The Enemy Combatant as Poet: The Politics of Writing in Poems from Guantanamo

As documents of the “enemy combatant,” the poems collected in Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak are unique to post-9/11 literature. Concerned centrally with the “world-changing” impact of trauma and spectacle, post-9/11 literature reinforces the testimonial function of witnessing implicit in human rights discourse.¹ This testimonial function figures the suffering human as an object of the law, and therefore cannot challenge imperial sovereignty and its extralegal legality. Take the second of “Two Fragments,” by Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost:

Just as the heart beats in the darkness of the body,

So I, despite this cage, continue to beat with life.

Those who have no courage or honor consider themselves free,

But they are slaves.

I am flying on the wings of thought,

And so, even in this cage, I know a greater freedom.

Dost’s poem describes the hypocrisy of the liberalism that has informed the “justice” of oppressive measures, leading to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and to extralegal practices at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. The poem’s tropes display the suffering body and thereby present the body as an object to observe. Dost testifies to the imprisonment of the “I” and to the “I”’s persistence as a “beating heart”; these conditions of confinement are portrayed to be witnessed. The speaker seems to affirm the persistence of the human spirit in the face of suffering, invoking a central and pervasive idea about the sufferer’s humanity. In the poems, the various layers of testimony—of the enemy combatant who testifies as a criminal, as a victim, and as a witness—create a legal situation outside of which none of the poems’ readers can think and which makes it impossible for them to see the relation between aesthetics and politics. If we consider the poems’ aesthetics, however, instead of reading them only as extensions of the discourses of human rights and of political resistance, then we can get a better idea of the political subject and of the torture and suffering to which he testifies.

 
But how does the poem caution against the reader’s identification with the figure of suffering that it simultaneously invokes? How does it question the “authentic ‘I’” that it also presents, stages, and puts on display? Dost’s poem, which is notably silent on the role of the witness (the spectator, the world, the bystander), remains ambiguous about the way its “body” can be read. Looking closely at the ways in which the materiality of the “body” is constructed in writing, we can advance some tentative theses about the way the function of testimony is called into question here. In Dost’s poem, the heart is a synecdoche for the “I,” and establishes an analogy between the “dark body” and the cage or prison cell. This rhetorical move places the heart in the cage, its beating a figure of the nonhuman aspect of a speaker whose bird-like insistence on flight brings to mind the image of the winged heart. The popular tattoo of a winged heart (a form of inscription that resonates with the method, used by many detainees, of inscribing Styrofoam cups with their verse before they were allowed pens and paper) is properly called the Tughra Inayati, the symbol of faith for Universal Sufism, the mystical expression of Islam. Tughra, in fact, refers to the act of writing; in Arabic it means “finely ornamented writing,” describing the detailed calligraphic script comprising the wings and the heart. A kind of object poem, then, Dost’s fragment produces this mystical symbol as a generic and universal emblem.² As a riddle, the poem creates distance between the author and the speaker and thereby challenges the principles that define the human being both by means of the extralegal law of imperial sovereignty, which isolates the body of the individual as the object of the law, and by means of the universalist and abstract notion of “human rights,” which can only respond through this same figure. Accordingly, the poetic speaker can be read as a cipher for the ways that the structure of oppression produces and enforces our identification with and as depoliticized subjects.
 
Dost’s poem allows us to consider how the identity between speaker and author, which is mandated in testimony, is produced by such formal and often material conventions. In her perceptive discussion of the ways that post-9/11 literature remains “formally familiar,” Rachel Greenwald Smith describes aesthetic form as reflective of a psychological defense against trauma.³ Her reading focuses on the “permeability” of affect, suggesting that 9/11 has made feeling vulnerable to the impingement of that other key characteristic of twenty-first century literary subjectivity. It is interesting, in this light, that reviewers of Poems from Guantanamo find the poems in the collection to be “generic” and “conventional,” works that could have been written at any time “by anyone suffering anything” (Chiasson). Insisting that the poems are “familiar”—or that they are not “good” enough to merit reading—the reviews, even if ostensibly critical of Guantanamo, are in fact symptomatic of the very logic of empire, which for the past decade has continued its empire-building activity while its critics and victims testify to and “expose” its oppression and corruption. In what follows, by contrast, I show how the initially defensive quality of the “formally familiar” becomes an aggressive measure when it is extended to understanding the poetry of the enemy combatant.
 
The uniqueness of the collection lies, then, in asking us how to read the writing of the enemy and in the challenge it thereby poses to received ideas about the testimonial function in both 9/11 and human rights literature. The collection, which has generated much discussion about inaccessible originals, translation, bad poetry, and the capacity of poetry to transmit “secret messages,” was gathered and edited by Marc Falkoff, a lawyer of some of the prisoners. By arguing that the central provocation of the publication is how to read the “enemy,” I challenge the popular assumption that its main question is how a tortured, traumatized body speaks. Instead, I ask how the “enemy combatant” comes to be redefined when he is understood as a lyric subject. To read the enemy combatant as a poet is to reject common images of the detainee as a victim of torture, on the one hand, or, on the other, as a fundamentalist terrorist.
 
The “enemy combatant,” a term employed to obscure and efface the identity of the person to whom it refers, designates the “barbarian” of our times, a figure whose alien otherness and position “before the law” announces opposition to the civilization implicit in empire. According to the logics of sovereignty and visibility that are predominant among critical efforts to understand the post-9/11 era, the enemy combatant is seen to reveal the barbarism of empire itself.⁴ Although these logics have been invoked by the Left to expose the hypocrisy of power, their shortcomings are apparent in readings that see the enemy combatant, like the poetic subject, as little more than a placeholder for opposition to empire. In contrast to reading the poetic speaker within the framework of the “state of exception,” I ask how a political subject emerges from a position of “assumed guilt.” The enemy combatant, as I describe him, denotes not only the unnamable negativity of empire, but also the duplicitous position of being assumed guilty and of assuming guilt for the crimes of others. The poems confront the historical rewriting of the subject of human rights literature as a victim rather than as an opponent of oppression, and introduce the paradoxical status of being at once victim and political subject.⁵
 
