“Still Clinging To Disaster: Reading Rob Halpern’s Disaster Suites”

“Where the pain is physical, it must be of an intensity akin to that which accompanies serious physical injury such as death or organ failure” Jay Bybee (qtd. in Sands 22-23).

“What the administration is trying to do is create a new legal regime” John Yoo (qtd. in Sydney Morning Herald).

Day 18, 10 December 2002

0400: Lead established control over detainee by instructing him not to speak and enforcing by playing loud music and yelling …

1930: Medical Representative weighed detainee and logged detainee’s weight at 119 pounds …

2230: Detainee urinated on himself as he was being taken to latrine (qtd. in Sands 32).¹

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Near the beginning of Rob Halpern’s 2009 collection Disaster Suites a voice confides to us:

They say organ failure is the limit nowBut I can’t say where it hurts so I am notTortured one forgets too easily the things

We feel inside the numbered words I amA colored dossier singing, ‘Once a littleSteamboat,’ but I can’t see any smoke

—means the ship must be on fire.²

To read these lines is to be solicited by the affectless and self-cancelling presence of someone who continues to live but no longer feels herself to be perceived as a fully human being (“but I can’t say where it hurts”); a torture victim, perhaps, rendered into a world in which torture is no longer understood to be torture (“they say organ failure is the limit now”) but “enhanced interrogation”; a spectral inhabitant, perhaps, of one of those exceptional and yet all-too-representative disciplinary spaces, like Guantanamo Bay, like Abu Ghraib, in which the invigilation of suspect foreign bodies was remorselessly maintained. The unsettling sense these lines give of a kind of life that is no longer recognised as fully human life is reinforced by the poem’s implicit contrast between the persisting imprint left by the “numbered words” of secret memoranda and official policy documents and the now barely perceptible trace (“I can’t say,” “so I am not”) of a once autonomous subject who is now upon the point of being transformed into a manipulable object for judgment and classification by the things “they” say about him. In public readings of the sequence Halpern accentuates this terrifying glimpse of the tortured body’s juridical and political nullity by imposing a caesura between the conjunctive phrase “But I can’t say where it hurts so I am not” and the accompanying but quasi-independent verbal phrase “Tortured one forgets too easily the things we/feel” which has the effect of inscribing the living death experienced by those incarcerated in undisclosed “black sites” at the very heart of the poem. Conversely, Halpern’s writing attempts to restore some measure of voice to a subject simultaneously figured within, and disfigured by, a new biopolitics of extra-judicial scrutiny by folding the image of the tortured body back upon the body politic in whose name this violence is done. The thickening effect of ethical implication engendered by this superimposition of bodies and scenes is subtly registered in the fluid, but nevertheless uneasy, modulation of subject position and mood between lines two and four of the poem. Here the movement into the subjective mode inaugurated by the independent clause “But I can’t say where it hurts” actually fuses three very different but interrelated subject positions: the numbed response of the torture victim for whom it hurts not just here, or there, but everywhere; the sullen irritation of the torturer asked to estimate how much pain may be too much pain; and the bad faith of the unresisting American citizen willing to avert his eyes to the political violence undertaken by his own government in concealed locations beyond the regulatory reach of domestic supervision. In the last instance what begins as bad faith quickly becomes bad conscience: if it is true that “I am not/tortured” by the ethical implications of events whose historical reality I stubbornly refuse to acknowledge, then why, the poem slyly demands, am I troubled by a continuing sense...