Poems from Guantanamo

by Marc Falkoff

traditional image of poetry as the sea itself to create verses that both provide relief and stir the depths of bitter despair: “Your stillness will kill the captain if it persists, / And the navigator will drown in your waves. // Gentle, deaf, mute, ignoring, angrily storming, / You carry graves.” Poetry from Guantánamo

  Bay carries a message to humankind that is bittersweet at best.

  Complacency is not of poetic temperament.

  From the earliest days of Islam’s rise among world religions

  in the seventh century, poetry has provided a steady moral com-

  pass for Muslims. Its power to inspire believers as well as its controversial use for mischief were both appreciated by the prophet Muhammad. While warning listeners away from the

  tendency of poets to “aimlessly rove in every valley, preaching what they never practice” (Qur’an 26:225), the Prophet had the

  good judgment to enlist the support of some of the strongest

  poets in Arabia. In the centuries that followed, as Islam ex-panded among diverse communities that knew neither Arabic

  nor the customs of the Prophet’s followers, poets continued to

  provide eloquent and easily memorized glosses on Islam’s core

  messages. Whether composing in classical Arabic designed for

  the learned or in regional dialects designed to attract broader and often illiterate audiences, poets were important allies to

  political leaders.

  Poets could also be formidable adversaries. As early Muslim states developed, so too did new means of incarceration,

  along with the categories of criminal behavior used to justify imprisonment. In the provinces of Kufa, Damascus, Mosul,

  and coastal Yemen, ill-favored poets were among the first occu-

  pants of these early prisons. With emerging notions of civili-

  zational order, responsibility, and social entitlement, however, the prison experience would speak to wider circles of versifiers, including those who, although not literally imprisoned, turned

  to certain types of verse in order to express the intensity of felt oppression. In genres called habsiyya, which emerged during periods of state centralization in Iran after the ninth century, as well as in Pakistan and India, for example, poets drew upon

  long-established traditions of Persian love poetry to reflect on their own sufferings, on the consolations of writing verse, and the possibilities of spiritual release. Such poetry continued to be refined in later centuries across South Asia and in the Middle East.

  At another level, nationalist movements supplied new tools

  for discussing oppression and the rights of indigenous peoples.

  Poetry was instrumental, especially rhymed couplets composed

  in the tradition of Arabic qasida verse. Since the Prophet’s day, the qasida’s formal meters, adjustable length (typically from twelve to eighty verses), and themes both spiritual and quo-tidian had helped popularize the genre among Muslim commu-

  nities across Southeast Asia, India, Central Asia, the coasts of Africa, and Europe. Habsiyya poets were especially fond of the qasida’ s structured conventions. As twentieth-century nationalists across the Arab world began enjoying the fruits of lib-

  eration struggles against Europe’s colonial territories, qasida poetry was reworked to express a common cultural heritage.

  Neoclassical themes such as nostalgia for youthful lovers, de-

  scriptions of desert journeys, and praise for patrons found re-

  ceptive audiences among socialist reformers partly because,

  although best expressed in Arabic, they also accommodated

  regional dialects and customs. Moreover, while expressive of

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  Islamic cultural ideals, they were not exclusively the heritage of Muslims. In diverse political contexts, poets addressed a variety of peoples, nations, and world revolutions.

  The challenge for activists was, of course, to keep the qasida genre from being co-opted by entrenched national elites and to

  preserve its flexibility as a weapon for populist dissent. Marxists promoted the use of vernacular, rather than classical, Arabic in efforts to sever the qasida’s association with traditions of belles lettres. They also privileged shorter, easier compositions that could be sung as anthems and performed in mass gatherings to

  stirring musical accompaniment. Palestinians gained renown

  for their qasida anthems, many of which furthered the themes of an emerging prison literature that included short stories and novels by both men and women. With roughly thirty percent

  of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip having passed

  through Israeli prisons by the 1980s, images of the “cage,” the

  “bird,” and, later, the “hurled stone” grew especially popular

  throughout the Middle East. Socialists in Egypt, South Yemen,

  Libya, and Morocco, as well as secular Bàthists in Syria and

  Iraq, found ample recourse to such images, while Islamists re-

  sponded to the qasida’s potential elitism in multiple ways. Conservative reformers sometimes criticized the practice of poetry altogether, especially if sung or set to musical instrumentation, arguing that Muslims were better served by studying the Qur’an, memorizing transmitted accounts of the Prophet’s words and

  deeds, and pursuing degrees in Islamic law—or shari` a—even from the confines of one’s prison cell. Other Islamists appreciated the value of poetry in refining one’s ethical and political sentiments. As noted by one of the Guantánamo poets, Abdulla

  Majid al Noaimi, “I set out to write, but I could not concentrate on the poem. I put poetry writing aside and turned to memorizing the Qur’an. But then I could not concentrate on the Qur’an, because my mind was occupied with the poem. With my mind

  divided, time began to pass. And then I was inspired.”