These considerations for reading the political subject must also include the complex history of the relationships between written and oral traditions, and between traditional and non-traditional forms of poetry. In his introduction to the collection, “Arab Prison Poetry,” Flagg Miller explains that the poems participate in various histories of poetic form, of Arab liberation, of prison literature, and of human rights discourse.⁶ As illustrated by Dost’s example, the poetic speaker takes place within a history of forms that is irreducible to the enunciation of a universal human subject. The ambiguity of this poetic speaker resists discernible efforts to provide a “close-up” of the terrorist turned victim, and in this way, the poems operate critically in a milieu otherwise rife with naïve assumptions about the self-evidence of testimony in expressive work. Along these lines, I find that the poems are not merely documents of barbarism—neither of the barbarism suspected of their authors, nor of the barbaric captivity to which they testify—but are in addition works that think through this “final,” post-9/11 stage of the dialectic between culture and barbarism.⁷ Reading the enemy combatant lyrically, as an anonymous and nonhuman subject, I explore the political alternatives that become imaginable with the poems’ publication and that are occluded by the term “enemy combatant” and by a dismissal of the enemy combatant as poet.
 

The Testimonial Function

 
Reviewers of the poems in Western media regard them as testimonies that “make visible” the crimes of the U.S. war on terror.⁸ In considering the assumptions and accusations of these disparate readers, I explore how this politics of exposure and visibility is undergirded by a dismissal of the poems’ specific “content and format.”⁹ The testimonial conflation of biography and speaker is accomplished in a dismissal of poetic form, a move that depoliticizes the poems and turns the resistant enemy into a tortured body. Robert Pinsky’s bland pronouncement that there “are no Mandelshtams here” serves as a model of this dismissal. Pinsky uses “Mandelshtam” to refer to the shared theme of imprisonment, but his reference emphasizes aesthetic form over political content. Pinsky’s judgment, which relies on a separation of aesthetics and politics that has been challenged by both poststructuralism and Marxist literary theory, indicates the poems’ embeddedness in the testimonial function, their tendency to be read as biographies of human suffering even when their readers purport to read them as “literary” documents.¹⁰ By reading the poems as more than testimonies, however, we can appreciate them not as biographical texts about universal human suffering, but as connected to the world differently and more singularly than this legalist, discursive abstraction of the human subject allows.
 
The production of a human subject—if not of humanity—was, however, the aim shared by Falkoff and the other human rights lawyers who saw the volume through to publication.¹¹ As Falkoff notes, this, and not the danger of coded messages in the original Pashto or Arabic versions, constituted the real threat posed by the poetry. He writes,

If the inmates were writing words like “the Eagle flies at dawn,” the censors might have a case, but they are not… [W]hat the military fears is not so much the possibility of secret messages being communicated, but the power of words to make people outside realize that these are human beings who have not had their day in court.

As Falkoff argues, the “power of words” is not in the words themselves, not in what they say, but in what they do: they allow us to perceive the “human beings” behind them. For Falkoff, the merit of the poems is their self-evidence as testimonies, and this testimony produces the subject as human.

 
The question of what constitutes a recognizable human being in this context is raised by critics on the academic Left as well. As Anne McClintock demonstrates in her essay “Paranoid Empire,” the endpoint of such critical, post-9/11 work is to shift from exposing the corrupt foundations of the oppressors to making visible the plight of the oppressed. In describing the paradigm of morality that followed Abu Ghraib, she extends Falkoff’s ideas about exposing the common humanity of the prisoners by pointing to how such an exposure intensifies our focus on ourselves. She writes,

The pornography argument turned the question of torture abroad back to a question about us in the United States: our morality, our corrupt sexualities, our loss of international credibility, our gender misrule. In the storm of moral agitation about our pornography and our loss of the moral high ground, the terrible sufferings of ordinary, innocent people in two occupied and devastated countries were thrown into shadow.

(100)

McClintock claims that “our” moral crisis competes with and displaces the suffering of others. Distinguishing between these two areas—morality versus suffering—McClintock seems to present the task of radical politics as the choice between two projects, but what emerges more tellingly is the extent to which these two choices are not really distinct. They are located rather in two subject positions—those of a moral self and a suffering other—that are both congruous with figures of testimony in human rights discourse.

The identity between poet and sufferer is enforced in the editorial decision to include a brief biography of each prisoner alongside his poem or poems (and it comes as no surprise that many find these “more evocative than the poems themselves” [Chiasson]). The insistently visual rhetoric of torture, which has become an integral part of the discourse on terrorism, makes its way in this manner into the poetic frame, by giving each name a figure.¹² Through the biographical “close-up,” we get what seems to be missing in the translated poems: the original, innocent prisoner—a victim of anti-terrorism and not a terrorist.¹³
 
The “sufferer” who testifies in Jumah al Dossari’s “Death Poem,” by contrast, questions his own status as a human being. The poetic speaker considers his death, presenting the public display of his body as signs of an “innocent” and “sinless” soul:

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.”

The speaker narrates a fantasy of his death, preparing his body as an offering to the world, and the poem thus engages its own polarization of guilt and innocence to assert the speaker’s innocence. He describes how his body should be sent to “judges and / To the people of conscience.” In an ironic appeal to habeas corpus, the innocent body thus bears a guilt which is not his own. At first seeming to sediment the opposition between guilt and innocence, ending with the hypocrisy of the “protectors of peace,” the poem attacks the supposed objectivity of conscience, and with it, the idea that guilt and innocence can be extricated from one another. The judges, who should be impartial, bear “the guilty burden, before the world, / Of this innocent soul.” The poem, which asserts the innocence of its speaker, does so by calling into question the function of “bear[ing] the burden” of his “wasted, sinless soul.” The speaker does not bare his soul, but makes apparent the difference between what belongs to the first person and what belongs to the world. Al Dossari’s poem employs a thematic concern with journey—the ironic and impossible journey of a body, of “sending” a body as a document to the world. The merit of the poem lays in the construction of the body as a site of elegy, as much an object as a subject of the poem. It asks how the body can be produced as a site of justice, or how human rights— figured in the world, in conscience, and in the judges—has failed to provide justice.

