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“These men are worth your tears”

A contrastive comparison of selected war poetry written in

World War I and in Guantánamo Bay

Masterscriptie opleiding Engelse Taal en Cultuur

Nynke Bottinga 1253492 Dr. Irene Visser

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Table of contents

Introduction 1

Chapter One

Two Conflicts: Backgrounds 5 World War I: The War Poets 5 The “War on Terror:” The Guantánamo Poets 10

Common ground: War 19

Chapter Two

The poets: Backgrounds 21

The World War I Poets 22

The Guantánamo Poets 30

Concluding remarks 36

Chapter Three

The poetry 37

Living conditions: World War I 37 Living conditions: Guantánamo Bay 40

Human relationships 41

Camaraderie 45

The home front 48

Politics 51

Conclusion 58

Bibliography 61

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Introduction

Ever since the 1920’s, when the emotional dust had settled, the poetry written by the participants in World War I has been a special field of study. A new kind of mechanized dehumanizing warfare that broke drastically with the conventions of combat in previous times had led soldiers involved in World War I to write a new genre of poetry: a poetry that was new in its directness, and in its appeal on emotions that went beyond the scope of what had generally been regarded as poetic. Now, in the opening decade of the 21st century, a new body of war poetry has been written under comparably harsh circumstances by prisoners held in Guantánamo Bay. This contemporary poetry written by detainees who are regarded by the American military as enemy combatants in the global “War on Terror” offers an as yet unexplored angle for literary study, as, like the World War I poetry, it was also written under circumstances of duress by men for whom there was no way out.

In this dissertation I will compare and contrast how the theme of war and its

implications for individual lives is reflected in selected poems written by selected war poets of World War I on the one hand and by inmates of Guantánamo Bay, America’s prison for terrorism suspects in Cuba, on the other. For purposes of clarity and sustainability I chose to concentrate on the work of four major poets from World War I and ten of the Guantánamo Poets. The main themes are the human relationships and politics. Within the human

relationship theme I focus on the personal situation and the larger context of the relationship the poets have with other people. I explore the function of the poetry for the individual poet, the bond between the poets and the men that share their fate, and how they position

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While the poetry written in World War I is actually war poetry, it might be argued that the Guantánamo poetry is not war poetry, because the American “War on Terror” is not a real war, but the name that the Bush administration has given to a series of campaigns and actions that were instigated after the 9/11 attacks to rid the world of terrorist threats. The military interventions that the US government makes to prevent further attacks fall under the

denominator of “War on Terror.” Even so, the two groups of poets, on the surface, appear to be opposites; the brave war heroes on the one hand seem to have nothing in common with the “most dangerous men on earth” on the other. The works of the War Poets have been very widely discussed for many years, but the poems by the Guantánamo Poets were only

published at the end of 2007 in the book “Poems from Guantánamo; The Detainees Speak,” and have therefore not been thoroughly studied yet. Despite the fact that the circumstances under which the poetry of the two groups of poets originated are different, I feel that they can indeed be compared fruitfully as the men in Guantánamo Bay are virtual prisoners of war; the way they are bereft of their individual freedom under threat of suffering is similar to the situation of the soldiers of World War I.

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In order to create a pyramid of analysis, working from a broad base to a specialised apex, this paper is divided into three chapters. Chapter One presents a summary of the historical backgrounds of World War I and of the circumstances leading up to the “War on Terror” of the early twenty-first century. The two conflicts will be compared to show similarities and contrasts between the political and historical developments that led to the wars that formed the context of the poetry.

Chapter Two discusses the lives of the World War I Poets whose work will be

explored: Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and Edmund Blunden. This chapter elaborates on their war experiences to create an image of what life in and beyond the trenches was like for them, to gain more insight into the circumstances in which the poems were created, andwhat the function of their poetry was for the poets. I chose to discuss the poetry of these particular four men, who are regarded as some of the foremost poets of World War I, since they all have a different way of dealing with the war in their poetry and because they have all written very clear, accessible and powerful poetry. In Chapter Two I also discuss the situation of a selection of Guantánamo Poets from The Detainees Speak who, on the whole, have not had the chance to achieve any literary status yet. However, in view of the fact that the majority of these poets are still imprisoned and that virtually nothing is known about them or about the lives of the poets that have been released, I will also use the accounts of other ex-inmates to come as close as I can to creating an image of what life for the poets in

Guantánamo is like. At the end of Chapter Two I will further discuss in what ways the situation of the War Poets in the trenches was similar to the situation of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay.

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This chapter also focuses on what in the wider context can be seen as the political content of the poems.

It must be noted that there is an obvious imbalance between the two groups of poets and their poetry. The wealth of material about the poets of World Was I and the stature they have achieved far exceeds the paucity of material and the virtual lack of literary research on the Guantánamo Poets. My study is therefore a pioneer study, for the first time attempting an analysis of war poetry from Guantánamo Bay by contrasting and comparing two entirely different groups of poets, in vastly different circumstances, unified by the theme of war and its related themes of suffering, despair and loss.

The World War I poems discussed in the paper and presented in the appendix were taken from The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry and The Oxford Book of War Poetry, John Lehmann’s The English Poets of the First World War and Edmund Blunden’s

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Chapter One

Two conflicts: backgrounds

The poems of the World War I Poets and the Guantánamo Poets share a geo-political background, in the sense that the origins of the World War I and the “War on Terror” are deeply entrenched in the field of international alliances. At the beginning of the twentieth century, all major European states, such as the Russian and the Austro-Hungarian empires, were linked to each other by agreements and alliances. This fact is of significance because these alliances were the reason that the war eventually turned into a global war, similar to the way that the originally American “War on Terror” has turned into a worldwide conflict due to NATO alliance obligations and political subservience to the powerful United States.

World War I: the War Poets

The most important of the political agreements in the early twentieth century were the Triple Alliance and the Triple Entente. The Triple Alliance was a military alliance formed in 1879 between the German Empire and Austria-Hungary, to which Italy was added in 1882. The basic agreement between the three powers was that, if any member became involved in a military struggle with two or more other nations, the remaining two would provide military assistance and join the war (Palmer 658). The other great alliance, the Triple Entente, was formed in 1907 between England, France and Russia. The agreement was basically the same as for the Triple Alliance, with the exception that England did not want to commit itself to any military promises (Palmer 659).

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attacks of September 11th, 2001, would have 87 years later. Franz Ferdinand was on an official trip in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital (Stevenson 10). Princip was a member of a secret Serbian society, officially called “The Union of Death,” which was more commonly known as the Black Hand. The assassination was the culmination of years of struggle between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Slavic nations it occupied. In 2001, bin Laden was also to state that the reason behind the attack on the Twin Towers was the interference of the US in the internal affairs of Arabian states. The basis of the Slavic struggle was that Slovenes, Bosnians, Serbs and Croats felt themselves to be one people, which was the reason for calling themselves the Yugoslavs. In 1900, the real South Slav upheaval began when a group of radical nationalists claimed that the Austro-Hungarian Empire would never grant them the autonomy they deserved, and that therefore the South Slavs should break free of the Empire and form an independent state of their own. Due to a spider's web of international alliances the situation deteriorated quickly, resulting in a military gridlock that led to the outbreak of war in August 1914.