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  Late twentieth- and twenty-first-century militants could find inspiration for composing poetry in the writings of Egyptian

  Islamist Sayyid Qutb, considered by many to be the most influ-

  ential modern theorist of global Islamic resurgence. During the 1950s and 1960s, Qutb was arrested and tortured in the jails of Gamal Àbd al-Nasser, the president of Egypt and champion

  of the Pan-Arab movement. Few institutions in the Arab world

  would prove as instrumental in turning moderate Islamist re-

  formers, many of them members of Egypt’s Muslim Brother-

  hood, into committed militants. From their ranks rose Anwar

  Sadat’s assassins, whose designation of the Egyptian president

  as a tyrannical “pharaoh” with close links to the United States (and its White House, or “Palace”) is echoed by one of the Guantánamo poets, Ustad Badruzzaman Badr. Many of al-Qaìda’s

  core leaders were Egyptians who had grown up in the shadow

  of Nasser’s jails (including Ayman al Zawahiri, Abu Hafs, Sayf

  al Àdl, Nasser Fahmi, and others). These men understood well

  how torture could turn conservative moral reformers into radi-

  cal militants, so they drew particular attention to ways in which abject humiliation drives victims of torture to seek revenge.¹

  Before Qutb had developed his ideas about global jihad in the interests of “freedom from servitude,” however, his earliest

  years were spent as a journalist, poet, and literary critic. The poet, Qutb wrote, is no mere philosopher, but is rather an activist who “plunges into life, sensing its sensations, conscious of its consciousness, interacting with it and then speaking about

  what he senses from it, or else about what life wants to say

  about itself !”² Contrary to the views of many Islamist intellectu-als, Qutb held vernacular Arabic to be an especially apt medium for political expression. His interest in wresting poetry fromr />
  the purview of classically trained aesthetes continues to reflect the orientation of many Islamist populists. Among contributors to this volume, Saudi-born poets (especially Mohammed

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  el Gharani and Abdulla Majid al Noaimi) demonstrate a special interest in the uses of vernacular Arabic for dissent.

  Linking broader trends in Muslim prison poetry to the con-

  tributions in Poems from Guantánamo begs the question of the nature of the Guantánamo poets’ dissent. Do the detainees

  call upon the vocabulary of radical Islamic militancy to defend themselves? Do they invoke other discussions of social justice? To what extent do their verses confirm their designations as global Islamic jihadists and “unlawful enemy combatants,”

  as the U.S. administration and military tribunals have main-

  tained?

  Part of the challenge of answering such questions lies in the

  role of poetry as a figurative enterprise. If our aim is to study verbal artistry in a way that is maximally useful, we need to be prepared to consider answers not about the poets’ intentions

  but about our own intentions as analysts responsible for distinguishing fact from fiction. We need to assess not only the de-

  tainees’ own tendencies toward radicalism but also our own as-

  sumptions about detainees’ identities, goals, and motivations.

  To begin with the nature of poetic dissent in general, it is

  useful to draw a comparison between the detainees’ verse and

  that of self-proclaimed militant jihadists. In this regard, the work of the Guantánamo poets is distinct for its relative absence of overt religious imagery. Militants such as Osama bin

  Laden himself, renowned among followers for his verse, tend

  to construct poems around well-rehearsed narratives of Islamic

  history, especially those focusing on the early armed struggles of Muhammad and his companions. In efforts to highlight

  their observance of Muslim doctrine, they employ classical Ara-

  bic inflected with archaic terms and pronunciations. Seeking a

  transnational Islamic audience, they avoid marked vernacular

  diction and themes that once appealed to the nationalist senti-

  ments of Sayyid Qutb and his associates in the Muslim Brother-

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  hood. Poets among the Afghan Arabs are even known to favor compositions bereft of rhyme and meter, in their attempts to

  shed ties to the nationalist and literary heritage of qasida poetry.

  In such cases, overtly political Islamic symbols become the

  most important anchor for linking such verse to an envisioned

  Muslim community.

  Barely half the Guantánamo poems in this collection, by

  contrast, invoke hallmark Islamic terms, such as “Allah,” the

  “book of God,” the “messenger,” and “Islam.” When they are

  used, moreover, such terms are usually employed in a main-

  stream manner, inserted into conventional supplications at the

  end of qasidas, rather than being used to develop themes of militancy. Certainly few of these poems open with pious supplica-

  tions, in contrast to most religious poetry. At first stroke, the Guantánamo poets catch us off guard with a modernism that

  even rings secular at times. To be sure, studies of Islamic re-

  form movements suggest that many global jihadists have a weak understanding of core Muslim beliefs and indeed have more

  affinity with Marxist revolutionaries than with religious devo-

  tees. Rarely do the jihadists themselves, however, invite such associations.