 
Al Dossari’s fantasy of what the poetic body can do is the opposite of what Shirley Dent imagines in her review of the poems in her Guardian “Books blog” post, “We should look to democracy, not poetry, to deliver justice.” Dent claims that a properly functioning democracy is more possible, and more realistic, than a political subjectivity that would arise in poetry.¹⁴ She also claims that the poems don’t do enough, either as political documents or as aesthetic works. She does not mean, however, that poetry should do more, but rather that justice, this form of doing, should be left to democracy. Although acknowledging that we live in the “absence of real democracy,” her argument that the truths of poetry should be “objective, universal, and complex” serves to articulate the aesthetic principles that underlie her strict separation of aesthetics and politics. These principles do not leave room for the idea that poetry could in fact challenge ideas of justice, and especially that challenges to justice could come in aesthetic form.
 
Like other reviews, Dent’s argument, which also faults readers who want this type of affective evidence associated with poetry, relies on a dismissal of the literary value of the poetry. One of the most prominent of these reviews, “Notes on Prison Camp,” written by poet Dan Chiasson, appeared in the New York Times shortly after the publication of the poems. Chiasson, who finds the poets innocent, the poems bad, and the politics of publication “liberal,” indicts the poems on the basis of their generic universality.¹⁵ He claims that the bulk of the poems are “so vague, their claims so conventional, [they] mimic the kinds of things sad or frustrated people have always written.” Although Chiasson suggests that it would be wrong to judge the aesthetic merit of poems written by people under these conditions, this disclaimer functions to justify his sustained dismissal of the poems. The mimicry of which Chiasson accuses the poems is a matter not only of his ignorance of the form from which the poems derive, but of the extent to which an insistence on innocence depoliticizes the “human” subject.
 
Chiasson seems to conclude that the lack of literary merit in the poems can be separated from the identity of the poets, but when he suggests that Falkoff is part of a conspiracy with the U.S. government, for example, he explicitly invokes the idea that the poems can be read unambiguously and transparently as reflections of the prisoner biographies. His interpretation is openly supported by longtime activist and poet Maxine Kumin, who writes in a letter to the editor “commend[ing]” Chiasson for his “forthright, intelligent review.”¹⁶ She states: “Surely the press and the editor must have believed they were doing the public a service, though their combined naiveté in the light of the facts is overwhelming.” Kumin’s position is especially conflicted, not only because she also goes on to write her own “torture” poems—from the point-of-view of the detainees—but, as Falkoff claims, because she seems to be saying, “leave the poetry about Guantanamo to me” (Worthington). In asserting that the detainees should not be writing, and in extending the criteria of innocence to the “naive” press and editor, Kumin perhaps unintentionally suggests that testimonies cannot also be political. The mutually reinforcing theses of the lack of literary merit and of innocence as an attribute of human suffering lead to a separation of aesthetics and politics that many of these reviewers would deny in other contexts.
 
In response to these reviews, George Fragopoulos discusses the need to remove the “dividing line” between aesthetics and politics. As Falkoff acknowledges in his conversation with Andy Worthington, Fragopoulos argues that aesthetics and politics do not intersect in straightforward ways. It strikes me, however, that the separation of aesthetics and politics is not the crux of the problem. It seems rather that the disregard of aesthetic form is symptomatic of a conflation of biographical and poetic speaker, and that this conflation allows the reader to project his or her ideas about the identifiable human onto the subject of the poems. In her essay on Paul de Man’s “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” Barbara Johnson describes the similarity of anthropomorphism and aesthetic identification by comparing lyric poetry and the Supreme Court case of Rowland v. California Men’s Colony. She concludes that anthropomorphism is more than a tropological figure—more than an establishment of likeness—because it extends as “known” the “properties of the human.” Johnson thus defines the projective extension of what is known as fundamental to the identification of personhood. Her insight reminds us that the “I” is not a transparent subject, but rather a figure that is often the product of multiple projections.
 
The reviews that I have discussed project a knowable human subject and therefore dwell on aesthetic sentiments that arise from this schema of intelligibility. In her recent book Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?, Judith Butler applies the testimonial function of the poems to a different end; she argues that the poems, and their authors, constitute the opposition to U.S. empire. Butler takes human suffering, or the suffering victim of human rights discourse, and gives it political agency without addressing the aesthetic dynamic of activity and passivity at work in the poems themselves. Her collapse of the “I” into a “we” results in the projection of her own political ideals onto the subject.¹⁷ She adopts Falkoff’s appeal that the poems “testify” to the wrongs of detention and the humanity of the subjects. Butler finds that the poems attest to an alternative, non-Western form of ethical interaction; that is, they exhibit a particular humanity, the inspiring capacity for collective human interaction. She reads the poems as evidence of a “sense of solidarity, of interconnected lives that carry on each others’ words, suffer each others’ tears, and form networks that pose an incendiary risk not only to national security, but to the form of global sovereignty championed by the U.S.” (62). Butler derives this reading not from poetic form but from “the repeated and open question” of al Haj’s and others’ poems, “How does a tortured body form such words?” Butler’s point is that a tortured body does not form “such words,” by which she means poetry, but that it speaks the pain of an other: the words of the poem attest to the sufferings of an other and of others. Butler identifies the political potential of the poetry in its capacity to represent resistant humanity in the face of global sovereignty. Butler extends the political implications of Falkoff’s project, but in a manner that continues to think about the poems, and about the political subjectivity they represent, as a symptom of the internal antagonism and demise of American empire.
 
