A tortured review
The New York Times has published some bizarre stories, columns, and editorials related to the war on terror, but I don't think it has ever published anything as weird as Wellesley Professor Dan Chiasson's review of Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak. Edited by a lawyer for Gitmo detainees, the book consists of 22 poems cleared for release by the Pentagon along with profiles of the detainee/poets. Professor Chiasson views the poems with an eye to the diabolical cunning of the Pentagon. Despite the antipathy and unhappiness conveyed by the detainees in the poems, Professor Chiasson finds in them the dark machinations of the Pentagon:
[I]n what sense could these poems, heavily vetted by official censors, translated by “linguists with secret-level security clearance” but no literary training, released by the Pentagon according to its own strict, but unarticulated, rationale — “speak”?In their poetry, according to Professor Chiasson, the detainees have not done justice to the suffering the government of the United States has inflicted on them. And this badness of this poetry, according to Professor Chiasson, is the fault of the Pentagon. New frontiers in literary criticism and anti-American hysterica, courtesy of Professor Dan Chiasson and the New York Times.Given these constraints, a better subtitle might have been “The Detainees Do Not Speak” or perhaps “The Detainees Are Not Allowed to Speak.” But the best subtitle, I fear, would have been “The Pentagon Speaks.” To be sure, it’s hard to imagine a straightforward propagandistic use for the lines “America sucks, America chills, / While d’ blood of d’ Muslims is forever getting spilled”; but you can’t help suspecting that this entire production is some kind of public relations psych-out, “proof” that dissent thrives even in the cells of Guantánamo. (Does that sound paranoid? Can you think of another good reason the Pentagon would have selected these lines out of thousands for publication?)
You have to be in the mood for some death-defying Orwellian back-flips, then, to read “Poems From Guantánamo.” When Martin Mubanga, an “athletic kickboxer” and a “citizen of both the United Kingdom and Zambia” (the poems come with extensive biographical notes, often more evocative than the poems themselves) refers to “hard-core detainees like you an’ me” — is this a case of the Pentagon’s missing the irony or, more likely, has the Pentagon deemed that analogy so absurd as to reveal a dangerous criminal mind-set? Since the poem, written in an absurd ersatz-gangsta patois, possesses exactly zero literary interest, what is a reader to do besides try to locate the governmental cunning in clearing it for publication?
But the bulk of these poems are so vague, their claims so conventional, that they might have been written at any point in history by anyone suffering anything. “What kind of spring is this, / Where there are no flowers and / The air is filled with a miserable smell?” Even though these lines were, we are told, carved into a Styrofoam cup (the detainees were for a time denied pen and paper), they mimic the kinds of things sad or frustrated people have always written. But surely being imprisoned in Guantánamo rises to a level of wretchedness beyond mere sadness or frustration. When Sami Al Haj, a detainee whose biography says he was “tortured at both Bagram Air Base and Kandahar” before ending up at Guantánamo, writes that “hot tears covered my face,” he sounds like a teenage sonneteer, not the victim of nearly unimaginable physical cruelty. Such are the unfortunate diminishing returns of poetic figuration, which, except in extraordinary cases, blunts where it purports to sharpen, blurs where it promised focus.
The effect of this volume is therefore curiously to make Guantánamo and our abuses there unfold on an abstract “literary” plane rather than in real life and real time. That’s too bad, since Falkoff and the other lawyers behind this project have acted in enormous good faith and some day will be recognized for their legal work as national heroes. But imagine a volume of Osip Mandelstam’s poetry released by the Soviet government in 1938, or an anthology of poems by Japanese internment prisoners released by our government during the Second World War. The government’s disingenuous resistance to this book’s publication aside (a wooden official statement denounces the book as “another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies”), the Pentagon ought to get an editor’s credit on “Poems From Guantánamo.”
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