The current state of poetry can be deduced from the fact that one of the most talked-about collections in recent times was borne of a marriage between terrorists and lawyers. “Poems from Guantanamo” is a slight book containing 22 “poems” authored by detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. The majority of the pages, however, comprise the accompanying introductory materials, biographies, and an afterward, which were written by others in an attempt to supply an aura of gravitas to the whole affair and to indicate the reason these poems were published at all, and the specific agenda of those responsible for it.
The Acknowledgements page is telling. This collection of poetry, we are told, would not exist were it not for the efforts of “hundreds of volunteer lawyers.” The bulk of the page is a recitation of the names of many of those counselors. As an afterthought, a short list of translators is provided at the end.
The Introduction by Marc Falkoff, a lawyer representing a number of the detainees, portrays them in devout religious terms, never once uttering the word “terrorist.” But these people didn’t find their way to Gitmo because they spent all their time in mosques praying for the welfare of people of all faiths. He outrageously compares the Gitmo detainees with the prisoners in Nazi concentration camps and the Soviet Gulag.
Most of the verses composed at Gitmo have not been released by the Pentagon, apparently for fear that they might contain secret messages. Falkoff admits the translators are not experts and that the translations “cannot do justice to the subtlety and cadence of the originals,” he writes, but when we look at the wretched poems themselves, Falkoff’s suggestion that they possess a superior quality in the original becomes ludicrous. It’s an absurdity only an advocate for terrorists would think to spout. He paints the Pentagon as an evil entity censoring many of the poems which still remain classified, but even so, “Representative voices of the detainees may now be heard.”
Reading through the poems, one feels like a beggar rummaging through a garbage can looking for a diamond but finding nothing but rotten tomatoes. The entire enterprise—from the words carved in cups or written on paper, to the translation, to the editing, to the publication—is a complete fraud. This book was published to serve as a political tool as part of an ongoing effort by anti-war activists to shut down the Gitmo prison. Falkoff and the others believe the detainees are innocent of any crime—or that there isn’t enough evidence to convict them in a US court of law. So this book portrays them as the opposite of what they are: innocent poets who were somehow in the wrong place at the wrong time. Sympathy for terrorists and terrorist-wannabes is the order of the day. They’re poets! Political prisoners! Let’s turn reality on its head and see who gets dizzy.
Monday, January 14, 2008
Book Review: Poems from Guantanamo
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