Butler, Chiasson, and Dent avoid the poems’ poetic qualities, all the while making strong claims about what the poems do or do not do as aesthetic documents, as if the politics are synonymous with the author’s biographical blurbs.¹⁸ The reviews are thus exemplary of the postwar depoliticization of art, which Adorno laments, for example, in his critique of the industry of culture. Along these lines, Arendt critiques not the separation of art and politics, which she understands as a conflict fundamental to society, but the role of the mediating faculty, the cultura animi, the “cultivated and trained mind” of culture. She describes how this faculty— taste—humanizes, and also how it can “de-barbarize” the world, in contrast to the way that society makes culture complicit, “monopoliz[ing] culture for its own purposes.” Arendt’s move to make art (and other activity) political is to count taste “among man’s political abilities” (220). Taste, the capacity to be in the position “to forget ourselves,” represents the role of the reader. To think of the poems not just as “documents,” or as “prison literature” and to include them within the purview of post-9/11 literature requires the aesthetic activity of forgetting oneself, of bringing the category of the “I”—like that of the “enemy combatant”—into question.
 

The Qasidah Form

 
In contrast to the interpretations discussed above, which emphasize the performative dimension of poetic work and thus place the poems firmly in the realm of contested visuality that is democratic politics, I now discuss a lyric activity that emerges where poetry and human rights intersect. I do so by asking what is particular to the poetic “content and format” of this writing. As I noted in the context of the reviews, the poetic “I”—here an ethnic “I,” to follow John Kim’s discussion of the way that the autobiographical “self” returns as a figure of “social collectivity” (337)—is made more powerfully human through an almost irresistible process of identification that collapses the distance between enunciating “I” and enunciated “I.” The “I” is the juncture of these concerns about the relation between aesthetics and politics: that figure, as Adorno found and as Dost’s poem illustrates, of “subjectivity turning to objectivity” (“Lyric Poetry” 46). As I show, the intricacy of aesthetics and politics contained in the lyric ambiguity of the poetic speaker—the indeterminacy of the “I”—disrupts these humanist models for thinking about the status and identity of the detainees. I focus on ways in which the poems’ recurring structure of the classical qasidah extends this mediation between aesthetics and politics by refusing the very terms of universal human rights that are invoked by the poems. Classical forms, and the neoclassical revival of these forms during the colonial period in the early twentieth century, thus retain an elusive, ambiguous, and somewhat spectral relationship to contemporary poetry, even as they are also rejected in the formally experimental free verse poetry of the latter half of the twentieth century. The poems of Guantanamo loosely represent the variety of these poetic forms; the collection includes poems that are traditional, formal, and experimental, and that reflect influences from diverse prison writings, all the while negotiating questions about the role of the human voice in writing.
 
Contextualizing the poems within the history of Arabic poetic forms particularizes and modifies some of the attributes of human rights literature and the transnational genres of prison and resistance literature, all of which are legible in the poems. The poems demonstrate how questions of form and of literary history can be brought to bear on larger political and social discourses. Flagg Miller’s introduction to the collection, which places the poems in the context of Arab liberation and Israeli occupation, focuses on the particular history of the qasidah, a form of Arabic poetry that is often compared to the ode. The traditional qasidah, according to Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, is a metered poem in monorhyme that is usually composed of fifteen to eighty lines (3–4).¹⁹ The qasidah is recognizable through its thematic units, which Stetkevych, in her foundational text on Arabic poetry, The Mute Immortals Speak, likens to the passage of ritual: the nasib, which consists of a description of the “abandoned encampment” (3); the rahil, which describes the poet’s journey; and the fakhr, the praise of self and tribe. Several of the poems from the collection—Emad Abdullah Hassan’s “The Truth,” Sami al Haj’s “ Humiliated in the Shackles,” Ibrahim al Rubaish’s “Ode to the Sea,” and Abdulla Majid al Noaimi’s “My Heart was Wounded by the Strangeness”—function as contemporary variations of the qasidah.
 
Scholars of the qasidah, including Flagg Miller and Hussein Kadhim, who take up the overt political and social uses of these poetic forms, discuss these variations and experimentations of form. Kadhim, for example, considers the neoclassical revival of the qasidah in the early twentieth century as a form of “incitement poetry” (shi ‘r al-tahrid) against colonialism.²⁰ In his reading, the rahil is a transitional part that links the elegiac nasib to the gharad, the poem’s main part and the locus of the political message. In his work on Yemeni poets, Miller describes a dialogic variation of the qasidah, the initiation-and-response poetry of the bid ‘wa jiwab. Miller focuses on the role of the messenger, who functions as a mediator between poet and receiver and thereby establishes the authority of the written text. Miller is thus attentive to what he calls the “scriptographic tropes” of the qasidah, those metaphorical and thematic indications of the process of writing within the text itself, and this kind of reading involves an elaboration of additional sections, such as a riddle following the main section, which serve as a provocation for the receiver to formulate his response. Kadhim’s and Miller’s discussions also take up the question of the relationship between the classical form of the qasidah and the innovations of the “free verse” movement in the fifties, which experimented with traditional and non-traditional forms of verse.²¹ Recognizing these traditional forms is central to reading the poems of Guantanamo, not because the poems mimic or allude to tradition as such, but because the persistence of these forms as fragments and variations presents a valid alternative to the human rights problem of how writing (after catastrophe or after torture) is possible.²²
 
Many of the poems in the collection explicitly assert the expressive power of the human voice, inviting the testimonial function that they have been accorded. But the force of this voice emerges from its paradoxical production of the poem as written text. In his poem “The Truth,” Emad Abdullah Hassan depicts the expressive force of the speaker’s “song” as the ability to restore the singing of birds: “Oh Night, my song will restore the sweetness of Life: / The birds will again chirp in the trees.” Here, “chirping” is an effect of the speaker’s song and of the human voice, and these two forms of expression—the human and the nonhuman—are conflated and collapsed. Hassan’s poem begins by asserting the redemptive value of the song:

Oh History, reflect. I will now

Disclose the secret of secrets.

My song will expose the damned oppression,

And bring the system to collapse.

The speaker’s “song” is thus the embodiment and expression of resistance, emerging at the limits of a system that it also aims to collapse. Here it begins to present a problem for the discourse of human rights that it also represents, troubling the aims of a discourse that attempts to bring the margins to its center. The “secret of secrets” is presented not as an elusive, mystical sign to be read, but as something that cannot be understood by the speaker’s enemies. Hassan tells us what his enemy cannot understand: “that all we need is Allah, our comfort.” The secret betrays the ambiguity of the very call for universality within the poems—that they neither simply speak the universal nor speak a coded universal but instead challenge the discourse of human rights to which they also appeal.