  If any common theme unites the poems, it is a general

  concern with physical incarceration and oppression rather

  than with Islam. Descriptions of imprisonment ( habs), cages, shackles, and tears provide a shared vocabulary, even as the

  poets’ responses elicit a wide range of emotions. While at

  times courageous and defiant, the poets at other times express

  utter defeat, lamentation, and nostalgia, as well as a desire to give good advice. Perhaps most surprising of all, many of the

  poets share a deep strain of romantic longing. Whether linger-

  ing upon images of loved ones or on the flowery pastures of

  youth, Guantánamo poets have written modern Arabic love

  poetry. Especially salient are the qasidas by Saudi, Bahraini, and Yemeni poets, whose “yearning to meet the loved ones,” “ten-12

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  derest hearts,” and gestures of the “kiss on his forehead” evoke trans-Islamic themes of habsiyya verse while also deferring to more proximate sentiments expressed in vernacular Arabic.

  For those familiar with Arabic poetry, such verses bear an

  extraordinary resemblance to the florid writings of twentieth-

  century secular nationalists. Themes of nature’s bounty, tran-

  scendence, and swimming “salmon” (certainly not found in

  Arab waters) evoke the work of early nationalist literati who

  came of age under European colonial rule and were inspired

  as much by poets like John Keats, William Wordsworth, or Sté-

  phane Mallarmé as they were by neoclassical Arabic traditions.

  The Guantánamo poets appear to draw even more heavily from

  the socialist legacies of postcolonial firebrands across the

  Islamic world. Such influences are found in both themes of

  forced servitude and the struggle for justice and in the poetic conventions of political anthems such as repetitive anaphora

  (“We are heroes of the time. / We are the proud youth. / We are the hairy lions.”) and open-vowel rhyme schemes that could be

  easily memorized and sung collectively. A common recourse to

  simple poetic meters underscores a special engagement with

  the kind of rural and tribal song traditions that could be picked up by broad audiences. Once again, even if adaptable to performance as Islamic anthems, an extremely popular genre among

  Muslim reformers worldwide, these poems typically defer overt

  association with Islamist iconography, as their authors strive to reach a more ecumenical audience.

  In trying to come to terms with the oddly contemporary

  tenor of the poets’ contributions, especially their national and socialist sensibilities, we have several possible explanations.

  From one perspective, we might conclude that the poems are

  evidence of the detainees’ savvy public relations skills and so do not represent their true views as diehard jihadists or terrorists.

  From another, we might point out that the authors may be a

  self-selected group and that the true radicals are likely keeping F O R M S O F S U F F E R I N G

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  quiet. These suggestions, though, are problematic for at least two reasons. Through the ostensible logic of common sense,

  such positions replace empirical findings, however oblique or

  confusing, with a far more scripted set of debates about what

  Muslims or Islamists really want or believe. Rather than acknowledging human experience as complex and, indeed, his-

  torically conditioned, they invoke a set of Western stereotypes about the entrenched goals and identities of an “alien enemy.”

  Such assertions are especially disturbing given that almost all the Guantánamo detainees have yet to see their day in court,

  with even their identities actively mediated by a U.S. administration that struggles to defend a mixed record in its War on Terror.3

  These arguments also deny the Guantánamo poets’ own tes-

  timonies of the censorship that hampers their ability to
express their responses to the events within the camp. At times, the

  silence is imposed by prison authorities whose meticulous sur-

  veillance of all communications to or from inmates, including

  postcards from home, is described by one of the contributors

  in the margins of his poem. Having tried to deliver a photo-

  graph of himself to his family through an intermediary, the poet relates his sadness at being told, sometime later, that the intermediary had been forced to swallow the picture just before a complete body search was conducted. More frequently, the

  source of detainees’ censorship is their own self-monitoring.

  Poetry itself is constraining, a theme that some of the poets

  explore as they confront the limits of structured verse in their attempts to describe the depths of their suffering. Al Anazi compares poetry to the sea, whose “beaches are sadness, captivity, pain,” and al Noaimi’s self-reference as “the Captive of Dignity” expresses his own comparison of sadness to a captive

  and the embellishments of his dignified verse to the captor.

  Still, poetry can provide a welcome salve even when its formal

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  devices prove insufficient to express the reality of a tragic situation. In a 2005 study of human rights in Morocco, Susan

  Slyomovics reports how Moroccan victims of torture hold poetry

  to be a deeply valued medium because it can communicate that

  which is too humiliating to acknowledge publicly, especially

  to relatives at home.⁴ Special note might be taken of the stark testimonial poem by Mohammed el Gharani, or the sulfurous

  verses of Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost, who writes that

  one “cannot help but be under the power of the traitors and the notorious. // Consider what might compel a man / to kill himself, or another.” Far from being insincere, the Guantánamo

  poets admit that they have many concealed emotions.

  Allowing for the complexity of the detainees’ poems is an

  important first step in restoring a human dimension to grander

  official narratives about Guantánamo. Alert to the many invest-

  ments at stake in representing and controlling their identities, the poets struggle intelligently, with what resources they have, to engage the sympathy and responses of the broadest possible