Welcome back readers,

This week in ASTU we discussed the Judith Buttler essay and initially I was dreading reading this piece because of the reputation of complexity it held. As I started flipping through it though, I became pleasantly surprised with my ability to decipher many of the more basic and even a couple of the sophisticated arguments Buttler was presenting. This caused me to reflect back to my first attempt reading Shahzad’s essay at the beginning of the year and the difficulty I had forming a strong understanding on it. Now finding myself grasping a seemingly much more sophisticated piece of writing gives me a gratifying feeling of progression.

I found the in-class discussions intriguing this week as we broke down many of the different ideas concerning the “us” vs. “them” debate, 9/11, trauma, media and Guantanamo Bay. Specifically in a group discussion today we were asked to speak on how hearing the poems from prisoners inside Guantanamo might alter our impression of the war on terror. Firstly we talked about the abnormality of the idea of Guantanamo prisoners producing so much poetry, and that was an interesting thought. This idea definitely made the prisoners appear much more human to me. But then we started to discuss how it’s odd that Guantanamo wouldn’t allow for most of the poetry to leave the prison. Then a string of questions began to form. How was the producer of “Poems from Guantanamo” able to compile enough poems for an entire book? And if they were holding or destroying the majority of it, what reasons do they have? And again if Guantanamo holds so much how can the end product of the poems released be trusted to be free of any censorship in the editing process? Then of course there’s the question of translation that was brought up in class discussion, how can the process of conversion from Arabic to English be trusted? I’ve always thought that being a J. Edgar Hoover type would be fascinating because you’d have the access to view all of the United States shady activities and be one of the privileged few.

If you read my blog than thanks!

A.J.