World War I had officially begun and quickly turned into a struggle in which not only a large part of Europe was involved, but in which countries like New Zealand, India and South Africa also sent soldiers to the front, on the basis of strong bonds with the British Empire, their (former) coloniser. After America’s intervention on the side of the Allied forces in 1917, countries on all five continents were involved in the war, just as it would be the case some ninety years later in the “War on Terror,” which has also evolved into a military

struggle in Iraq and Afghanistan, involving the ever increasing deployment of international troops.

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Battle of the Marne, fought from September 5 tot 12 1914, it became a “war of position” (Palmer 669). At the Marne, the British and French armies forced the Germans into retreat, thus ending the German illusion of quickly crushing France. From that point on, the war turned into an almost continual stalemate while for four years in a row, the front lines of both armies changed only by a few miles (Lehmann 9). The ordinary infantry soldier played the most important role in the fighting, due to the fact that the war was now fought from the trenches and because visibly entering the no man’s land between the two front lines virtually always meant certain death. The World War I was the first war to develop into a trench war. Due to the deadly new introductions of machine guns and massed artillery fire, it was made virtually impossible to advance for great distances across no man’s land. Where a machinegun could simply mow down dozens of advancing enemy soldiers, artillery fire could even take out hundreds (Emden 92). For this reason the men dug themselves in in the trenches, from which the majority of the war would be fought.

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the summer conditions were not much better as the heat “encouraged lice, flies and maggots to breed while rats fed on discarded waste and corpses” (Rawson 293).

Poetry must have formed an emotional outlet for the life in the trenches which was very hard. Even though “going over the top,” according to Richard van Emden, was a “rare experience,” (98) many of those fighting in the trench found it hard to cope with the scenes of death and destruction they witnessed, as they frequently saw their comrades getting shot to pieces, others getting horribly maimed or left to die in the mud, as saving them would endanger both the other soldiers and the mission (Emden 164). Many soldiers were losing faith in the “good cause,” or, as Siegfried Sassoon, wrote to a friend, “in unholy terror of losing my life in that organised inferno of mud and misery up the line [..] I haven’t met anyone yet who has any faith in the ‘purpose of the war’” (Egremont 123). Even between major attacks, the men in the trenches were never safe, as enemy snipers were always alert to any movement (Emden 91-92). All this contributed greatly to an atmosphere of fear and oppression, as the soldiers knew that they had to be constantly vigilant, because they never knew when the next gas- or artillery attack might be or if they would be alive the next day.

At the beginning of World War I, the war poetry had been filled with romantic patriotic sentiment that emphasised that sacrificing your life for your king and country was the noblest thing a person could do. This idea was expressed in romanticised poetry, in which soldiers become heroic, almost epic warriors who are at one with nature and are supported by heaven. An example of the rhetoric that was used comes from a fragment of ‘Into Battle,’ written by Julian Grenfell in 1915:

The fighting man shall from the sun

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Great rest, and fullness after dearth. (lines 9-10 & 13-14)

The romantic ideas expressed in the early months of the war died in the trenches of Flanders and France and there was a change in poetic expression. Once it became clear that the war would not be over quickly and especially after the battle of the Somme in 1916, where more than 600.000 French and English lives were lost and nothing was gained (Palmer 669) the feeling that the war was absolutely futile began to become very clear in the writings of the War Poets, along with a sense of disillusionment, of bitterness and anger towards those in charge who prolonged the war (Lehmann 9). Most of the early British War Poets like Rupert Brooke and Julian Grenfell in their poems keep returning to the concept of war as a game, and have an attitude to the war that was “conditioned by their years of immersion in the works of Ceasar, Virgil, Horace and Homer” (Stallworthy xxvi). Their poems are filled with references to chariots, swords, honour and bravery (Stallworthy xxvii). After 1915 however, poets like Sassoon and Owen did away with the extensive use of references to glorious battles and warriors of the past, and began incorporating the truth of war in their poems, explicitly

naming the horrors without losing themselves in metaphors. Like the Guantánamo Poets, they concentrated on the nature of the suffering they had to endure. However, their readership was restricted by censorship and by the nature of the magazines they were published in, which were of limited circulation.

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their lives for nothing. As private Reg Lawrence put it: “[W]e are fighting for national

honour. How absurd! A soldier when he bayonets a man does not nurse the nation’s wrong in his breast” (Macdonald 241). There was a saying in the army: “The higher the fewer,” which meant the higher the rank, the fewer the brains (Macdonald 161). The saying was an

expression of the soldiers’ frustration with their generals, other high-ranking military staff, and politicians who made them live in abominable circumstances and sent thousands of soldiers to their deaths with one single order, while they themselves lived lives of luxury at a very safe distance from the fields of battle, caring only about the political and strategic objectives (Macdonald 230). One of the letdowns on returning home on leave was that the soldiers generally found themselves unable to share their true experiences with their loved ones, as those simply could not fathom the horrors of what the men had been through, not in the least because all letters and news from the front were severely censored to keep up morale (Stevenson 217-218).

The “War on Terror:” the Guantánamo Poets

Almost ninety years after the end of World War I, terrorist attacks in the United States formed the beginning of a conflict that in many ways bore similarities to World War I. On the 11th of September, 2001, four commercial jet airliners were hijacked by nineteen terrorists, all of whom had affiliations with al Qaeda, an Islamic terrorist organisation run by the notorious extremist Osama bin Laden. Two of the planes were flown into the Twin Towers in New York, and the hijackers also crashed a jet into the headquarters of the United States

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in Pennsylvania. Exactly what that target should have been has been discussed at great length but is now widely believed to have been either the White House or the Capitol Building.

Similar to the long growth of Yugoslav independence movement prior to 1914, frequent attacks1 on the US by Muslim fundamentalists preceded the 9/11 attacks. There had been a long history of antagonism between several religious extremist organisations and the American government, as a result of the latter’s interventions in the Arab world. William Pfaff states that radical Islamic organisations like al Qaeda want to create an all-Muslim environment and eradicate all Western and modern influences from the Arab world. Al Qaeda wants to return to the glorious past in which Islamic power was very great, religion was “pure” and unspoiled, and the Muslim people were all “obedient and devout” (140). For al Qaeda and other representatives of extremist radical Islam, the United States is a symbol of a “contagious and moral corruption” (56) which they want to eradicate from their world, before it eradicates them and their way of life. The reasons for the 9/11 attacks can be found in a fatwa2 from 1998, issued as a reaction to Operation Desert Fox, by, among others, Osama bin Laden. It includes the following statement:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty Allah, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight

1

TheAugust 7, 1998, U.S. Embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, the 1993 WTC bombing, the 1996

Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen. 2

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them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah.”3

The three reasons given for this ruling are firstly, that the Americans have been occupying the lands in the Arabian Peninsula since the 1991 Gulf War, and have plundered its riches.

