The Waste Land: Declassified Poetry From Guantánamo Bay

Courtesy Of: Harpers Magazine
By Ken Silverstein.
Posted On Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Harper's Index

Jumah al-Dossari, originally from Bahrain, was seized by Pakistani security forces in late 2001 and turned over to the United States. The U.S. military brought him to the Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba, where, he claims, he was beaten, his life was threatened, and he was isolated from other prisoners for long stretches of time. Dossari, who denies any connection to Al Qaeda or terrorism, and has never been charged with any such crime, has repeatedly attempted to commit suicide while imprisoned. His most recent attempt, according to Amnesty International, was in March 2006, when he tried to slit his throat.

Death Poem
By Jumah al-Dossari

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.
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.”

That poem will be included in a collection of poetry by Guantánamo detainees that is being assembled by Marc Falkoff, a law professor at Northern Illinois University and an attorney for seventeen clients at the prison camp. Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak will be published this fall by the University of Iowa Press and will include essays by several prominent literary and cultural figures. Most of the poems were written in Arabic and translated by non-professionals.

...Of the work that has been cleared for publication, Falkoff plans to include

“Ode To The Sea”
By Ibrahim al Rubaish

(“Your beaches are sadness,
captivity, pain and injustice
whose bitterness eats away at patience/
Your calm is death,
and your sweeping is strange
and a silence rises up from you,
holding treachery in its fold”)

...Several of the poets in the volume were released from Guantánamo after long periods of incarceration, without ever having been charged.

They include the

Moazzam Begg
Of Britain

(“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”)


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http://www.harpers.org/sb-the-waste-land-1169582427.html