by Marc Falkoff
“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
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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
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
formsofsufferinGin
muslimPrisonPoetry
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