Moreover, it is stated that the Muslim rulers have been dictated to by the Americans and that the people living on the peninsula have been humiliated by these “infidels” taking over their holy places and countries. Furthermore, the issuers of the fatwa argue that the US has turned the Arabian Peninsula into a “spearhead through which to fight the neighbouring Muslim peoples.” Secondly, the Americans, or the “crusader-Zionist alliance” as the US and its ally Israel are referred to, are said to want to repeat the massacres of the Gulf War on the Iraqi people, out of sheer blood thirst and malice and to “humiliate their Muslim neighbours.” The last justification for issuing the fatwa is that the Americans, by their bombing of Iraq try to divert the attention away from the fact that their allies the Israelis are still occupying

Jerusalem and the fact that they are killing Muslims every day in the continual struggle with the Palestinians. According to the fatwa, the war on Iraq is part of the plan to fragment, divide and weaken the lands on the Arabian Peninsula, in order to aid Israel in its unholy “crusade” against Muslims. The attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon were part of the extremists’ “counter-crusade,” to warn the United States to retreat completely from the Arab world.

The first reaction from Western governments to the terrorist attacks was one of shock. The attacks were so shocking because America, the most powerful country in the world, had been hurt by a meticulously planned terrorist attack, executed out of pure hatred towards the country and its leaders. What is more, the terrorist organisation behind the attacks operated out of two of the poorest, least powerful countries in the world, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The attacks were a wake-up call for the United States and made them realise that they were

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not untouchable, and indeed quite vulnerable to such attacks (Pfaff 8). The Bush

administration reacted very quickly to the attacks, and already in the first week after 9/11 the anti-terrorism bill for the PATRIOT act was submitted. PATRIOT is an acronym for Provide Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. On 26 October 2001, the PATRIOT act was signed into law by President Bush (Rapley 207). The act brought about enormous changes in civil rights and the way the country was protected against new terrorist attacks, giving almost limitless power to the FBI, the police and the legal prosecuting system, and seriously limiting the personal freedom of potential terrorists and also of all other

Americans (Rapley 208). The American citizens however, according to Rapley, were glad to support the bill as they felt threatened, angry and scared and needed strong protection and forceful words and measures from their government.

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call on all Arab and Muslim immigrants to come forward and register. Around 82,000 people complied of whom 13,000 turned out to be illegally residing in the US (Rapley 230).

However, not one single terrorist has been convicted as a result of this action (Cole & Lobel 107). There has been very severe criticism from human rights organisations on this policy of singling out the Arabs and the Muslim immigrants as actions like these sustained the idea that Arabs and American Muslims were the enemy and that they should be hated and feared.

On the evening of September 11, President Bush, in his address to the nation, declared “war” on terrorism, (New York Times) and not just on the terrorists responsible for the 9/11 attacks, but on all terrorists around the globe. Two days later a NATO resolution was adopted that basically stated that, if the US was to start an actual war, it would have full NATO backing, which meant that all the NATO countries would be involved in the conflict (Perlez). It did not take long for the US to appeal to NATO, because in the night of 7 to 8 October 2001, the US and Britain launched an attack on Afghanistan. The objective was to destroy al Qaeda training camps with cruise missiles and long-range bombers. The other purpose of the bombings was to overthrow the oppressive, extremist Taliban government, replace it with a more democratic government and bring relief and aid “to Afghans suffering truly oppressive living conditions under the Taliban regime” (Tyler). Despite the growing tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims in both their own countries and the rest of the world, Bush and Blair made it abundantly clear that the campaign in Afghanistan was not a war on Islam. Moreover, Bush asserted that “we are the friends of almost a billion people worldwide who practice the Islamic faith” (Tyler). The “War on Terror,” however, had officially begun.

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Afghanistan would later turn out to be only the beginning of much more struggle and misery to come. Today, in 2008, more than six years after the Afghanistan offensive began, the Afghan President Karzai, reportedly only controls 30 percent of the country. The resurgent Taliban control 10 to 11 percent of the country, and the rest of the territory is under local tribal control. However, several of these tribes are loyal to the Taliban, not in the least because the situation in the last six years has hardly improved for the Afghan people, while NATO troops have been busy keeping the peace and helping to rebuild the country

(Associated Press). It is in the chaos prevailing in this shattered country that several of the poets discussed in this paper have been arrested to be transported to Guantánamo Bay.

The second major step in the “War on Terror,” instigated by Washington, was the attack on Iraq, nicknamed, “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” which started on March 20, 2003. The reasons given by the Bush administration for the attack were that the Iraqi supposedly

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Americans are seen as aggressors and oppressors, rather than the liberators they claim to be (Cole & Lobel 148). This culturally widespread idea that the Americans are the aggressors plays a prominent role in the poems of the Guantánamo Poets, many of whom see themselves as innocent victims of America’s “War on Terror.”

Since the beginning in 2001, there has been a storm of criticism on how the US has waged its “War on Terror,” and the campaigns have seriously damaged the image of America, which, according to Cole and Lobel, has gone from the “home of the free” to being the

“country most likely to be hated the world over” (15). First of all, the fact that the US was not fighting an actual but a metaphorical war, was the reason for a great deal of opposition, and it has often been speculated that the wars in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq were not about freedom, but about oil, money, revenge and more power for the US (Pfaff 46). Secondly, the way in which the enemy was portrayed in speeches by Bush and his team has been judged as severely misleading and bordering on indoctrination. From the very beginning, the Bush administration has referred to the terrorists and the “war” in terms of good and evil, light and dark. For President Bush, the terrorists represent everything that is evil, oppressing and reprehensible in the world, while on the other hand the Americans symbolize everything that is free, good and noble. For example, when speaking about the terrorist suspects that were held prisoner by the US, Defence Secretary Rumsfeld referred to them as “the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth,” (Cole & Lobel 103)

furthermore, he made the contrast between “us” and “them” visible when he said that the men were “the worst of a very bad lot. They are devoted to killing millions of Americans -

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and all the other inmates, as they, in this rhetoric, are the embodiment of “evil,” and thus do not have to be treated humanely (Rapley 252). Consequently, this is often reflected in the Guantánamo poetry.

