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new yorker

APRIL 16, 2015

 

 

“Guantánamo Diary”

and the American

Slave Narrative

 

 

BY 

 

 

Detainees at Guantánamo Bay kneel for prayer. CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN MOORE/GETTY

Detainees at Guantánamo Bay kneel for prayer.
CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN MOORE/GETTY

 

In January, Little, Brown published Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s “Guantánamo Diary,” the first full accounting of the rendition and detainment of a person imprisoned at Guantánamo. Edited by Larry Siems—though edited first, Siems notes, by the United States government, which left more than twenty-five hundred black-bar redactions—the book details more than three years of Slahi’s imprisonment. This includes, most notably, his torture under what is known euphemistically as a “special interrogation plan,” which was personally approved by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The diary was completed in late September, 2005; Slahi remains at Guantánamo to this day.

Those considering the diary, including Siems himself, often seek literary touchstones for the extraordinary document. For Siems, the model is ancient and Greek. “By my count,” he writes, Slahi “deploys a vocabulary of under seven thousand words—a lexicon about the size of the one that powers the Homeric epics. He does so in ways that sometimes echo those epics, as when he repeats formulaic phrases for recurrent phenomena and events. And he does so, like the creators of the epics, in ways that manage to deliver an enormous range of action and emotion.” Other readers find more modern echoes. John le Carré’s blurb on the book’s back cover cites Orwell and Kafka. Kafka comes up often: Publishers Weekly calls Slahi’s battle with interrogators “Kafkaesque.” For Mark Danner, writing in the New York Times, Kafka’s Joseph K. looms as just one “great literary spirit” alongside two others—Samuel Beckett and the Dostoyevsky of “The House of the Dead.” In making the connection to Dostoyevsky, Danner also follows Siems’s lead, calling Slahi’s work “a kind of dark masterpiece, a sometimes unbearable epic of pain.”

The impulse to establish a generic or authorial lineage for “Guantánamo Diary” is understandable, and useful: it not only helps to highlight the remarkable literary effects and historic significance of the book, it can also help readers to reckon with a narrative we haven’t seen before—and which many people believed was impossible in a piece of literature written about modern America. “Guantánamo Diary” is an odyssey, as Siems points out; Guantánamo does resemble Dostoyevsky’s Siberian prison camp. The book indeed illustrates, Beckett-like, the absurdity of Slahi’s captors, and, Kafka-like, the opacity of his captivity. Explaining the Kafka comparison, Danner writes that “the signs of Slahi’s guilt are everywhere,” yet he’s never formally charged with a crime. There is even a haunting echo of the famous last words—“Like a dog!”—that Joseph K. speaks as the knife is turned. Slahi writes of an interrogator who would say during their sessions, “Looks like a dog, walks like a dog, smells like a dog, barks like a dog, must be a dog.” Slahi’s response: “It sounded awful, I know I am not a dog, and yet I must be one.”

My own reckoning with the book in these terms, though—my own way of finding a place for torture on my bookshelf, as it were—began with a passage near the end, where Slahi reflects in a general way on his life in captivity. He writes,

I often compared myself with a slave. Slaves were taken forcibly from Africa, and so was I. Slaves were sold a couple of times on their way to their final destination, and so was I. Slaves suddenly were assigned to somebody they didn’t choose, and so was I.

Slahi is referring specifically to American chattel slavery, known in the South by a self-satisfying euphemism of its own: “our peculiar institution.” Another thing Slahi shares with the American slave is that the system of his oppression—“a secret operation aimed at kidnapping, detaining, torturing,” in his words—was grown here. And Slahi’s writing resembles, in both the details of his story and the intention behind its telling, a body of American literature whose testimonies represent the clearest arguments against human bondage and systems of brutality that this country has ever produced.

In the introductory essay to his 1987 collection, “The Classic Slave Narratives”—which brings together accounts by Olaudah Equiano, Mary Prince, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Jacobs—Henry Louis Gates, Jr., describes the birth of a new type, or category, of literature. As an editor of “The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers,” I’ve come to know intimately the genesis of one particular narrative—and the struggle and fame that accompanied its publication—in the mode Gates describes. 

In the long history of human bondage, it was only the black slaves in the United States who—once secure and free in the North, and with the generous encouragement and assistance of northern abolitionists—created a genre of literature that at once testified against their captors and bore witness to the urge of every black slave to be free and literate.

An original American art form, the slave narrative was not without models—in particular, the picaresque novel. But as true testimony by formerly enslaved people, it stood alone, Gates argues, as an indictment of “both those who enslaved them and the metaphysical system drawn upon to justify their enslavement.” What’s more, with a whole system in its sights, “the black slave’s narrative came to be a communal utterance, a collective tale, rather than an individual’s autobiography. Each slave author, in writing about his or her personal life’s experiences, simultaneously wrote on behalf of the millions of silent slaves still held captive throughout the South.”

