As Robert Frost once said: “Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found its words.” and the poems written by captives in Guantanamo bay and Juliana Spahr definitely capture the deep thought of sorrow shared amongst a group of people. This leads us back to the mention of collective suffering, and Butler’s argument that suggested a significant “us” and “them” in the process of mourning.
Contrasting the two poetry books, on one hand we have prisoners, people who symbolize, or who are classified as being evil, or committing some sort of crime. While of the other, we have the desperate outcries and facts of what happened during the horrible incident of 911. All the poems are sad, they mourn in a different way but for the same loss, the loss of having to part with their loved ones, and the loss of freedom. In a sense, all of the people mentioned in the two works are suffering from being “caged”, either in a literal or physical sense. Unable to connect with the outer world and completely shutting themselves out. In addition, there really is no “us” and “them” with regard to suffering, since it cannot be measured and is felt is roughly a very similar way. Butler’s article talks about how these incidents may drive us further apart, and in real life, we are the people that decide whether we deicide to close off from the entire community or not.
In Spahr’s poem that is written right after 911, she takes an approach not necessarily specific towards the people that suffered due to the attack, but stating how all of us divide from cells, how all of us breathe in the space between our hands. She talks of unity, rather than accusation. As for poems of Guantanamo bay, we see the subtle gentleness in between the lines of the people that were accused of committing crimes. I believe that both poetry books strive to overcome the inflicted sense of separation between individual entity and society, going beyond the events themselves, and focusing more on the thought that is conveyed miraculously through the lines of poems.