Indeed, the element of the “War on Terror” that was most severely criticised, and which has done the most damage to the reputation and the image of the US, has been the treatment of terrorism suspects in detention facilities like Guantánamo Bay, a high security US detention centre on the coast of Cuba. The men held in this prison were arrested all around the world, even in countries such as Bosnia and Gambia (Cole & Lobel 104). Ninety-five percent of all the men detained have been captured by non-US forces, outside Afghanistan, mostly in Pakistan, often in exchange for “generous bounties,” (Cole & Lobel 105) which must be very alluring to people in desperately poor regions. A 2006 CIA report showed that, of those incarcerated in Guantánamo Bay, only 8 percent are actual fighters for al-Qaeda or the Taliban, 30 percent are alleged members, and 62 percent of the prisoners are only “associated with” a terrorist organisation, which can mean as little as having lived next door to a known member, but may very often mean that the prisoner is innocent (Cole & Lobel 104). The detainees in Guantánamo Bay are not “prisoners of war” because the Bush administration has labelled them “enemy combatants.” This new label was applied because the rights of prisoners of war are protected under the Geneva Conventions, and the

administration claims that, by giving these prisoners a new label, the usual rights and

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these prisoners” (Rapley 237). In short, the US government can do with these prisoners what they want, even sentence them to death, without being restrained by any international legal impediments. The incredible insecurity that the Guantánamo prisoners feel about their legal situation, as they had all human rights taken from them, is a strong factor in the web of circumstances that made them turn to poetry to voice their anger, fear and frustration.

The Guantánamo poems were written under conditions of war. The poets faced a lack of information about why they were there and what would happen to them, had their freedom of movement taken away and suffered a loss of individuality. Moreover, they were facing enemy violence and suffered from personalised punishments that were perhaps in many ways as oppressive as trench warfare experiences. From 2003, when Guantánamo Bay was taken into use as a high security prison, up to the present day, there have been reports of inhumane treatment and torture taking place inside the prison walls. In 2005, newspapers like The New

York Times and The Washington Post were calling for closure of Guantánamo and similar facilities, since all the reports about torture were seriously starting to damage the reputation of the US (Rapley 223). The prisons stayed open, however, and the reports kept coming.

Because the administration has always kept completely secret what happened in the detention facilities, all the reports are the result of “investigative journalism,” (Rapley 238) leaked documents, and most of all, statements by released prisoners and former Guantánamo employees. Further evidence of the fact that something is very wrong at the detention facilities that has ever come out, were the pictures of US soldiers torturing prisoners in Abu Ghraib, a detention facility in Iraq, that were published in 2004 and made headlines around the world, giving a new impulse to the debate about the way in which America is violating human rights. Recently, on the 28th of February 2008, “new” photos, taken in Abu Ghraib in 2006 were perhaps even more shocking and degrading. The pictures do not provide

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from burning the Quran to forced enemas, shackling men like slaves, forcing them to soil themselves and lie in their own excrement for days, physical abuse, exposure to extreme heat and cold for very long periods, and an endless list of other torture methods were actually used, but make it very hard for the US government to maintain that their prisoners are being treated humanely. Furthermore, the recent prohibition of the use of “waterboarding,” an interrogation technique involving a cloth being put over a prisoner’s head, after which his face is put under a powerful jet of water, simulating the feeling of drowning, adds to the allegations that the US is indeed torturing its “enemy combatants.”

Living in Guantánamo in “near-total isolation” (Falkoff 1) in a situation in which they had no legal rights and thus no protection, facing a very insecure future and completely at the mercy of the US army, many detainees began writing poetry to “maintain their sanity, to memorialize their suffering, and to preserve their humanity through acts of creation” (Falkoff 3). The first poems were inscribed on Styrofoam cups from lunch and dinner trays; all these poems ended up in the trash at the end of the day. After about a year, the detainees were allowed access to paper and pencils, so that they could write down their poems properly (Falkoff 3). The poems found their way to volunteer lawyers and human rights advocates who had been trying to “restore the rule of law to Guantánamo” (Falkoff ix). Eventually, when, after scrutinous censoring, and a selection of these poems had been declassified, they were collected by Marc Falkoff and published as Poems from Guantánamo; The Detainees Speak. President Bush’s “parasites”, the “worst of the worst” had been given a human voice.

Common ground: War

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and in 1914, it was the assassination of Franz Ferdinand which sparked off the events leading up to World War I. Secondly, both World War I and America’s attacks on Afghanistan and especially on Iraq, were started as “preventive wars” (Cole & Lobel 107). Germany declared war on Russia and France because the Germans thought that their forces were strong enough to defeat the Alliance and thus end the threat to Germany’s powerful position in Europe. The Germans were sure that, if they waited any longer, Russia would have a stronger army and they would not stand a chance. Consequently, they preventively declared war on Russia, when they still felt they had the upper hand. The war on Iraq was also very much an example of preventive warfare. Whereas the attacks on Afghanistan can be explained as a direct result of the 9/11 attacks, the war on Iraq can only be explained as a preventive war. To prevent further terrorist attacks in the future, the American government used Iraq to make a statement to all terrorists. Both in World War I and the “War on Terror,” the plan of waging a preventive war to eliminate the enemy backfired and both turned into global conflicts.

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Chapter Two

The poets: backgrounds

To present the background for the poetry which will be discussed in the next chapter, and to be better able to draw comparisons between World War I Poets and the Guantánamo Poets, this chapter gives an overview of the lives of four World War I Poets: Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden and Ivor Gurney. Furthermore, with the use of accounts of the lives of (ex-) detainees, I will try to create an image of what the living conditions in Guantánamo Bay were like for Guantánamo Poets. I will be discussing Mohammed el Gharani, Sami al Haj, Ibrahim al Rubaish, Abdulla Majid al Noaimi, Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost, Emad Abdullah Hassan, Abdullah Thani Faris al Anazi, Moazzam Begg, Jumah al Dossari, and Adnan Farhan Abdul Latif. I have chosen to focus on the four World War I Poets for several reasons. They are interesting to me because each take a diverse and unique angle in representing war experiences. Whereas Sassoon, Owen and Blunden were officers, Gurney was a private soldier, which makes his perception of the war and the battlefield

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The World War I Poets

Siegfried Sassoon was the World War I poet who, out of the four, spent the least time in the trenches due to injuries, but who was also one of the first poets to write very critical and cynical poems about the war and the people who prolonged it. Born into a rich Jewish family in 1886, Sassoon had a very English upbringing in the Kentish countryside. He developed a profound love for that landscape, which often found a way into his poems (Lehmann 38). He was raised by his mother, and she instilled a great sense of patriotism in her son, as she was convinced that England was the greatest country in the world (Egremont 11). After receiving home schooling and attending two different boarding schools, Sassoon read law and medieval history at Cambridge, during which time his first poems were published. Graduating in neither subject, he became a struggling poet in London (58). In 1915, he made a deliberate decision to join the army, because “courage was [now] the only thing that mattered,” and as he wrote to a friend, “like most of the human race I had always wanted to be a hero” (62). In November of 1915, Sassoon left for France (Hart-Davis 13).

