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.