conscience of a nation."