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desperate the soldiers sometimes felt, and that the ideals for which the war had been started were “rapidly evaporating” (39). In 1917, after witnessing countless scenes of carnage, men torn limb from limb, having faced weeks of sleep deprivation, losing friends and colleagues and not feeling that any of the slaughter and struggle made one bit of difference, and that “all this loss of life is a sheer waste” (Egremont 138), Sassoon decided to write a public statement against the war.4 His decision to write the statement was based on the fact that he wanted his protests to reach a larger audience than his poems were able to, as those, due to severe censorship by the government, often remained unpublished or were just printed in small-circulation journals (143). In the statement, Sassoon, on behalf of the troops, attacks those politically responsible for deliberately prolonging the war. Furthermore, he protests against the “callous complacency” of the people at home, and makes it clear that he did not wish to be a part of the war any longer, as he refused to send his troops to their death for reasons he did not agree with. In response to the statement, Sassoon was not court martialed, which would have been the expected procedure, but instead was brought before a medical examination board and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, because he was said to be “suffering from a nervous breakdown” and could not be considered “responsible for his actions” (157). In Craiglockhart, Sassoon met his future good friend Wilfred Owen.

After three months in Scotland, Sassoon was deemed fit for General Service, and had eventually to return to the front (Hart-Davis 13). He survived the war to acquire worldwide fame as one of the most prominent War Poets of World War I. According to Rupert Hart-Davis, Sassoon, in his later life, was annoyed at always being referred to as a “war poet,” even though he had written a considerable amount of other poetry and prose. Still, the war had a profound effect on the life of Siegfried Sassoon. It had transformed him from an awkward and shy young man into the “spokesman for a whole way of thinking” (Egremont 224) and

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provided him with material for several (semi-autobiographical) books and volumes of poetry, increasing his fame the world over.

Siegfried Sassoon’s friend, fellow poet, and fellow officer Wilfred Owen was born on March 18th in 1893 in Oswestry, Shropshire. Owen’s mother was deeply religious and as a young boy he was profoundly affected by her faith, as he was his mother’s favourite and they were extremely close. He attended Sunday School every week, read from the Bible daily and even preached to his own family on a regular basis, an event known in the family as

“Wilfred’s Church” (Hibberd 21). After receiving a good education, but not being accepted into the University of London, Owen became a parish assistant to Reverend Herbert Wigan (White 23). As a result of sad experiences in which he saw no divine intervention, Owen eventually lost his faith and turned against his mother’s religion, calling it “a false creed” (Hibberd 99), even though he dreaded the divine punishment he was always told he would receive for renouncing his faith. Having gained some experience as a teacher of younger pupils during his schooldays, Owen left for France to become an English teacher in September, 1913 (White 25).

Owen was in France when the war broke out, so he did not experience the “recruiting frenzy” (Hibberd 131) that was going on back home in England, where all able men were drafted for military service with the aid of fervently patriotic posters and flyers saying that their king and country needed them, and simultaneously implying that whoever refused to enlist was a coward and brought shame on himself and his family (Macdonald 26-28). Owen did not want the “bore of training” for the war, but he did, however, “most intensely want to fight” (Hibberd 160) for his king and country, because he felt that doing nothing was

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disillusionment he expressed in the poem “Dulce Et Decorum Est,” in which the influence of Siegfried Sassoon’s disenchantment can be felt.

After receiving training as an officer, Wilfred Owen’s regiment was sent to France in late December 1916. Because he was an officer, his living conditions were fairly good

compared to those of the common soldiers; officers had their own mess with food cooked by a good chef, they had private lodgings, and their own personal servant (Hibberd 203). However, these rather comfortable conditions would not last very long. As the Censor strictly prohibited soldiers to give the home front any information about their whereabouts in case the letter was intercepted by the Germans, on January 4th 1917, Owen wrote an encoded letter to his mother in which he told her that his regiment was being moved to the front line of the Somme

battlefield (206).

Owen was stationed near Beaumont Hamel, where some of the most intense fighting of the Somme battle took place. It was January, the middle of winter, and living conditions in the trenches, even for an officer, were abominable. In Owen’s words “everything is

makeshift” (Stallworthy 153). All the men were constantly cold, wet and especially muddy, with no opportunity whatsoever to become warm, dry or clean. The conditions were mind-numbing, and Owen, in letters to his mother, describes that he has “no fancies and feelings,” (Hibberd 207) and that “there is nothing in this inferno but mud and thunder,” (Stallworthy 154) the latter in the form of continual bombardments and gun fire from both sides.

Nevertheless, after almost two weeks in the trenches, he still felt that he could not “do a better thing or be at a righter place” (Hibberd 209). His conviction changed, however, when his regiment was moved further up the line, where fighting became even more intense and Owen witnessed people dying in gruesome ways on a daily basis. At the end of January, he

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[..] the universal pervasion of Ugliness. Hideous landscapes, vile noises, foul

language, and nothing but foul, even from one’s own mouth (for all are devil ridden), everything unnatural, broken, blasted; the distortion of the dead, whose unburiable bodies sit outside dug-outs all day, all night, the most execrable sights on earth (Breen 123).

The continual physical and mental hardship and horrors took their toll on Owen and

thoroughly changed his view of the war. Whereas on enlisting he had been full of grand ideas and ideals about the war, his trench experiences made him see that there was nothing remotely glorious about what the soldiers had to go through and that all the deaths were far too great a price to pay.

The anger that started to build up in Owen and which clearly came out in the letters to his family would later become the basis for his poetry. He felt that he had to educate the people at home about “the actualities of war” (Hibberd 216) as he knew that heavy censorship and propaganda kept the English civilians ignorant of what the war at the front truly entailed. His poetry only really reached its completed form after he met Siegfried Sassoon, whose work he greatly admired, in Craiglockhart War Hospital where he was treated for shell-shock5 (Lehmann 54).

From Sassoon, Owen learnt to be more playful with language. Moreover, Sassoon taught him to make his poetry more realistic by writing more directly from experience and real life (Egremont 170). Owen’s eyes were opened to the new insight that poetry should reflect truth. This meant that even the most horrible event could hold poetic beauty. Both Owen and Sassoon strongly believed in Keats’ words that “[b]eauty is truth, truth beauty” (Hibberd 268). A lot of Owen’s most famous poems, like “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Dulce Et Decorum Est” were written in Craiglockhart, but after his return to the battlefield,

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he kept writing and sending his poems to Sassoon for approval. The quality of his work made Sassoon begin to suspect that his “little friend Wilfred was a potential Keats” (Egremont 171). Perhaps he could have become as great a poet as Keats, had he survived the war. Sadly

however, Wilfred Owen died on November 4th, 1918, while leading his men in trying to cross the Oise-Sambre Canal. The news of his death reached his family a week later, on November 11th, the day the armistice was signed (Stallworthy xix).

