Booksellers Host Events for Poems From Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak

As stated in the Acknowledgements of Poems From Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak (Marc Falkoff, Ed., University of Iowa Press) collecting the poems for this volume was "no easy task." It took many human rights lawyers, as well as other Constitutional and human rights advocates, professors, and more, who were eventually able to gather some of the Guantanamo detainees' poems for publication.

During Banned Books Week (September 29 - October 6) and throughout September and October, several booksellers across the country -- including Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, City Lights in San Francisco, Skylight Books in Los Angeles, and Village Books in Bellingham, Washington -- will be holding readings from the collection.

"We thought it was appropriate to do during Banned Books Week," said Chuck Robinson of Village Books. "Although it's not necessarily a banned book, these are banned people, banned voices, and we thought it was altogether appropriate."

The 21 poems in the collection were all written by poets who were detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, or still are among the 775 men held in the U.S. detention center there. Originally deemed classified information by the U.S. military, the poems were written with little expectation of being read outside Guantanamo.

Marc Falkoff

That they were written at all is in many ways remarkable. In the first year of detention, many detainees were not allowed pen and paper. Some drafted poems on Styrofoam cups with pebbles, or traced letters with dabs of toothpaste. Most of these "cup" poems were lost. Two are reconstructed in this collection. Some poems here were reconstructed from memory. As Marc Falkoff, editor of the collection, assistant professor at the Northern Illinois College of Law, and a lawyer for 17 Guantanamo detainees, wrote in the introduction, Poems From Guantanamo "represents another step in our struggle to allow our clients' voices to be heard."

The poems serve as an outlet for the detainees' experiences, anger, frustration, loneliness, and hopefulness. In one poem called "O Prison Darkness," Abdulaziz, who did not want to give his last name, writes of persistence and survival. In "To My Father," Abdullah Thani Faris Al Anazi focuses on the injustice of his imprisonment and longs for home, "where the lavender cotton sprouts."

The project got started, explained Jim McCoy, marketing manager, UI Press, when Joe Parsons, UI Press's acquisitions editor, read an article in Bookforum, about a few poems that had been released from Guantanamo detainees after being cleared by the U.S. Department of Defense. Parsons contacted Falkoff, who had been mentioned in the article, to find out if he had more poems. The press decided that because of the political urgency of the situation it was imperative to get the volume together and published as quickly as possible. As a result, the title, from idea to publication, was ready in just nine months.

UI Press has been quickly working with booksellers to orchestrate readings. "Coordinating events around this book has been unlike anything I've been involved in before," said McCoy. "Response from booksellers has been nothing short of outstanding."

McCoy noted that Iowa City's Jim Harris, owner of Iowa City's own Prairie Lights, has taken up the charge of involving booksellers. "As a university press, we don't have the funds to tour an author, and in this case we don't have authors to tour," McCoy explained. "Jim proposed that we approach stores across the country and ask them to coordinate local poets, activists, and legal experts to read from the poems."

Harris contacted Skylight Books in Los Angeles, Powell's in Portland, Robin's Bookstore in Philadelphia, Mager's and Quinn in Minneapolis, and Village Books in Bellingham, Washington. McCoy said that other bookstores are welcome to participate.

Village Books will host a group of local poets, who'll read selections from the book on October 4, and will include an introduction about how the poems were collected, as well as review the circumstances in Guantanamo.

Village Books' Robinson said that when Harris told him about Poems From Guantanamo, he immediately got on board to publicize the collection. Robinson noted that many U.S. citizens are concerned about people being detained for years, in a highly secretive program, without being charged. "People want insight into what a prisoner's experience of Guantanamo is," he said. "With the event, we'll have an opportunity to give them that. Obviously, we're very interested in giving voice to a lot of different opinions and ideas, voices that haven't been heard. And these voices have been very sequestered."

A complete listing of dates and times of events can be found at www.uiowapress.org. UI Press is distributed by the Chicago Distribution Center. Booksellers can also contact Jim McCoy directly at [email protected] or (319) 335-2008. The book is $13.95 and royalties will go to the Center for Constitutional Rights. --Karen Schechner