 
Hassan’s poem lays out the problem of the poetic subject who is situated at the crossroads of human rights and resistance literature. His speaker, like many others, announces an intention to use poetry as a vehicle for assuaging wounds and for lifting oppression. Here, the irony of human rights discourse is not only that its moral principles are also its offenses, but also that its victims must appear without contradiction as innocent, a pose at odds with political resistance, which, as we will see, assumes a condition of guilt. The double task of the poet obscures the self-evidence of the speaker who seems to emerge as biography, and in the case of these poems, which invoke traditions of form, this is a tropological process, a process of “borrowing.”²³
 
The forms of response initiated by the qasidah involve the “primal, nonhuman” figure of the messenger in the rahil (Miller, “Moral Resonance” 172). Miller finds that this section differs for the bid ‘wa-jiwab because in the traditional rahil, the poet often imagines himself traveling across a landscape. The bid ‘wa-jiwab instead invokes a third party, a figure of the messenger who journeys between two correspondents. Miller’s distinction points to how the imagined “self,” the enunciated “I,” takes place in this ambiguous human/nonhuman role. The affective landscape of the journey has a nonhuman aspect; birdsong is also the voice of the nonhuman, and poetry is not only testimony to human experience or humanity but is also, as Daniel Tiffany writes in Infidel Poetics, “a distant expression, or recollection, of the inhuman voice” (152).²⁴ Tiffany points to the artifice of this process by which voice is humanized, highlighting the non-self-evident nature of the human being. These observations indicate how nonhuman figures can help to break up the unity—the unity of universal, human suffering—supposed by the discourse of modern poetics.
 
In poems such as “Death Poem,” or “The Truth,” the ambiguity of the human messenger as poet allows the poem to present questions about what constitutes human being and belonging. In Sami al Haj’s poem, “Humiliated in the Shackles,” the messenger is figured as a bird who

“witnesses” the testimony of the speaker:

When I heard pigeons cooing in the trees,

Hot tears covered my face.

When the lark chirped, my thoughts composed

A message for my son.

The lyric image of birdsong, which has long been associated with the songlike or aural quality of poetry, serves as a muse, transforming nonhuman song into human tears. The poem goes on to pair the chirping of larks with the writing of the poem, establishing the process of empathic identification by which the cooing “bar-bar” of the other in the figure of the bird spurs the tears of the speaker, a cathartic identification that produces the possibility of writing. In such a model, there is no resistance to the other; he is hardly recognized as such, because within the context of the poem, and in the testimonial order it prescribes, the bird’s song is subordinated to (and sublated in) the voice of the speaker. Following this schema, the ability to “chirp” represents the healthy internalization of “cooing” and its expression as an active and embodied voice. In contrast, the nonhuman or “becoming-animal” element involves the Kafkaesque condition of assuming guilt and being assumed guilty.

 
As I have indicated, the image of the “caged bird” and other common tropes of imprisonment gain much of their power not only by extending the position of the first person to the third, and thereby creating a community of sufferers, but also by radicalizing the human subject that is implicated in this community.²⁵ In The Poetics of Anti-Colonialism in the Arabic Qasidah, Kadhim describes how the Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawqi (1869–1932) uses the ancient motif of doves to establish the theme of mourning unjust death. Here, the traditional use of birdsong as a trope and as an image in the qasidah serves the function, Kadhim notes, of keeping atrocities alive “in the memory of the people” (32). Kadhim’s argument pertains to the association between birdsong in an ancient qasidah and in a modern one, but also implies that reference to the “cooing/wailing of the doves” extends a local act of injustice to a national atrocity and thus calls for identification through injustice as well as remembrance.
 
As Kadhim argues, such invocations played a role in anti-colonial resistance writing, inviting the production of a subject whose identification with the pathos of nature implicitly recognized the usefulness of such images for mobilizing a collective response.²⁶ Kadhim details the manipulation of pre-Islamic motifs that are contemporanized in post-1948 resistance poetry through the conventions and formal structure of the qasidah. Read in this way, the “hot tears” belong not to al Haj, and also not to the speaker, but to the elegiac nasīb, the qasidah’s short prelude, which is established traditionally through the imagery of shedding tears. The tears thus mark not the experience of human suffering, but the process of writing poetry, to which the speaker also later refers. From the outset, writing remains at the level of composition or arrangement, and not of expression. The “thoughts” of the speaker abstract his voice from the composition of the poem. The reference to “thoughts” as an object, instead of as an activity of the “I” as speaking subject, indicates the disunity of expression. The introduction of the materiality of thought as the agent of expression furthermore casts off the automatic process by which nonhuman birdsong becomes internalized in the expression of human suffering, as if bird and human correspond to one another and to the binary of freedom and imprisonment. Instead, the speaker foregrounds the processes of internalization and projection that delimit not the suffering subject, but the subject who “speaks” in writing, the poetic speaker.
 
Kadhim’s observations about the way that traditional poetic motifs are mobilized as national symbols help us to think about the way that birdsong, which is not merely a motif but is rather the “universal” motif of poetic voice, is related to the universalization of atrocity. Such a movement indexes the discourse of universal human rights that Flagg Miller identifies in his introductory essay as the “language” for which the poems strive. In this way, barbarism is associated with atrocity, with the performance of an act so alien in its terribleness that it defies language, but one that, by virtue of this defiance, is expressed only as a universal. The “cooing” doves are transformed into “chirping,” and so writing qua “chirping” refers to the capacity of expressive force to restore justice by expressing its universality. The reading that is given by the testimonial function—by this sequencing of inhuman suffering, human emotion, and human expression—is thereby challenged, in the absence of a transparent human subject, by the questions that have been raised about the unity and power of human voice.
 