The third officer-poet, Edmund Blunden, was born in London on November 1th, 1896. In 1900, the family moved to Kent and the rural life that he experienced there always

influenced his work where it is reflected as an idyllic romanticised past (McPhail and Guest 13). After attending Christ’s Hospital boarding school where he discovered poetry, Blunden got a scholarship and gained a place at Queen’s College in Oxford (18). In 1914, when he was twenty years old, he published his first two slim volumes of poetry on his own initiative (Hardie 5). In 1915, Blunden volunteered for the army, thus forsaking the chance to study for a degree. In the spring of 1916, his regiment went out to the trenches, and he would

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hours” (117) when they were billeted there. There are vivid descriptions of how the battle of the Somme had traumatized all the men that were there, and how unbreakable bonds were formed between the men who suffered the experience together, bonds that no civilian could understand (145).

Blunden’s war poetry lacks the clear razor-sharp sarcasm and bitter irony that are characteristic of many of the works of Sassoon and Owen. Even though there are grim irony and severe criticism to be found in Blunden’s works, they are most often expressed through his favourite metaphor, nature. In his poem “Rural Economy” for example, the German army is compared to a farmer sowing bombs and grenades like seeds, that eventually, fed by the flesh and blood of the thousands of soldiers “huddling nigh” (line 4) in abandoned fox holes, shoots “a roaring harvest home” (line 31). Nature, enduring the destruction at the hands of humans and always finding a way to revive itself, even at sites of complete devastation, was a solace to Blunden in the war and helped him to pull through (Lehmann 83). The strong bond he felt with nature clearly speaks from his war poetry. After the war, Blunden spent a fruitful life working for the Times Literary Supplement and as a university teacher of literature in Hong Kong and Tokyo, ending his career as a professor of poetry at Oxford.

Ivor Gurney, the only one of the four poets to voluntarily enlist as a private soldier was born on August 28th, 1890 in Gloucester (Hurd 7). He started composing music at the age of fourteen, and both the city of Gloucester and the countryside surrounding it, with its

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not having the use of a piano in the trenches. On 25 May 1916, Gurney’s battalion arrived in France and four days later they found themselves in the trenches on the front line.

Something which is important to note is that, for Ivor Gurney, the war, in the

beginning, had a very different meaning than it did for the other War Poets. Gurney had been mentally unstable since he was a teenager; he suffered from a mental disorder that in the present day would probably be diagnosed as bipolar disorder or manic depression, although it has also been argued that he suffered from paranoid schizophrenia (Hurd 198). At any rate, Gurney was far from balanced at the beginning of the war, suffering from severe depressions and mental breakdowns. However, the rigidity of army life seems to have had a positive effect on his scattered mind, and his letters in the first months of the war are full of assurances that his mental state is improving.

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their men often features in the works of the other three poets is absent in Gurney’s work because he, as a private, had no other responsibility than to obey his orders. Nonetheless, Gurney’s poems put the war in perspective by focussing on the everlasting character of the vast sky above France and the resilience of nature, and on the power of friendship and kindness between men.

After the war ended, Gurney kept writing poetry and music. A great quantity of his war poems were written in the years after the war, as he had found wartime censorship severely limiting and because his war experiences, the brutal killings and dismal living conditions, kept haunting him and had to be let out (Hurd 157). The war with all its horrors was very probably also a great contributor to the quick deterioration of Gurney’s mental health after 1918. Never free of mental problems, Gurney’s situation worsened to the point that his family had him declared insane in 1922, upon which he was institutionalized in the City of London Mental Hospital in Kent, where he stayed until his death in 1947

(Kavanagh xiv).

The Guantánamo Poets

Unfortunately, it is not possible to provide the reader with the kind of biographical sketches that were used for the World War I Poets when discussing the Guantánamo Poets, simply because not much is known about most of them. The greater part of the poets featured in The

Detainees Speak are still being detained and biographical information about them is not available. There are a few poets, however, about whom more is known than just a name and a nationality. Among them are Shaker Abdurraheem Aamer, Moazzam Begg, Mohammed el Gharani and Sami al Haj. All of these men are or were represented by human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who tells parts of their stories in his book Eight O’Clock Ferry to the

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2005, has written a book about the three years he spent as a prisoner of the Americans. The stories of these four men, and examples of the lives of other detainees, will be used to establish a picture of what the living conditions for a detainee in Guantánamo Bay are, providing a background for the situation in which the poets created their poetry.

To be able to place the Guantánamo poems in a historical and literary context, it is important to note that poetry in the Arabic world has a slightly different place in the literary domain than it does in the Western world. According to an old saying, Arabic poetry is “born of suffering,” (Falkoff 7) something which is quite applicable to the Guantánamo Poets. The Arabic poetic tradition is very old and diverse and started with the first poets writing long odes in the form of rhyming prose (Arberry 3). Arabic poetry was later used as a means of teaching the Islamic faith through “easily memorised glosses” (Falkoff 7) and it functioned as a tool for expressing Islamic cultural ideals and voicing ethical and political opinions (9). For example, poetry was the primary instrument used by oppressed peoples to voice their opinions and feelings. In that sense, the works of the Guantánamo Poets, who are virtually an

oppressed people themselves, fit into Arabic poetic tradition. On the other hand, however, the Guantánamo Poets, according to Flagg Miller, also seem to be inspired by traditional Arabic love poetry, in the way they express their longing to be with their loved ones. Interestingly, they seem to have been influenced by postcolonial socialist legacies, for instance in the way they deal with the themes of their forced bondage by the US forces, in their struggle for freedom and justice resulting from that bondage (Falkoff 13). Their poetry originates from the fact that the poets are lonely, detained indefinitely in a war situation. They are literally

trapped and often have no prospect of a better situation in the near future, and all these

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constitutes a new, unprecedented form that emerged as a result of circumstances of international war and conflict.

Many of the life stories of the Guantánamo Poets share a common beginning. Most of them were arrested in Pakistan or Afghanistan by either the Pakistani police or the Afghan Northern Alliance, and handed over, or sold, to the United States. After spending time in an Afghan or Pakistani prison, such as the notorious Bagram prison near Kabul, the detainees were flown to Cuba to be detained indefinitely in Guantánamo Bay. Shaker Aamer and Moazzam Begg for example, had both lived in the UK for years. They both had careers in England and both were married to English women, with whom they had young families. In early 2001, they decided to go to Afghanistan together, taking both their families as part of the zakat, which is the religious duty of giving charity, one of the Five Pillars of Islam. Begg and Aamer travelled to Afghanistan to build a school and to drill wells (Smith 190). After the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing American bombardments, both men tried to cross the border to Pakistan to get out of the war zone. Begg successfully made it to Pakistan, but was kidnapped from his house in Islamabad in the middle of the night by Pakistani and American intelligence officers (Begg 4). Aamer was seized crossing the Afghani border. Both men were sold to the US by the Pakistanis, a practice which, according to President Musharraf’s memoirs, has earned the Pakistani government millions of dollars (Smith 169).

