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Guantanamo - digternes bugt
Senere på året udkommer på engelsk en samling af digte skrevet af indsatte på Guantanamo, skriver The Guardian.
Det er juraprofessor Marc Falkoff fra Northern Illinois University, der repræsenterer 17 af lejrens indsatte og ad den vej blev opmærksom på, at der faktisk er mange af de indsatte, der er begyndt at skrive poesi:
It all began when he turned up at the secure facility in Washington DC where all communications from detainees are sent, and found a poem waiting for him.Et af de mere absurde aspekter af koncentrationslejrens regimente er, at de indsatte ikke ejer deres egne ord, og at de militære myndigheder anser sådanne digte for potentielt set endog meget farlige - så farlige, at de fortjener at være hemmeligstemplede:
"The first poem I saw was sent to me by Abdulsalam al Hela," he says. "It's a moving cry about the injustice of arbitrary detention and at the same time a hymn to the comforts of religious faith."
"It was interesting to me because I did a PhD in literature, but I didn't think too much about it."
A second poem from another client followed soon after, and Falkoff began to wonder if other lawyers also had clients who were sending poetry. It turned out that Guantánamo Bay is "filled with itinerant poets".
Many of the poems deal with the pain and humiliation inflicted on the detainees by the US military. Others express disbelief and a sense of betrayal that Americans - described in one poem as "protectors of peace" - could deny detainees any kind of justice. Some engage with wider themes of nostalgia, hope and faith in God.
Not content with imprisoning the authors, the Pentagon has refused to declassify many of their words, arguing that poetry "presents a special risk" to national security because of its "content and format". In a memo sent on September 18 2006, the team assigned to deal with communications between lawyers and their clients explains that they do not "maintain the requisite subject matter expertise" and says that poems "should continue to be considered presumptively classified".Pennen er stærkere end sværdet, eller er det elefanten, der på bedste øststats-maner frygter sine indsatte mus?
Hvor gode er disse digte så? Ifølge artiklen af svingende kvalitet, som det også er forventeligt, omstændighederne taget i betragtning, og meget af interessen er trods alt ikke blot litterær:
Falkoff is hoping the collection of poems from Guantánamo Bay will put a human face on people branded by the former American defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as "among the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the Earth".Og måske det primært er det, de militære censorer er bange for.
The quality of the poems in the collection is "variable", says Falkoff, but "there's some really good stuff there". He stresses that because of security restrictions he has often been unable to see anything more than translations prepared without "poetry in mind". Nevertheless some of the poems transcend their extraordinary circumstances, he says, and "just knock me over".
With the courts moving slowly towards fair and open hearings, he continues, "the detainees' own words may become part of the dialogue. Perhaps their poems will prick the conscience of a nation."