Assuming Guilt

 
The double task of the poet to assuage wounds and lift oppression has to do, in no small part, with his condition of “assumed guilt.” The enemy combatant is assumed guilty, which refers to the ground of his imprisonment, but he also “assumes” the guilt of exposing the hypocrisy of his oppressor, a position that suggests he is an active participant in his guilt. In fact, however, it is the ambivalence of this passive/active, involuntary/voluntary assumption of guilt that defines the indeterminacy of the enemy combatant as poetic speaker. The poems raise questions about the relation between guilt and responsibility that were also presented by psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott in his 1940 essay, “Discussion of War Aims.” Winnicott explains how the emergence of the “good,” moral citizen involves a moment of identification and projection. The supposed overcoming of a moment of barbaric conflict elides the possibility of identifying a “bad” feeling in a “good” person. He provides the example of the Englander who asserts his indifference to politics by naming both an enemy and others who are responsible for this enemy. He concludes that if the Englander were to take responsibility, the action would be equivalent to not seeing a difference between ally and enemy:

At the present time we [Englanders] are in the apparently fortunate position of having an enemy who says, ‘I am bad; I intend to be bad’, which enables us to feel, ‘We are good’. If our behaviour can be said to be good, it is by no means clear that we can thereby slip out of our responsibility for the German attitude and the German utilization of Hitler’s peculiar qualities. In fact, there would be actual and immediate danger in such complacency, since the enemy’s declaration is honest just where ours is dishonest.

(211–212)

As Winnicott illuminates so strikingly, the problem with exposing the enemy is that it reinforces the falseness of one’s own position. The mistake of the civilian, the “good” Englander, according to Winnicott, is to judge guilt and innocence through a splitting of good and bad. The move allows one to “thereby slip out of” responsibility for the oppressor, and the complacency with which this happens—not the issue of complicity or collusion—is the problem that Winnicott identifies. This raises questions about the neutrality of the witness, and in particular about the limits of moral responsibility and the role that guilt plays in taking responsibility. Moreover, Winnicott suggests that the guilt required is not redemptive (the pangs of conscience), but that the proper or more meaningful form of responsibility comes from the assumption of guilt.

 
The notion of guilt that I would like to explore is indicated by the main section of al Haj’s poem, which follows an initial supplication to both nonhuman birdsong and to the poem’s messenger, the poet’s son. According to Kadhim’s assessment of the anti-colonial qasidah, this main section contains the political message; in this case, it details the temptation and hypocrisy of oppression rather than the experience of torture. In its treatment of temptation, the main section is reminiscent of the Qur’anic story of Joseph, which Susan Slyomovics recounts in her book, Performing Human Rights in Morocco. She writes, “even though Joseph is vindicated, his innocence is of no moment; in some sense he is guilty of having exposed the master’s wife as sinful and the master retaliates: ‘then it occurred to the men… (that it was best) to imprison him for a time’” (4).²⁷ Joseph, in this example, is guilty not of a crime but of being in a position to expose the guilt of another. The guilt assumed by al Haj’s speaker lies similarly in his exposure of the hypocrisy of freedom. Al Haj’s speaker, like the other speakers in the collection, is guilty of the crime of exposing the crimes of the oppressors. His subjectivity arises from this guilt, not from the crime that he exposes, although, as I have indicated, the act of exposure is often read as an expression of the human subject. A similar distinction can be made regarding what the poems do: they do not “expose” the corrupt morality of the oppressors, but instead describe this pervasive yet inscrutable context of guilt (Schuldzusammenhang) that lies just at the margins of perception.²⁸
 
“Humiliated in the Shackles” articulates the guilt of being tempted by the offerings of empire:

The oppressors are playing with me,

As they move freely about the world.

They ask me to spy on my countrymen,

Claiming it would be a good deed.

They offer me money and land,

And freedom to go where I please.

Their temptations seize my attention

Like lightning in the sky.

But their gift is an evil snake,

Carrying hypocrisy in its mouth like venom.

They have monuments to liberty

And freedom of opinion, which is well and good.

But I explained to them that

Architecture is not justice.

America, you ride on the backs of orphans,

And terrorize them daily.

Bush, beware.

The world recognizes an arrogant liar.

To Allah I direct my grievance and my tears.

I am homesick and oppressed.

Mohammad, do not forget me.

Support the cause of your father, a God-fearing man.

I was humiliated in the shackles.

How can I now compose verses? How can I now write?

After the shackles and the nights and the suffering and the tears,

How can I write poetry?

The poem’s tropes of the restraints and excesses of movement are the vehicle for its expression of the hypocrisy of freedom. As in Dost’s poem, these are presented by the first person as the experience of confinement. The “world” surely includes the actions of the oppressors, figured through an entrenched vocabulary of first-person singular and third-person plural: “they” “are playing with me,” they “ask me,” they “offer me.” The paradox of freedom exposes the false guilt of the imprisoned: while the oppressors move about freely, they do so by holding the speaker’s freedom captive. The speaker proclaims his independence from these temptations, but his concern lies with the appearance of turning into the enemy of the oppressed, and thus he presents himself as a subject who actively takes on his condition of oppression by enumerating his refusals of the “world” he is offered.

 
Al Haj creates a figure of someone whose captivity does not desensitize him, but makes him more sensitive: to nature, to the hypocrisy of temptation, and also to his own feeling. In the penultimate stanza, he describes his soul as “like a roiling sea, stirred by anguish, / Violent with passion.” Distance, the enforced separation of diaspora, is here equated with emotional states that allow “nature” to stand in for or to represent the speaker. Like the first lines, prototypical images of the distance and familiarity of foreign nature follow the conventions of the qasidah, and the poet writes himself into this tradition by reasserting the generic identity of the poet: the poet who is a sensitive poet can write poetry—here are the birds, here is the message, here is Allah, here are my tears, here is the sea.
 
The poem, which invokes Allah, points through the language of religious redemption to the problems of human rights. Freedom here is not freedom from imprisonment. The freedom that is the object of criticism is not a freedom that can be granted, like a right, but the freedom that wealth bestows: the ability to circulate freely, to exchange money and land, to achieve transparency between global and individual being. In other poems, the language of universal human rights is pursued through the figure of the “world” as an impartial judge or law outside the prison: a world “that will wait for us,” to which “photographs of my corpse at the grave” will be sent, “before” which men will bear a “burden” and, finally, as an implied addressee, if “justice and compassion remain in this world.” “Where is the world to save us from torture? / Where is the world to save us from the fire and sadness? / Where is the world to save the hunger strikers?”²⁹ In these formulations, the world becomes a figure for human rights, the neutral observer who is there to witness suffering.
 