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and to each other, making it virtually impossible to walk or even sit up straight. Once in Guantánamo Bay, the men stopped existing as individuals and became numbers; their names did not matter anymore, as they had become “enemy combatants” without human rights (Rose 3).

The living conditions of the poets, which formed a part of the inspiration for writing poetry in Guantánamo Bay, are, for the greater part, inhumane. There are different camps with different levels of “comfort,” in Guantánamo Bay. Whereas the World War I Poets had to live in trenches and dugouts, in Camp Echo, where Moazzam Begg was the first resident,

prisoners are kept in permanent solitary confinement in a steel cage of eight by six feet, with mesh sides, a steel floor and roof and a steel toilet next to a steel bed. The cage is constantly air conditioned and lit twenty-four hours a day, and there is absolutely no contact with other prisoners (Begg 194). Moazzam Begg lived in such a cage for almost two years. Afterwards, he was transferred to the main Camp Delta, in which most of the prisoners are being held. In Delta, prisoners also live in cages, (the layout of the camp reminded Begg of a dog kennel) the main difference with Echo being that there is no air conditioning and the prisoners can talk to each other. The fact that the men are able to pray together, have discussions, and generally support each other is a very important factor in most of the prisoner’s lives and the camaraderie and friendship they feel for their fellow convicts is a recurring item in their poems (Willemsen 182). For example, one poem, “My Heart Was Wounded by the

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The hundreds of interrogations, which could go on for as long as twenty hours, were often coupled with physical abuse in order to “break” the detainees’ “resistance” (Rose 96). This physical maltreatment and the abysmal housing conditions form the core the

Guantánamo Poets’ poor quality of life, and are certainly contributory to the fact that they seek solace in poetry to get away from, or make sense of their awful experiences. The US “methods of interrogation,” (Smith 133) include sleep depravation, exposure to extreme heat or extreme cold, forcibly listening to very loud music for hours or even days, severe beatings and physical abuse, but also humiliation in the form of, for example, cavity searches, forcing prisoners to soil themselves, and leaving them alone for extensive periods of time, chained and often naked, in various “stress positions” that become unbearable if held too long (Rose 100-102). The interrogation methods do not stop at physically harming the prisoners;

Moazzam Begg gives examples of how his interrogators mentally tortured him by making him believe that his wife was being hurt in the next room and that terrible things would happen to his family and his loved ones if he did not confess to the crimes they accused him of (Begg 197). Virtually all of the interviewed prisoners have stated that they have been incredibly upset and have felt outraged by the regular desecration of their holy book, the Quran, by American soldiers who threw it on the ground, in the toilet, or even ripped out the pages, which for devout Muslims, who believe the Quran “is the revealed word of God” (Begg 165) is one of the gravest profanities and insults imaginable.

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in Afghanistan in 2001 for trying to “re-enter Afghanistan in December 2001” (Smith 175), which he did with a valid visa, as he was there covering the war by assignment of that television station (Falkoff 41). Clive Stafford Smith states that, in Guantánamo, the reason why al Haj had been detained did not even come up in the first “hundred-plus” (181)

interrogation sessions the US military had with him. All the interrogators seemed interested in was using him as an informant against al-Jazeera, the station that broadcast Osama bin

Laden’s video messages.

Uncertainty is also a major theme in the life of Mohammed el Gharani, who was just a fourteen-year-old boy when he was arrested in Pakistan, where he was learning how to use a computer and studying English, and transported to Guantánamo Bay in early 2002 (Falkoff 37). Besides the fact that detaining a minor is a violation of international law, the allegations on which el Gharani is being held are of a questionable nature. He is being detained on suspicion of being a member of a London al Qaeda cell, and acting as a major financier for the terrorist organisation in 1998. In 1998, el Gharani was eleven years old, and, according to his interviews with Stafford Smith, had never left his native country of Saudi Arabia (Smith 150). El Gharani’s mental state is described by Stafford Smith as “fragile” (147) and he has tried to commit suicide twice in Guantánamo Bay (139). His poem “First Poem of My Life” is filled with bitter hatred for the Americans and what they have done to him: “Their war is against Islam and Justice” (line 40).

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detainee does not cooperate and its main tools are pepper spray, shackles and extreme force. There are several accounts of detainees suffering permanent physical or mental damage after being “ERF-ed” (225). An example of the ERF team’s activities is found in the story of Shaker Aamer, who went on hunger strike in 2005. To the US military, a hunger strike was perceived as uncooperative behaviour and thus the ERF-team was brought in to assist in force-feeding the hunger strikers twice a day. Shaker Aamer related to Clive Stafford Smith how a forty-three inch long tube was forced down his nostril into his stomach twice a day to administer the food. If he did not cooperate, the ERF team would severely punish him by for example lifting him in the air and dropping him on the floor, sexually humiliating him or slamming his head into the wall (213). It is safe to say that the acts of the ERF team greatly contribute to the climate of fear and oppression in Guantánamo Bay.

Concluding remarks

As becomes apparent from the descriptions of the lives of both the World War I Poets and the Guantánamo Poets, the circumstances in which their poetry originated are primarily

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Chapter Three

The poetry

This chapter presents the discussion of the poems selected.6 My main focus in this chapter will be on the representation of human relationships and the political elements in the poems, because frequent readings of the poems suggested that these were the principal themes. “Human relationships” in this case refers to the relationships the poets have with their fellow soldiers or detainees, and the relationship they have with their loved ones at home. A third aspect I have chosen to highlight within the frame of human relationships is the way the poets personally deal with the situations they find themselves in, how they keep themselves going by seeking solace in nature, the past and their religion, and how they articulate those

sanitizing thoughts in their poetry. The reason I have included this last aspect is that I feel the internal dialogue is a vital part of the poetry. Closely connected to the human aspects of the poems are the political themes of the poets’ works and therefore these will be discussed in detail later in the chapter. Of course, the circumstances as discussed in Chapter Two that made the poets turn to poetry in the first place cannot be ignored, since they are the root cause of the poetry. That is why I will start this chapter with the discussion of several poems that reflect the abysmal living conditions that were described in Chapters One and Two.

