Yemen Times: "Yemeni poets behind Gitmo’s bars"

Portrait of the artist as a young man:

Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif, 28, was in Pakistan looking for medical treatment – he had an injury from an accident in 1994, and was looking around the world for affordable treatment. In 2004, Pakistani forces detained him and turned him over to the United States for a $5,000 bounty, after which he became a Guantanamo detainee . . .

American lawyer Marc Falkoff described Latif as a small, thin Yemeni man with a scraggly beard. He recalled, “I first met Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif soon after I filed a habeas corpus petition on his behalf in late 2004. We were sitting in an interview cell, really a retrofitted storage container, at Camp Echo in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Across the table, Latif sat with his arms crossed and his head down. The guards had removed his handcuffs, but when he shifted his weight his leg irons clanged and echoed in the bare room. The irons were chained to an eyebolt on the floor. Guards were stationed outside the door, and a video camera was visible in the corner.”

Early this year, Latif began a hunger strike, which the military countered by force-feeding him liquid nutrients, inserting a tube up his nose and into his stomach.

My nose aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of Zam Zam I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull feed-tube to the drains . . .

Hunger striking wasn’t the only method that Latif used to express his pain, and his protests against the mistreatment that Guantanamo prisoners receive. He transferred his suffering to poetry . . .

The mind is its own place and in itself
Can make a Heav'n of Gitmo, Place of Bards
Lying astonished on the oblivious pool
Bereft of ink, to buffeting board inured . . .

Writing poetry was both difficult and dangerous for the prisoners, who weren't given pens or paper until 2003. Some of the poems written by inmates were first scrawled in toothpaste on Styrofoam cups or etched into the cups with small stones, since in their first year of captivity the prisoners were not allowed to use pen and paper . . .

Thou still unlettered cup of styrofoam,
Unetched with pebbles or with paste of tooth
Mute polymer, O canst thou then express,
Paper denied, a wrack'd and fettered truth?

The strict security arrangements governing anything written by Guantanamo Bay inmates meant that 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 cadence of the originals." [...]

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

Tags: Gitmo, poetry, Al-Buraq Bard Brigades