The positing of a “world” outside the prison and as a “universal” idea of justice also occurs, as Kadhim points out, in the anti-colonial qasidah and implies a stable presence that can be equated with the stable identity of the human being.³⁰ But al Haj’s “world” challenges this stability and the idea of the world—of witnessing—as a form of justice. The “world,” “freely” moved about, is double-faced. Trampled upon and given the power to recognize, if not truth, then at least lies, the world becomes a figure for the oppressed. The duplicity of the world as both ground and figure constitutes the economy of oppression, and what al Haj depicts is a world that cannot safeguard acts of witnessing. Power, or profit, is generated through the exploitation of this duplicity, in which the world appears both as a given place in which actions occur and as an actor who not only takes part in the struggle but also functions as an arbiter. The stakes of such a profit game are thus not only control of the “world” as land or as a land, but also the persistent equation between civil and political rights and justice, and the persistent exclusion of social and economic rights.³¹
 
The fantasy of restoring justice to the “world,” like the fantasy of an identity between author and speaker, relies on the figuring of its good and bad through the seemingly neutral, but increasingly split images of universality—here, human song, the world, and the sea. In Ibrahim al Rubaish’s “Ode to the Sea,” the qasidah’s oft-invoked metaphor of the sea is taken up as a figure of a distance that is both beautiful and aggressive, its “calm” and its “stillness” no longer merely sources of contemplation, but forces, “like death,” that “kill.”³² The sea, which depicts the mediatable distance between poet and reader, between the speaker and his family, has become a force of alienation and strangeness. Al Rubaish writes,

O Sea, give me news of my loved ones.

Were it not for the chains of the faithless, I would have dived into you,

And reached my beloved family, or perished in your arms.

Your beaches are sadness, captivity, pain, and injustice.

Your bitterness eats away at my patience.

Your calm is like death, your sweeping waves are strange.

The silence that rises up from you holds treachery in its fold.

Your stillness will kill the captain if it persists,

And the navigator will drown in your wave.

Gentle, deaf, mute, ignoring, angrily storming,

You carry graves.

If the wind enrages you, your injustice is obvious.

If the wind silences you, there is just the ebb and flow.

O Sea, do our chains offend you?

It is only under compulsion that we daily come and go.

Do you know our sins?

Do you understand we were cast into this gloom?

O Sea, you taunt us in our captivity.

You have colluded with our enemies and you cruelly guard us.

Don’t the rocks tell you of the crimes committed in their midst?

Doesn’t Cuba, the vanquished, translate its stories for you?

You have been beside us for three years, and what have you gained?

Boats of poetry on the sea; a buried flame in a burning heart.

The poet’s words are the font of our power;

His verse is the salve of our pained hearts.

What has held ground as “the world,” neutral but overtaken by oppressors in al Haj’s poem, is here presented in the figure of the “sea” as complicit with oppression. Al Rubaish turns away from a politics of “making visible”; the sea depicts a form of guilt that is like the guilt of the enemy combatant, both passive and active. Forming the borders of the island prison, the sea’s “frame” is perspectival but also incriminating.³³ Its neutral juxtaposition also becomes the source of its own guilt. This structure of self-incrimination and incrimination of the other describes the position of subjectivity faced by the enemy combatant.

 
The task of the poet is brought into question as the poem turns to ask who stands to gain from suffering. The speaker’s inquiry about what the sea has gained is in this manner a form of self-inquiry. Al Rubaish underscores the ambiguous morality by depicting the sea as a medium in which poetry is sustained despite its alienation. It is the silence and stillness of the sea as a figure of distance that offends and is offended. The speaker does not place blame, however, but rather feels taunted; he is moved about by the sea, not just held captive by it. The speaker reduces himself to the “poet’s words”: as “boats,” the poems mediate the distance between neutral waters and the imprisoned enemy combatant. Collusion, in this case, is a moment of guilt, the contradictory experience of being unable to be neutral. The sea embodies the distance between freedom and imprisonment and in this way becomes a figure for the mind and for the turmoil of the soul. Appeals to the world instead of morality are important because they acknowledge the split condition of guilt and responsibility and the fact that responsibility is often the name for the neutrality imputed to human rights discourse.
 

The Poet Messenger

 
The consequences of thinking about the psychological aspect of moral situations become evident when considering enemy combatants more explicitly as poets. As we have seen, al Haj’s poem not only exposes the acts of oppression that Empire undertakes (no free ride, the “ride” is on the “backs of orphans”), but realigns the terms of justice. He writes, “But I explained to them that / Architecture is not justice.” Architecture refers to the phrase “monuments to liberty” in the preceding stanza, and thus to the absence of freedom writ by its memorialization. Empty monumentality is another figure for the hypocrisy of American culture, a part of the logic of the false appearance of freedom. The reference to architecture has two further significant associations. First, it cannot help but refer in its context both to the destruction of the twin towers and to the symbolic nature of their destruction as “monuments of liberty.” In pointing to this destruction negatively, al Haj also indicates ambivalence about seeing such acts of destruction as justice. Second, the language of building is a metaphor for poetic activity; in the qasidah, architectural concepts are the conventional terms for poetic form.³⁴ Al Haj’s opposition to the oppressors thus challenges not only the symbols of power and political representation, but the politics of representation itself.
 
