Gitmo Understanding

Meghan O'Rourke reviews Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak in Slate. Let me quote a few bits to give you the tenor of the piece:

it drives home the plurality of experience and attitudes of those incarcerated, pushing back against the tendency to view them as interchangeable "enemy combatants."

as the way the poems restore individuality to those who have been dehumanized and vilified in the eyes of the public.

The poems short-circuit the entrenched scripts of "American" vs. "Muslim" and "us" vs. "them" and replace them, briefly, with the considerations of one individual trying to speak to another.

The words tyrant (referring to George W. Bush) and oppression recur, as does an acute frustration that Americans who employ the rhetoric of peace and democracy cannot see the hypocrisy of their actions

Curiously, the Western reader may find herself unable to read a poem without trying to evaluate the author's relationship toward the United States. It is a hopeless task, and the kind of exercise in judgment better suited to a judge and jury than to a literary critic.

It is a method of reading Miller cautions the reader against, noting that it only reinscribes the kind of us vs. them thinking the poems themselves begin to complicate.

If certain poems participate in the kind of generalized anti-American invective ("For they are a people without reasonable minds,/ Due to their supply of alcoholic drinks") we've been primed to expect from Muslims by the Bush administration, many others find a vocabulary of their own to express an individualized anger and dismay.

And because the poems are lyric fragments, rather than extended memoirs, they do not leave us with a sense that we have a comprehensive handle on the author's point of view. Rather, these poems both humanize their authors and keep them obscure to us

Instead, it performs a valuable service in humanizing the individuals incarcerated there, reminding us that even those charged with crimes are people, not faceless automatons—even as it also leaves us with a potent sense of how much we don't know about them.

So there you have it--the prisoners at Guantanamo are complex individuals, and don't you dare claim to fully understand them, while Bush and the people who agree with him are a mindless monolith who shouldn't be treated with the same respect.