Our discussion about Poems from Guantanamo in the past couple weeks made me think about Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in a way I never had before. I didn’t really know that much about Guantanamo Bay, other than that they torture people there and that I think that is wrong. I never considered that the people there might be innocent, that they might have families or that they might only be children. I distanced myself from the unpleasant thoughts that I associated with Guantanamo Bay, and never took the time to think of the prisoners there as people. I didn’t think of them as inhuman, I just didn’t really think of them as people with lives outside of their link with the word ‘terrorist.’

In Poems from Guantanamo, each poet has a biography prefacing their poems, illuminating their circumstances. These biographies create an obvious bias favoring the prisoners, painting them in a favorable light. Though this can be seen as an exaggeration, trying to convince the reader that the detainees are all innocent, I would like to argue that the extent to which all of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay are portrayed as evil is most likely also an exaggeration. There were at one time fourteen year old boys at Guantanamo Bay: it seems unreasonable to me to pin crimes of terrorism on children. Though not all of the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay were found to be guilty, some of them have been, and this book of poems helps us to realize that even if the authors of the poems are evil, they are still humans.

In Abdullah Thani Farris Al Anazi’s biography, he is quoted: “In the world of international courts, the person is innocent until proven guilty. Why, here, is the person guilty until proven innocent?” I don’t fully understand how these men can be held in prison without being convicted of any crime and the policies that keep this from being wildly illegal. Though I understand that when it comes to matters of national security, the US is very careful, which may be necessary, it is not necessary to remove even basic human rights from people who have not even been proven guilty. As Judith Butler explores in her book Frames of War: when is life grievable?, we are all vulnerable to each other. The detainees at Guantanamo Bay are held in the utmost state of vulnerability. They have no means of defending their vulnerability. It can be argued that the crimes some of these men committed were inhumanly heinous. This can be said to justify the fact that the men at Guantanamo Bay are made so vulnerable that they are hardly even human. However, the fact that I didn’t even think of the detainees at Guantanamo Bay as human before I read these poems shows that these men are criminalized and dehumanized to an extreme. The media doesn’t even allow people to see these people as humans. These men are not even given the opportunity to defend their vulnerability or innocence or to be seen as human, and this, in my opinion, is not right.

Works Cited:

Butler, Judith. Frames of War: when is life grievable? New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

Falkoff, Marc. Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2007. Print.