In keeping with Miller’s description of the thematic structure of the dialogic qasidah, which commonly includes a riddle after the main part, the “explanation” of the justice of architecture turns out to be a riddle instead of a moral lesson. If architecture is a figure for writing, the question to ask is not how is writing (or representation) possible after atrocity, but how is writing a form of justice? Al Haj’s poem is a poem that ostensibly seeks justice, testifying to the speaker’s innocence in consorting with the enemy, of taking enemy bribes, and of doing evil deeds. Along these lines, the speaker’s testimony serves as an assurance to his “countrymen” that he has not betrayed them. The riddling question, however, underscores the poem’s ambivalent relation to the world. Until he “explained to them that / Architecture is not justice,” the speaker has occupied the position of responding in opposition to the oppressors. He is the “me” and the “I”; he is not “they,” and yet the plurality of the world is on his side.³⁵ Here, taking the position of the subject, his explanation serves as a reminder that his innocence is of no matter. Evidence of his innocence betrays his responsibility for exposing the injustice of symbolic power. In raising the question of whether writing is justice, al Haj addresses his poem towards an audience with whom he does not identify and who does not identify with him, and thereby rejects the tropes of humanity and the religious imagery that his poem simultaneously invokes.
 
In the poems from Guantanamo, textual authority becomes a metaphor for ensuring justice, for “taking responsibility” for the condition of guilt one assumes. “Humiliated in the Shackles” builds upon its script of praise and invective to invoke the oppressor directly; the speaker apostrophes “America” at a turning point in the poem. The inversion of the structural relationship between you and them—“America, you ride on the backs of orphans, / And terrorize them daily” changes the terms of the “them.” Here, “them” does not refer, as it has, to the oppressors, but instead to “the backs of orphans,” a synecdoche for the oppressed. No longer identifying with the oppressed, the speaker turns directly to “you, America,” and ends up locating the oppressed in the position of the object. The poem’s description of the ambivalence of these positions–and of the ambivalence inhering in the very process of identification that forges a relationship between the speaker and the reader–hinges on the figure of the poet as messenger and as someone who can recast the “I”’s projection of himself onto the other.
 
The poet as messenger is described more explicitly still in Abdulla Majid al Noaimi’s poem, “My Heart was Wounded by the Strangeness.” Al Noaimi’s poem begins with several verses of prose before he moves into the form of the qasidah. This prelude explains how the poet received a greeting from a fellow detainee who expressed that he was trying to write a poem for him. Al Noaimi writes, “I felt guilty about this. Will he write a poem for me when he is no poet, while I, who claim to be a poet, have written nothing for him?” The guilt expressed by the speaker is, in a way, a continued provocation of al Haj’s question about the justice of writing. Not affirming immediately the role of the poet, the speaker continues to describe how the poem became difficult to write, and how the poet turned to memorizing the Qur’an. “With my mind divided,” he then writes, “time began to pass. And then I was inspired.” This prose verse is a frame story for the poem; depicting the poet as a messenger, it functions to enforce the continuity between biography and poem established in the collection’s format by describing how the poet has come to write the poem. The frame, however, also establishes the poem’s authority as a written document; pointing out the poem’s textuality and the processes of constructing text, it highlights the artifice of writing.
 
In referring to the “division” of his mind between the task of memorization and the task of creation, the speaker invokes poetry’s role as “the profane antitext to the Qur’anic sacred text.”³⁶ This detail about the poem’s process of composition alludes to my larger questions about how the poem elucidates its politics. Here, the authority of the speaker as messenger arises from the contradictory methods of memorization and creation that inform not only his composition, but also his constitution as subject. The qasidah form begins where the prose leaves off:

My heart was wounded by the strangeness.

Now poetry has rolled up his sleeves, showing a long arm.

Time passes. The hands of the clock deceive us.

Time is precious and the minutes are limited.

Do not blame the poet who comes to your land,

Inspired, arranging rhymes.

Oh brother, who need not be named, I send you

My gift of greetings. I send heavily falling rains

To quench your thirst and show my gratitude.

My poem will comfort you and ease your burdens.

If you blame yourself, my poem will appease you.

My mind is not heavy with animosity.

The first three verses assert the resurgence of poetry as a figure of healing, the aftermath of being wounded. The speaker describes a temporal shift in this first verse, indicating the recovery of poetry’s power and demonstrating its embodiment of resistance. These verses comprise the poem’s nasib, its opening supplication and prelude. So the nasib, the elegiac moment of the qasidah, here describes the “strangeness” of loss and ruin—of “passed” time and a “wounded” heart. In an oblique apostrophe, the speaker then entreats the reader not to blame “the poet who comes to your land.” The poem, which has so far seemed to recall the setting of imprisonment, extends the interior of this position to its outside—quite literally, again, America—through the figure of the poet as messenger.

 
Yet the poem falls back into the address that it has claimed in the prose section, addressing the manifest recipient of the poem, the speaker’s friend and brother, “who need not be named.” This section makes use of the typically liquid imagery of the rahil—the “heavily falling rains”—to transfer blame again, as a means of establishing correspondence between the speaker and his addressee.³⁷ The speaker claims that his poem will act as a comfort, most importantly to appease his brother’s guilt. The ambiguous reference “outside” the poem causes us to doubt the singularity of the poem’s recipient, performing the paranoia it has warned its reader against. That poet—the poet as messenger, wounded by “strangeness” and now inspired—is no longer mentioned, as the poem moves to these more explicit ideas about the function of the poem: its ability to appease, to shift blame, to make pain “captive,” to hide “in our hearts” what is “expressed in my words.” These functions, which have very little to do with exposure or with testifying, refuse the position of the poet as victim of suffering. Guilt and its attendant figures make room for a consideration of the way that the textual space invites obscurity, contradiction, and resistance as alternative forms of subjectivity.
 
The questions that al Haj’s and al Noaimi’s speakers pose are equally “How can I write poetry as a survivor of torture?” and “At what distance between oppression and opposition does the subject take place?” Al Haj’s speaker exposes not only the enemy who is the object of the poem, but also the projections of his enemy readers, who are far more diverse than Bush, the “arrogant liar.” These readers are oppressive not solely because of their literary declamations, but also because they conflate the speaker’s identity with the identity of the enemy combatant and because they need a seemingly “neutral” world to do so. In contrast, the poems present a figure who raises the question of just who is responsible for oppression. Such a reading moves beyond asking how the U.S. is responsible for the conditions of “evil,” which has been the subject of the past decade’s critiques of U.S. global power, and asks instead about the guilt that both reinforces and resists these moral and aesthetic pronouncements.