A law professor at Northern Illinois University, Marc Falkoff, has gathered a collection of poems from detainees at the Guantánamo Bay Detainment Camp in Cuba.
Falkoff plans to publish the collection titled Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak in the fall of 2007 through the University of Iowa Press. Most of the poems were written in Arabic and have been translated by “non-professionals,” according to Ken Silverstein, Washington editor for Harper’s Magazine.
Falkoff is also an attorney for seventeen Guantánamo detainees, and he holds a doctorate in literature. He claims that several of his clients were sending him poetry, but that poetry itself did not motivate Falkoff to publish it. Interestingly, he hatched that idea while reading Here Bullet by Iraq War veteran, Brian Turner. Falkoff, then, contacted other attorneys and discovered that they also had poems from their detainee clients. Falkoff explains, “It hit me that we could pull a lot of this stuff together as a collection so the public could, yes, hear the voices of Guantánamo, and perhaps move [[beyond]] the administration's sloganeering.”
Falkoff does not explain what he means by “the administration's sloganeering” or what would result by moving beyond said sloganeering. But later he says, referring to some of the poems being classified by the Pentagon, “It was not made clear whether the Pentagon believes the danger lies in the power of words or in the risk that detainees could send coded messages to terrorist operatives through their poems. “ As much as I'd like to think it's the former, I presume it's the latter.”
In other words, Falkoff would prefer to believe that the Pentagon wants to censor the poems for ideological reasons, which is not be a legitimate reason instead of for security reasons which is a legitimate reason. And although he thinks the Pentagon’s reasons are valid, he would prefer that they were not valid. So this lawyer with a doctorate in literature would rather his government do things for poor reasons instead of for valid ones.
Detainee, Jumah al-Dossari, who was captured by Pakistani security in 2001, was brought to Guantánamo. Al-Dossari claims he has been beaten and isolated for long periods of time. He denies any terrorist connection. Allegedly, he has tried to kill himself several times. Al-Dossari will have his poem, “Death Poem,” included in the Falkoff’s upcoming anthology:
Take my blood.
Take my death shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.
Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.
And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden, before their children and before history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace.”
Another example of the poetry Falkoff has deemed to have literary value is Ibrahim al Rubaish’s “Ode to the Sea”:
Your beaches are sadness, captivity, pain and injustice whose bitterness eats away at patience
Your calm is death, and your sweeping is strange and a silence rises up from you, holding treachery in its fold.
Perhaps it is the lack of skill of the “non-professional” translators, perhaps it is the tone deafness of the lawyer/doctorate in literature, or perhaps it is a combination of the two, but this book will serve no useful purpose. This kind of doggerel may serve to fill the idle hours of the possible terrorist waiting for justice at a military detainment camp, but it does not bode well for a book that will call itself poetry.
