Abstract
This chapter provides one of the first comparative articles on literary texts about the Guantánamo detention centre. It concentrates on publications about the camp from when only little sound information was available to the public. Discussing Dorothea Dieckmann’s novel Guantánamo, (2004), and a play of the same title (2005) by Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, it shows how gaps of knowledge are filled and how the politically marginalized Guantánamo is integrated into critical discourse. The chapter explores how Dieckmann and Brittain and Slovo turn the “most transparent prison” (Donald Rumsfeld), into an intellectually deducible phenomenon. As argued, this aesthetic achievement is the product of new genre concepts such as the “institutional novel” (German “Institutionenroman”) and “verbatim theatre”, which are applicable to both texts. These enable authors to narrate ‘Guantánamo’ despite the political and historical uncertainty. With the detainee from Guantánamo bare life has reached its highest state of indeterminacy. (Giorgio Agamben)
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Notes
- 1.
Bennett, “X-Ray Visions: Photography, Propaganda and Guantánamo Bay,” 69.
- 2.
Cf. Smith, Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side. Seeking Justice in Guantánamo Bay, XII.
- 3.
Cf. Iris Radisch, ORF, 11.2.2004, Broadcast Bachmann Award.
- 4.
Since in 1994, the London Tricycle Theatre staged the so-called “tribunal plays” based on the reconstruction of public inquiries, it has become a central place for political theatre in Great Britain. During Nicolas Kent’s tenure as Artistic Director, the Tricycle presented, for instance, dramatizations of the Nuremberg trials against the Nazi regime (Nuremberg, 1996) as well as a piece on the Genocide of Srebrenica, which occurred in 1995 during the Bosnian War (Srebrenica, 1997). See Stoller, Tales of the Tricycle Theatre.
- 5.
The journalist and writer Victoria Brittain worked as a correspondent for The Guardian and various French magazines in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. In her writing, she is mainly concerned with issues of human rights. Brittain counselled the UN on “The Impact of Conflict on Women” and has published several books such as Death of Dignity: Angola ’ s Civil War (1997) and Shadow Lives: The Forgotten Women of the War on Terror (2013). Gillian Slovo, born in South Africa, is a novelist, playwright, and memoirist, who in her early career wrote almost only thrillers and crime fiction. The daughter of Joe Slovo and Ruth First, two major figures in the anti-apartheid struggle, published the memoir, Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country as well as the critical plays Guantanamo. Honor Bound to Defend Freedom (with Victoria Brittain, 2005) and The Riots (2011).
- 6.
Glaberson, “Guantánamo, Evil and Zany in Pop Culture.” Concerning the commercialization of the camp, cf. also Hickman, Selling Guantánamo: Exploding the Propaganda Surrounding America ’ s Most Notorious Military Prison.
- 7.
Begley, Why the Dreyfus Affair Matters; Fesperman, The Prisoner of Guantanamo; Smith, Guantanamo; Whyman, Inside the Cage.
- 8.
Perera, Guantanamo Boy.
- 9.
Haschemi Yekani, “The Politics of (Social) Death and Rebirth in ‘The Road to Guantánamo’ and ‘Taxi to the Dark Side’.” Gibbons, “Representing the Real on The Road to Guantánamo”; Bennett, “Cinematic Perspectives on the ‘War on Terror’: ‘The Road to Guantánamo’ (2006) and Activist Cinema.”
- 10.
Falkoff, et al. (eds), Poems from Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak; Trapp, “The Enemy Combatant as Poet: The Politics of Writing in Poems from Guantanamo”; Weber, “Literary Justice? Poems from Guantánamo Bay Prison Camp”, 417–434; Griswold, “‘To Be Free from This Cage’: The Poetry of Guantánamo Bay Detainees.”
- 11.
For example, Kurnaz, Fünf Jahre meines Lebens. Ein Bericht aus Guantánamo; Begg, Enemy Combatant: A British Muslim’s Journey to Guantánamo and Back; Pastouna, Guantanamo Bay. Gefangen im rechtsfreien Raum; Willemsen, Hier spricht Guantánamo. Interviews mit Ex-Häftlingen; Slahi, Guántanamo Diary. See also the analysis by Harlow, “Resistance Literature Revisited: From Basra to Guantánamo.”
