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  • Guantánamo Poems“Guántdnamo, amas, amat”
  • Elisabeth Weber (bio)

In a case of massive censorship exercised by the American government, thousands of poems written in the Guantánamo Bay prison camp have been suppressed over the last ten years. The poems’ authors have been denied some of the most basic human rights and in most, if not all, cases have been subjected to torture. The original Arabic and Pashto versions of the few published poems, along with tens of thousands of untranslated ones, remain under lock and seal in a “secure facility” in Virginia.1

English translations of twenty-two poems were declassified and published in an edition prepared by one of the prisoners’ pro bono lawyers, Marc Falkoff, on the condition that translation be done by “linguists with security clearance” who, as Falkoff explains, had to work “without access to the usual dictionaries and other tools of the trade.”2

As then-senior military correspondent Yochi J. Dreazen wrote in a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal on June 21, 2007, shortly before the publication of the anthology,

U.S. authorities explained why the military has been slow to declassify the poems in a June 2006 letter to one of Mr. Falkoff’s colleagues. “Poetry . . . presents a special risk, and dod standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language,” it said. The military says poetry is harder to vet than conventional letters because allusions and imagery in poetry that seem innocent can be used to convey coded messages to other militants. The letter told defense [End Page 159] lawyers to translate any works they wanted to release publicly into English and then submit the translations to the government for review. The strict security arrangements governing anything written by Guantanamo Bay inmates meant that Mr. Falkoff had to use linguists with secret-level security clearances rather than translators who specialize in poetry. The resulting translations, Mr. Falkoff writes in the book, “cannot do justice to the subtlety and cadences of the originals.” For the military even some of the translations appeared to go too far. Mr. Falkoff says it rejected three of the five translated poems he submitted, along with a dozen others submitted by his colleagues. Cmdr. Gordon says he doesn’t know how many poems were rejected but adds that the military “absolutely” remains concerned that poetry could be used to pass coded messages to other militants.3

Reading the twenty-two published poems means, thus, to read them torn out of their cultural and especially their linguistic and poetological context. It means reading them in the language of the jailor, not just in terms of translation into English but in terms of translation into the English of “linguists with secret-level security clearances.” It also means reading them in the language of a universe created to circumvent the constitutional rights that citizens and foreigners alike have on US soil. In short, reading those poems in translation means reading them in a context as forcibly US-American as the prison camp itself.4

According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, of the 779 men imprisoned on the American base in Cuba since its opening in January 2002, nine have died while in detention (some of whom committed suicide), but fewer than nine have ever been convicted of a crime.5 Habeas corpus—the constitutional right to know and challenge the reason for one’s imprisonment—has thus been violated systematically over more than a decade.

“Guantánamo, amas, amat”

When in June 2004 Paul Muldoon published his poem “Hedge School” in the New York Times, the prison camp held 597 prisoners.6 The lightheartedness of the expanded title given to the poem by the New York Times, alluding to the start of summer vacation around the country (“Out of School and Into Summer; Hedge School”), suggests that the editors [End Page 160] didn’t read much further than the poem’s original title before including it on the opinion page of the newspaper’s June 26, 2004, edition:

Hedge School

Not only those rainy mornings our great-great-grandmotherwas posted at a gatewith a rush...

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