Sunday, August 19, 2007

Al-Buraq Bard Brigades Bomb

Dan Chiasson brings sound aesthetics and bad politics to bear on the Gitmo poets. From the NY Times:
. . .It is hard to imagine a reader so hardhearted as to bring aesthetic judgment to bear on a book written by men in prison without legal recourse, several of them held in solitary confinement, some of them likely subjected to practices that many disinterested parties have called torture.
It's poetry, Man! Do what you must!
You don’t read this book for pleasure; you read it for evidence. And if you are an American citizen you read it for evidence of the violence your government is doing to total strangers in a distant place, some of whom (perhaps all of whom, since without due process how are we to tell?) are as innocent of crimes against our nation as you are.

. . . a better subtitle might have been “The Detainees Do Not Speak” or perhaps “The Detainees Are Not Allowed to Speak.” But the best subtitle, I fear, would have been “The Pentagon Speaks.” To be sure, it’s hard to imagine a straightforward propagandistic use for the lines “America sucks, America chills, / While d’ blood of d’ Muslims is forever getting spilled”; but you can’t help suspecting that this entire production is some kind of public relations psych-out, “proof” that dissent thrives even in the cells of Guantánamo. (Does that sound paranoid? Can you think of another good reason the Pentagon would have selected these lines out of thousands for publication?)
Thousands of lines? Does that portend a future unabridged Gitmo anthology?
You have to be in the mood for some death-defying Orwellian back-flips, then, to read “Poems From Guantánamo.” When Martin Mubanga, an “athletic kickboxer” and a “citizen of both the United Kingdom and Zambia” (the poems come with extensive biographical notes, often more evocative than the poems themselves) refers to “hard-core detainees like you an’ me” — is this a case of the Pentagon’s missing the irony or, more likely, has the Pentagon deemed that analogy so absurd as to reveal a dangerous criminal mind-set? Since the poem, written in an absurd ersatz-gangsta patois, possesses exactly zero literary interest, what is a reader to do besides try to locate the governmental cunning in clearing it for publication?
Perhaps Rove took it with him when he left?
But the bulk of these poems are so vague, their claims so conventional, that they might have been written at any point in history by anyone suffering anything. “What kind of spring is this, / Where there are no flowers and / The air is filled with a miserable smell?” Even though these lines were, we are told, carved into a Styrofoam cup (the detainees were for a time denied pen and paper), they mimic the kinds of things sad or frustrated people have always written. But surely being imprisoned in Guantánamo rises to a level of wretchedness beyond mere sadness or frustration. When Sami Al Haj, a detainee whose biography says he was “tortured at both Bagram Air Base and Kandahar” before ending up at Guantánamo, writes that “hot tears covered my face,” he sounds like a teenage sonneteer, not the victim of nearly unimaginable physical cruelty. Such are the unfortunate diminishing returns of poetic figuration, which, except in extraordinary cases, blunts where it purports to sharpen, blurs where it promised focus.

The effect of this volume is therefore curiously to make Guantánamo and our abuses there unfold on an abstract “literary” plane rather than in real life and real time. That’s too bad, since Falkoff and the other lawyers behind this project have acted in enormous good faith and some day will be recognized for their legal work as national heroes . . .
Chiasson concludes "the Pentagon ought to get an editor’s credit on 'Poems From Guantánamo.'" Perhaps they should put out a Gitmo prose anthology and hire Chiasson to ghostwrite it. (Hat Tip: Power Line)

More on the Gitmo Bards:

Gitmo Poetry Preview!
Gitmo Poetry Preview II

Crossposted on Soccer Dad

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