- 12.
Cf. Smith, The Prison and the American Imagination; Honigsberg, Our Nation Unhinged: The Human Consequences of the War on Terror; Silkenat and Shulman (eds), The Imperial Presidency and the Consequences of 9/11. Lawyers react to the Global War on Terrorism; Irving/Schwab (eds.), Guantánamo, USA: The Untold History of America’s Cuban Outpost; J. Margulies, Guantánamo and the Abuse of the Presidential Power.
- 13.
With the title “Guantánamo Initiative,” the artists Christoph Büchel and Gianni Motti published documentary material about the history of the camp in a touring exhibition. In 2005, they presented their project at the 51st Venice Biennale and petitioned the Cuban government to transform the detention centre into a cultural centre, cf. the program, www.hauserwirth.com/artists/3/christoph-buchel/images-clips/15/ (accessed 1.5.2015). Amnesty International also staged a performance called a “dissent event” in several cities, cf. Scalmer, Dissent Events: Protest, the Media and the Political Gimmick in Australia.
- 14.
The author Dorothea Dieckmann, born in 1957 in Freiburg, graduated in Literature and Philosophy. Her oeuvre includes literary essays and novels such as Kinder greifen zur Gewalt. Essay (Children Take Up Violence) (1994) and Die schwere und die leichte Liebe (The Heavy and the Easy Love) (1996).
- 15.
Radisch, ORF, 11.2.2004, Broadcast Bachmann Award, my translation.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Kämmerlings, “Was zählt ist auf dem Blatt,” my translation.
- 19.
Irving and Schwab (eds), Guantánamo, USA: The Untold History of America’s Cuban Outpost, 2f.
- 20.
The social, political, and juristic dilemma of “Guantánamo” is based on (1) the categorization of the detainees as “unlawful combatants,” which excludes them inter alia from Article 5 of the Geneva Convention on the “Treatment of Prisoners of War”; and (2) the evaluation of the legal status of the lease agreement between Cuba and the United States, as the decisions of the Supreme Court on the cases Rasul vs. Bush and Hamid vs. Rumsfeld demonstrate: The first case ensures every detainee has the right to defend himself in the sense of the Habeas Corpus. As experts highlight the “decision radically breaks down the distinctions of citizens versus alien and inside versus outside,” because even detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq get the right to petition US courts. “On the other hand, the controlling […] opinion in Hamid v. Rumsfeld […] the Bush administration won the important right to categorize captured persons as ‘enemy combatants.’ As noted earlier, the administration’s position is that there are no legal combatants at all in the war on terror.” Michaelsen and Shershow, “Beyond and Before the Law at Guantánamo,” 301f. Judith Butler highlights that the Geneva Convention itself provided the US strategy by its difference legal and illegal combatants. “The Geneva Conventions,” Butler argues, “have already regarded ‘terrorists’ as ‘outside the protocols’ and even ‘outside the law’ by extending ‘universal’ rights only to those imprisoned combatants who belong to ‘recognizable’ nation-states, but not to all people.” Aradau, “Law Transformed: Guantánamo and the ‘Other’ Exception,” 490.
- 21.
K.C. McIntosh writes: “On the step shores of a ragged inket, cut through the mangroves, is the naval station, and storeshouse, Along the cliff-top the low green bungalows of the quarters nestle in a tangle of palms and trumpet vines, a flowery oasis in a desert of scrub and thorn… Then the fleet comes streaming in, a long gray line. The stolid battleships drop ponderous anchors near the naval station. Trim, lean cruisers in double row take position just beyond, and then come the clumsy, squat vessels of the train: store ships, repair ships, and tankers, their gray formation broken by the startling white of the droning wakes of a hundred busy motorboat gigs and barges sped back and forth carrying seniors on official visits… “Bong! Bong! That’s all we’ll hear between now and April,” yelps a turret officer. “Come on gang, let’s go!” K.C. McIntosh, “Guantánamo Bay,” 109.
