We haven’t read any new material for my ASTU class in a while, so I am going to throw it back to a few weeks ago. We read and discussed Poems from Guantanamo Bay published by Marc Falkoff but I never took the time to really think or write about it. As the name suggests, this book is a collection of poems written by prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. These men are accused of being terrorists of the highest degree and therefore even though we know that their basic human rights are being violated in Guantanamo, we turn a blind eye.

When this collection of poems was published, there was a lot of controversy surrounding all aspects of the book, ranging from the poems themselves to its sheer existence. One controversial aspect that I found to be very interesting was the critique that some of the poems were not even really good. To a certain degree I had to agree that there were a few poems that were a bit… clunky, for lack of a better word. Maybe that is just because I am used to poetry that has nice flow.

But once I was able to take a step back and really evaluate the situation in which these poems are being produced, I realized,

“Who cares?”

Should we really be asking whether or not these poems are good? Is that a fair question to ask in this context? Sure, if this were a book produced under different circumstances, that would be a fair question. But these poems are produced by men that have been removed from society, tortured and abused to the point where they have begun to question their own humanity. I do not know how much harm these men have caused, but whether or not they are terrorists, I do not believe that anyone deserves to be treated as they have. For them, poetry is an outlet, a healthy outlet, a way to stay sane, a way to remind themselves they are human. So while some of these men were poets before they were held captive, many were not and that does not mean that they do not have any less of a right to produce poetry and have their voices heard.

I think that among this debate, what is forgotten is that poetry is an art form. And like any other art, it is meant to be uncensored, raw and subjective. Therefore how can we sit here and judge someone’s expression of emotion based on whether or not it is “good” to our standards? I think that this debate misses the mark completely because that is not at all what Falkoff set out to produce. He did not go to Guantanamo looking for the world’s greatest poets; he set out to give a voice to the voiceless, the forgotten, the abused.

The past two weeks of our ASTU class have been incredibly fast paced: we whizzed through a great number of texts all relating to  the events of 9/11. A common theme that I found throughout these texts was that of “us” vs “them”. What I find most interesting about this dichotomy is the ability that is had to not only cause fear, misunderstanding and hatred, but it ultimately leads to dehumanization.

There are many ways in which the idea of us vs. them gets reinforced through the various texts we have read. Take Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, for example. The novel very clearly presents the narrator’s father as the hero, the good guy and the terrorists as the enemy, the bad guys. This is not only the beliefs of the 9 year old narrator, but also that of the author and as a result, it becomes the beliefs of the reader. The text serves as a medium to convey ideas, beliefs and opinions and just as mainstream media molds the way in which we think about us vs. them, Foer’s novel performs the same task. It is through this type of thinking, that there has to be a good guy and an enemy, that perpetuates ignorance and cruelty.

To further this point, Butler asserts that we “mourn for some lives but respond with coldness to the loss of others” (36). This is due to the before mentioned dichotomy. How can we mourn for lives that we didn’t even consider worth living before? How did we get here? Can humans get past this dichotomy? I really hope so because it is this stream of thinking that perpetuates and justifies wars and violence.

On a slightly different (yet very related note), it is just so fascinating to me how malleable the human brain is. We are constantly being brainwashed to believe certain things and to want certain things and we do not even realize it. Roughly seventy years ago, the enemy was Germany; fifty years ago, the enemy was Russia. Today it is the Middle East. We spend so much time in our history classes looking at propaganda, scoffing at its ridiculousness, at awe that citizens of that time actually believed such biased news and yet the same exact thing takes place today!

It sickens to think about the fact that people can be so easily manipulated, into doing things they might not otherwise do, because they live in fear. This is the main and most powerful strategy that militaries utilize: dehumanization. I found this article on my Facebook newsfeed that talks about an American Iraq veteran who is on trial for having raped a 14 year old Iraqi girl and then killing both her and her family… reading about it was so incredibly heart wrenching, disturbing and upsetting. I don’t really know what else to say about it besides the fact that it perfectly exemplifies the points I have made about about the us vs. them dichotomy.