By the end of the Civil War, Gates reports, formerly enslaved men and women had written more than a hundred book-length narratives. And, over the decades, a pattern developed “in both their content and their formal shape.” Readers of these stories could expect to see the acquisition of literacy—reading and writing were viewed as paths to freedom. Testimonials by respected white figures were appended to the fronts and backs of these narratives to assure readers of the good character of the writer and the veracity of his or her tale. The narrator, too, assured the reader of the story’s utter authenticity and his own integrity. Here is Equiano’s opening line: “Permit me, with the greatest deference and respect, to lay at your feet the following genuine narrative.” And the start of Jacobs’s preface: “Reader, be assured that this narrative is no fiction. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true. I have not exaggerated the wrongs inflicted by Slavery; on the contrary, my descriptions fall far short of the facts.”

Slahi tells us that his life seemed to him like the life of a slave. From the very beginning, the reader is confronted with a man in chains, then a man stripped naked, a blindfolded man, a man “in Uncle Sam’s hands,” pulled up a set of airplane steps “like a dead body.” “Guantánamo Diary” comes with the implicit endorsement of the host of pro-bono attorneys it took to declassify the document, and Siems, like Jacobs’s editor, Lydia Maria Child, stands in his defense. Slahi, too, insists to the reader that he’s telling the truth. “I don’t even know how to treat this subject,” he writes. “I have only written what I experienced, what I saw, what I learned first-hand.” Eschewing hearsay was one of Jacobs’s strategies as well, in an 1857 letter to the abolitionist Amy Post, who would write one of several endorsements for her “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl”: “I have another object in view—it is to come to you just as I am a poor slave Mother—not to tell you what I have heard but what I have seen—and what I have suffered.” While Slahi details much of the brutality he has faced, he also, like Jacobs, spares the reader some of what he found most demeaning—especially those abuses of a sexual nature: “I am saving you here from quoting the degusting and degrading talk I listen to from noon or before until 10 p.m.” While Jacobs does detail her life in ways that reveal “a woman’s struggle against her oppression in slavery as a sexual object,” as her biographer Jean Fagan Yellin notes, within the narrative itself, Jacobs mainly hews to her readers’ Victorian sensibilities. (Reporting a heavy heart at the birth of a daughter into slavery, Jacobs writes, “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.”)

Like the authors of slave narratives, Slahi writes with a literacy he’s learned from his captors on behalf of the men held captive alongside him. And he writes, like those authors, for essentially polemical reasons for an American audience whose sympathy he can’t help but expect. “As I write these words,” he writes as the book comes to a close, “many brothers are hunger-striking and are determined to carry on, no matter what. I am very worried about these brothers I am helplessly watching, who are practically dying.” Slahi says at one point that he “looked at the history of slaves,” though it’s not clear whether he means that he has studied at Guantánamo the kinds of books his story seems to be modelled after. He reports getting as a gift Steve Martin’s “The Pleasure of My Company,” and credits “The Catcher in the Rye” for his “first unofficial laughter in the ocean of tears.” He was reading what he could. I asked the New York Times reporter Charlie Savage, who has written about his June, 2013, visit to the Guantánamo library, whether he recalled seeing any slave narratives or histories of slavery in the collection. He did not.

Regardless of whether Slahi has read Douglass or Jacobs, Prince or Equiano, “Guantánamo Diary” is their kind of book—an American literature that, as Gates says of the slave narrative, has “had to satisfy the dual expectations of shaping the random events of their lives into a meaningful and compelling pattern, while also making the narrative of their odyssey from slavery to freedom an emblem” of the human desire to be free. Slahi’s narrative is such an emblem. While the scope and duration of American slavery dwarf those of the C.I.A. detainment program, and some, I’m sure, would rather not see the two compared at all, reading Slahi’s book in light of the slave narrative brought to mind a phrase from J. M. Coetzee’s “Elizabeth Costello”: “Degrees of obscenity.” Slahi may never escape. Even so, his words have gotten out, and we’ve seen the horrors many of us believed were impossible. We know what torture looks like. By reading this book, we come to know a man who was tortured. With such knowledge comes the hope that we, like those who read Equiano and Prince in their moment, and Douglass and Jacobs as the nation divided and then went to war, will stand accused as he accuses us. Slavery and its literature accused a nation and continue to accuse—more than Kafka ever could.
Scott Korb is an associate editor of “The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers” and the author, most recently, of “Light Without Fire: The Making of America’s First Muslim College.”

 

>via: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/guantanamo-diary-and-the-american-slave-narrative?mbid=nl_041715_Daily&CNDID=30109741&mbid=nl_041715_Daily&CNDID=30109741&spMailingID=7672752&spUserID=NjQyOTc2MTkzNjES1&spJobID=661657091&spReportId=NjYxNjU3MDkxS0