- 22.
Irving and Schwab, Guantánamo, USA, 7.
- 23.
As chapters “National Identity and Literary Culture after 9/11: Pro- and Anti-Americanism in Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World (2003) and Thomas Hettche’s Woraus wir gemacht sind (2006)” and “The Mimicry of Dialogue: Thomas Lehr’s September. Fata Morgana (2010)” by Christ and Frank in this volume highlight, Hamburg, as the root of the terroristic cell, became a crucial point of reference in imaginations of 9/11.
- 24.
“It is astonishing to what extent the inner life of the detainee has been studied, how imaginative and rich in nuances and how microscopically exact the descriptions of the agonies of imprisonment are. In which pushing rhythm the sentences deconstruct the detainee in his individual parts in order to poetically honour every single detail of his sentiment […].” My translation of Falcke, “Dorothea Dieckmann sucht einen Weg in das Innerste der Gefangenen von Guantánamo.”
- 25.
On the colonizing view in the European literature on 9/11, see chapters “ National Identity and Literary Culture after 9/11: Pro- and Anti-Americanism in Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World (2003) and Thomas Hettche’s Woraus wir gemacht sind (2006)” and “The Mimicry of Dialogue: Thomas Lehr’s September. Fata Morgana (2010)” in this volume.
- 26.
“This novel has a lot to say about the downside of the First World’s cult of compassion in support of the wretched of this earth. With a myriad of details about his sensations, the narrator pleads for sympathy for poor Rashid; she takes his personality apart completely, in order for us to relate to him. She knows him better than he would ever know himself. She performs a vivisection on him, in the name of empathy. It is all not very far from colonising alien suffering.” Ibid.
- 27.
Anthony Downey connects Agamben’s “theory of marginalization” with the context of the War on Terror, which affects even daily life. “Under the latter conditions, the spectre of terrorism has increasingly promulgated ‘states of exception’ whereby the sovereign state can usher in laws to curtail, contain and monitor its own citizens. In the eyes of a sovereign power that has effectively usurped the legislative branch of the state is a move that renders us all potentially homines sacri.” Downey, “Zones of Indistinction. Giorgio Agamben’s ‘Bare Life’ and the Politics of Aesthetics,” 112.
- 28.
Peters, “Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer Project,“ 330.
- 29.
As Paul Hegarty argues, not only the “homo sacer” but also the sovereign, who punishes him, resides in the “state of exception” outside the order. “Both the ones who can be killed and the sovereign are outside the Law just as they are at its very core. The sovereign, in the form of the king, for example, is outside and beyond the Law. Agamben identifies this situation as the ‘exception’—and from which the ‘state of exception’ can emerge—that is, the suspension of Law. The exception, the suspension of Law, is the moment Law is founded, which is itself neither legitimate nor illegitimate, but violent.” Hegarty, “Giorgio Agamben”, here 21.
- 30.
Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 9.
- 31.
Dieckmann, Guantánamo, 13.
- 32.
Ibid., 47. “The first repetition was joined by the entire block. Suddenly, they all spoke the same language, the language of Allah. The ‘ah’ of Allah was a curse, a call to arms, a coded slogan. With each chant it grew bigger, louder, higher in pitch, rising above the roofs and swooping back down again. The entire camp echoed with it and became one people.” Dieckmann, Guantánamo: A Novel, 39.
- 33.
Ibid.: “He pressed his lips together, he growled like an animal, he shook like mad at the bars of the gate and the doorframe.”
- 34.
Ibid., 37.
- 35.
Ibid., 45f. “Allah’s voice doesn’t have any resonance. It winds laboriously up and swirls around the corrugated iron roofs, sinks, recovers, rises again.”
- 36.
Rebien, “Cosmopolitan Perspectives. Globalization and Transnationalization in Contemporary Literature,” 127.
- 37.
Ibid., 128.
- 38.
Ibid., author’s note.
- 39.
Cf. Sombroek, Eine Poetik des Dazwischen. Zur Intermedialität und Intertextualität bei Alexander Kluge.
- 40.
See Campe, “Robert Walsers Institutionenroman Jakob von Gunten,” or “Kafkas Institutionenroman—Der Proceß, Das Schloß.” About 50 years before Campe contoured the concept of “Institutionenroman,” Hiram J. Friedsam published an article with the title “Bureaucrats as Heroes”. Here the author discribed the conjuncture of so-called “bureaucratic novels”, such as Churchill’s A far country, Lewis’ Arrowsmith and Dos Passos The Big Money. Similar to Campe Friedsam describes the “bureaucratic novel” as a narrative, which contrasts plots with ‘strong’ heroes like “entrepreneurs”, who - in Friedam’s view-were popular in American literature for quite a long time. In opposition to this main focus on agency, the “bureaucratic novel is one in which plot development is centered on the web of bureaucratic relationships, in which the hero is involved. It is not enough that the hero be identified as a bureaucrat; it is necessary that what does and what is done to him derive from the fact that he is a bureaucrat.” Other than Campe Friedsams model of the “bureaucratic novel” is strictly limited on bureaucrats as central character. Friedsam, “Bureaucrats as Heroes,” 270.
- 41.
Ibid., 35. “He doesn’t want to remember […] Memories are dangerous. They bring time into the cage, and the cage is too small for that. As soon as time has the chance to stretch out it pulls him off in every direction,” ibid., 26.
- 42.
Ibid., 31. “He is here. He’s arrived at last. Somewhere on earth, a prisoner, I, Rashid,” ibid., 23.
- 43.
Ibid., 91.
- 44.
Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction.
- 45.
Faber, “Guantánamo. A Novel.”
- 46.
Cf. e.g. Dieckmann, Guantánamo: A Novel, 39, “He pressed his lips together, he growled like an animal, he shook like mad at the bars of the gate and the doorframe. So alone, so narrow, so alone was the moment when all the other prisoners had the same words on their tongues that he felt he could beat down the walls of his cage under cover of their anger. But the cage was stronger than his despair.”
- 47.
“On his last day he had to work in my block. Came to me and said: ‘Murat, I only have two hours left.’ Was so excited. Then he came again saying: ‘Just one more hour.’ Once the time was almost over, he reappeared in front of my cell and looked at his watch. The other guards were some distance away. He yelled at them: ‘Hey, watch me as I do this!’ The guards came closer, he looked at his watch and started to count. ‘Five, four, three, two…’ As he came to zero he took his wrist band, flapped it at his hind parts, and, to the horror of the remaining guards, made a gesture as if he was to wipe his ass with it. Then he threw the band on the floor and trampled over it. ‘I’m no MP anymore!’ He stamped on it like the guards would do with the Qur’an. ‘You’re watching? So!’” My translation, ibid., 208f.
- 48.
Kurnaz says: “We appointed a leader after the Qur’an assault. Each prisoner had to pick a candidate. The voting was kept in secret; the Americans knew nothing about it. It took many weeks, because it had to be done from mouth to mouth, from cell to cell. Out of 500 detainees ten were chosen to collect and sort out the votes. These ten picked out three men, and the three then agreed on one single person who would become a leader. This man we called Emir. Nobody except from the three, which had chosen him, knew who it was. This man was not to be known as our official leader. He picked a further person who was to speak with the Americans and make appearances as our Emir so that the real Emir could stay in the background.” Kurnaz, Fünf Jahre meines Lebens, 152.
- 49.
Kurnaz, Fünf Jahre meines Lebens, 150. The combatant Khalid Mahmoud al-Asmar interviewed by Roger Willemsen draws a pronouncedly negative picture of the effectiveness of the detainees’ protests: “The strikes and all other sorts of protest that took place in Guantánamo were only a reaction to the desecration of our faith and our religious rituals […] We have often initiated strikes because of the desecration of the Qur’an. Then there always were negotiations and promises that this will be put to an end. But they also showed that the ones who were doing this were just stupid, and that these individual perpetrators had to be punished. Two days after we had ended a hunger strike, another desecration of an Afghani Qur’an took place […] As we started a hunger strike all across the camp, a General came to us and said: ‘Earlier, this was a cemetery for the Spanish, now it will be yours’.” Khalid Mahmoud al-Asmar, quoted from Willemsen, Hier spricht Guantánamo. Interviews mit Häftlingen, 69f.
- 50.
Cf. Worthington, The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison, 191.
- 51.
Kurnaz, Fünf Jahre meines Lebens, 112f. or rather 200.
- 52.
“Charly-Charly was one of the outer crates and we were very close to nature. I never had so many visitors later. Once there was this boa that came to me, very long and thin, I thought it could grow even more.” (translation), Kurnaz, Fünf Jahre meines Lebens, 112.
- 53.
al-Asmar in Willemsen, Hier spricht Guantánamo, 68.
- 54.
“Okay, you don’t want to, sagt der Offizier, let’s make an eagle, quick, Rashid wird von der Pritsche gestoßen, wirbelt herum und klatscht dem Boden, auf den Bauch, den Stoffhaufen, vor dem Gesicht, einer kniet auf seinem Rücken, ein anderer schiebt mit den Stiefeln seine Beine auseinander, seine Arme werden über den Kopf geschoben und die Handflächen nach oben gewendet, don’t move, brüllt der Offizier. Rashid rührt sich nicht, er schmiegt den kalten Körper an das kalte Linoleum. Er hört das Klappern und Trampeln und Scharren, er hechelt unter dem Druck auf seinem Brustkorb und zuckt erst, als zwei harte Stempel auf seine Fußsohle drücken, und wieder, als dasselbe mit den Händen geschieht, und hält still und schreit erst, als die stumpfen Druckstellen zu Stielen werden, die sich schlagartig in die Sohlen bohren, dann nageln sie die Hände fest, und er zwingt den Kopf in den Nacken und erkennt das Stuhlbein auf der Handfläche und die Stiefel und die gefleckten Hosenbeine davor. You say you know English, nazi = Der Offizier spricht von hinten, sein Stuhl steht auf Rashids Füßen.” Dieckmann, Guantánamo, 80. “Okay, you don’t want to, says the officer, let’s make an eagle, quick. Rashid is pushed from the gurney, spun around, and smacks the floor on his stomach with the heap of clothes right in front of his face. One of them is kneeling on his back, another kicks his feet apart. His hands are pulled above his head, palms up. Don’t move, growls the officer. Rashid doesn’t squirm, he presses his cold body against the cold linoleum. He hears his teeth chattering, footsteps and scraping noises. He wheezes from the pressure on his rib cage and finally jerks when something is pressed into the soles of his feet and then into the palms of his hands. He only starts to scream when the bruised pressure points start to bore into his feet like broom handles and seem to drill his hands into place. He manages to crane his head and sees the legs of a chair on his hands, and the boots and camo pants of someone sitting on it. You say you know English, nazi? The officer’s voice comes from behind him – he’s sitting on the chair on Rashid’s feet.” Dieckmann, Guantanamo. A Novel, 73 (italics in the original).
- 55.
Dieckmann, Guantánamo, 77.
- 56.
Kurnaz, Fünf Jahre meines Lebens, 99.
- 57.
Ibid.
- 58.
Dieckmann, Guantánamo, 92.
- 59.
Ibid., 97.
- 60.
Ibid. 150 and 152.
- 61.
Quoted from the theatre’s homepage: www.tricycle.co.uk/home/about-the-tricycle-pages/about-us-tab-menu/archive/archived-theatre-production/guantanamo-honor-bound-to-defend-freedom/ (accessed 1.5. 2015).
- 62.
Canton, “Guantánamo. Documenting a Real Space?” 90.
- 63.
Ibid., 89f.
- 64.
According to Mary Luckhurst, “Verbatim theatre has proliferated in Europe and North America since the 1990s, and post-9/11 has become increasingly visible on both mainstream and fringe stages.” Based on the “German documentary tradition,” practised by (among others) Erwin Piscator, Ralf Hochhuth, Heinar Kipphardt and Peter Weiß, the concept of “verbatim theatre” has established itself above all in Great Britain in recent decades. “The use of the term ‘verbatim theatre’ is specific to the UK, suggesting that particular political and cultural factors are in operation which make it important to distinguish the working method of this form of documentary theatre from others. As the Latin root of ‘verbatim’ suggests, the moment of utterance is privileged, and ‘verbatim theatre’, in its purest sense, is understood as a theatre whose practitioners, if called to account, could provide interviewed sources for its dialogue, in the manner that a journalist must, according to the code of ethics, have sources for a story. The term originated in England and was first coined in an article by Derek Paget in 1987 called ‘“Verbatim Theatre”: Oral Techniques and Documentary Techniques’, and it makes for intriguing study.” Luckhurst, ibid., 200f.
- 65.
Taylor, “The Experience of Immediacy: Emotion and Enlistment in Fact-Based Theatre,” 227.
- 66.
Gillian Slovo, symposium on ‘Verbatim Practices in Contemporary Theatre,’ July 13, 2006, cited by Luckhurst, “Verbatim Theatre, Media Relations and Ethics,” 214.
- 67.
Brittain and Slovo, Guantanamo, 34.
- 68.
Ibid., 25.
- 69.
Lyotard, The postmodern condition.
- 70.
Ibid., 51.
- 71.
Within the play, Clark utters the following summary: “If I had to sum up, it would be: I’m furious because those who are innocent have lost three years of their life, much as I lost, as I’ve been living in a sort of private hell since my sister was murdered, and although at least I’ve been able to recover and get over it and deal with, and still sort of have my life, they’ve had theirs taken away. And that’s… and they’ll never get it back and I’d buy them a drink if I met them, you know, if in truth they had done nothing wrong, I can’t imagine a worse thing for any person, they deserve all of our sympathies and all of our efforts to sort of make sure they do actually get the justice they deserve.” Brittain and Slovo, Guantanamo, 44.
- 72.
Donne, in Brittain and Slovo, Guantanamo, 59.
- 73.
Klüver, “Raus geht es nur noch im Leichensack” (My translation).
- 74.
See http://www.hrw.org/features/guantanamo-facts-figures (accessed 1.5.2015).
- 75.
Ibid.
- 76.
In a radio interview broadcast the day before the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, the Portuguese writer and Nobel Prize laureate José Saramago expressed his wish for the closing of Guantánamo as the first action of the new leader. For him, this step would not only have been an overdue procedure, that helps the detainees of the “concentration camp,” but also progress for the relationship between the US and Cuba. Saramago, Das Tagebuch. In his book American Vertigo (English translation: American Vertigo: In the Footsteps of Tocqueville, 2006), the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy especially criticizes the “intercultural comedy” by the US military, which, on one hand, serves eagerly to comply with religious rules––i.e. not wearing long shirts that could disturb the detained Muslims in their sense of shame––while, on the other hand, openly confesses to cudgelling prisoners, who show their reluctance by spitting at the guards or smudge walls of their prison cells with faeces. Lévy, American Vertigo. Auf der Suche nach der Seele Amerikas, 279. For the critique of American intellectuals, see, for example,. Chomsky, Interventions and Arnove (ed.), The Essential Chomsky.
- 77.
C.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year, 37.
- 78.
Ibid.
- 79.
Ibid.
- 80.
Butler, Precarious Life, 80.
- 81.
Feldman, ”The Actuarial Gaze: From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib,” 15, quoted in Hesford, “Staging Terror,” 32.
- 82.
Hesford, “Staging Terror,” 35.
- 83.
Ibid.
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Hubmann, P. (2017). Tourist/Terrorist: Narrating Uncertainty in Early European Literature on Guantánamo. In: Frank, S. (eds) 9/11 in European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64209-3_12
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