Living conditions: World War I

Daily life for the soldiers in World War I was arduous. On certain days a soldier could find himself in the middle of scenes of carnage, not knowing if he would still be there the next day or even the next hour, while other days were filled with the mind-numbingly boring daily routine of military life behind the front line. Ivor Gurney provides his take on the supposed

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splendour of military life in his poem “Servitude”, in which he makes it crystal clear that, for him, the life of a soldier lacked the honour that was popularly accorded to it, and that even the lowliest job in the world was more respectable than what the soldiers had to do on a daily basis:

To keep a brothel, sweep and wash the floor Of filthiest hovels were noble to compare With this brass-cleaning life. (lines 3-5)

Wilfred Owen was the poet who, in my opinion, painted the most vivid picture of what the actual experience of battle was like. Many of his poems have a nightmarish quality and are striking because of their intense visual quality. Owen paints with words, by making the scenes he described visual for the reader, and reading the poems is like watching a painting like Picasso’s “Guernica.” In “The Sentry,” for example, he gives a description of the sights and smells in an abandoned German dugout, in which he and his men seek shelter from a shell attack. His depiction of the conditions in the dugout gives the reader an idea of what the circumstances in similar dugouts must have been like for the soldiers, who would sometimes spend weeks in a row in such a glorified “hole in the ground;”

Rain, guttering down in waterfalls of slime, Kept slush waist-high and rising hour by hour, And choked the steps too thick with clay to climb. What murk of air remained stank old, and sour With fumes from whizz-bangs, and the smell of men Who'd lived there years, and left their curse in the den, If not their corpses.... (lines 4-10)

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line when they are suddenly in the middle of a gas attack. In the description of the men and the state they are in while marching to their rest, nothing divulges the fact that he is actually talking about young, able-bodied men in the prime of their lives. They had aged prematurely from lack of sleep, the horrible scenes they had witnessed and the vile acts they had had to perform.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. (lines 1-9)

The nightmarish quality of Owen’s words is intensified by his use of alliteration; the repetition of letters, as in “knock-kneed,” “coughing” and “cursed” heightens the sense of distress his poem expresses. Owen also uses symbolism to enhance the gruesome nature of his work. For example, the word “blood-shod” not only makes the reader think of bloody and wounded feet, but also creates the image of blood of the thousands of dead clinging to the feet and bodies of the walking soldiers.

The horrors that Owen describes had severe psychological consequences for many soldiers. In his poem “Survivors,” Siegfried Sassoon, who had encountered men suffering from severe shellshock while he was in Craiglockhart Hospital, gives a gripping account of what the war did to the mental state of the men. He describes their “stammering” and

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of friends that died” (line 6) that haunt them in their sleep and make them relive the gruesome details of the battlefield. In the last two lines of his poem, Sassoon juxtaposes the way the men went into the war with how they came out of it. At the beginning they were confident, mature “[m]en who went out to battle, grim and glad” to serve their country. After the war, they were “[c]hildren” with prematurely old faces, and “eyes that hate you, broken and mad” (line 10), defeated, both physically and mentally, by the strain they had been under.

Living conditions: Guantánamo Bay

As opposed to the poems of the World War I Poets, there are hardly any poems by the

Guantánamo Poets that relate what life in the prison is actually like. The reason for this is that the works of the Guantánamo Poets are more severely censored than those of the World War I Poets were, so that no actual information about daily life in the prison is allowed to be

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Several of the Guantánamo Poets express the same emotions of feeling oppressed, homesick and humiliated as the World War I Poets, but without being as explicit in naming the tribulations they face. Sami al Haj is one of the few poets who goes beyond that in highlighting a situation which is specific to the lives of the Guantánamo Poets and played no part in the situation of the World War I Poets. In his poem “Humiliated in the Shackles” he claims that the Americans tried to bribe him to spy on his countrymen:

They offer me money and land, And freedom to go where I please. Their temptations seize my attention Like lightening in the sky. (lines 11-14)

Most of the other poets, however, do not divulge as much information as al Haj does and merely hint at abuses without actually describing them, most often using the word

“oppression” as an umbrella term for all forms of abuse and hardship. The reason for this is probably fear that if they were to address this topic, their poems would not make it past the censor and their efforts would be in vain.

Human relationships

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the manner in which the poets use their work, at least in their minds, to reach out to the people at home, both in a positive sense, because they love and miss them, and in a pejorative sense, because they feel those people are letting them down7. The latter is especially true for the World War I Poets, as they are far more critical towards the home front than the Guantánamo Poets are.

In World War I poetry, the poems which are, in my opinion, the best examples of poetry written to instil the strength to keep going when the situation seems completely desperate are found in the poetry of Edmund Blunden and Ivor Gurney. Both poets have the same method of keeping up their spirits and comforting themselves by turning to things that bring them solace; they fall back on the beauty and resilience of nature or on soothing images from the past, and often use a combination of the two. In a poem entitled simply “Song,” for instance, Ivor Gurney implores his childhood county of Gloucestershire to remember him: “Do not forget me quite/ O Severn Meadows” (lines 7-8) Gurney creates the impression that, by thinking of the countryside he loves, holding on to his fond memories, and knowing that that countryside is still there at home waiting for him to return from the unrealistic world of war, there is still a reason for surviving and making sure he can eventually return to his England. As he says in his poem “Strange Service,” in which he addresses his country: “deep in my heart for ever goes on your daily being/ And uses consecrate” (lines 16-17).

The most striking example of a poet literally trying to instil strength into himself, I would claim, is Edmund Blunden’s “Preparations for Victory.” In this poem the poet has an (internal) dialogue with his soul and his body, trying to convince both that they should not be afraid and should stay strong and “manly” in the face of danger. Time has lost all

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significance; “Days or eternities like swelling waves surge on [..]” (line 19). To comfort his body and soul, Blunden points to the things around him that are yet unscathed by the war:

Look, here are gardens, there mossed boughs are hung With apples whose bright cheeks none might excel,

And there’s a house as yet unshattered by a shell. (lines 7-9)

Even though Blunden desperately seeks for some positive elements to hold on to in order to be able to make sense of the world around him, in the end the chaos and destruction of the battle defeat him. It is interesting to note that what ultimately defeats the speaker in this poem is not a German enemy, but one of the elements he clung to for solace in the beginning of the poem, the force of nature:

Look, we lose;

The sky is gone, the lightless, drenching haze Of rainstorms chills the bone; earth, air are foes,

The black fiend leaps brick-red as life’s last picture goes. (lines 24-27)

The significance of these last few lines should not be underestimated because the reversal of the power of nature from a comforting to a destructive force underscores the fact that

Blunden, no matter how hard he tried, could not make sense of the situation he found himself in and was unable to understand the war. His view of the world had literally been turned upside down and he expressed this inversion of perception in his poetry.

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whether they are “good people,” even though they do not evade writing about grief. Their poems often give the impression that they were written as a validation of their poets’ moral strength, saying: I am proud, I am strong and I will certainly survive this ordeal. The theme that nothing their captors can do will break their spirit, as long as they have faith in Allah and faith in themselves, is a predominant one in the Guantánamo poetry. An example of this fortitude is found in Abdulla Majid Al Noaimi’s poem “I Write My Hidden Longing.” In the first few lines the poet seems to be in a state of despair, unable to cope with the physical and mental suffering that he has been subjected to; “My body is frail / And I can see no relief ahead […] I wish someone would comfort me […] My chest cannot take the vastness of emotion” (lines 7-8, 13, 16). In the penultimate stanza however, he seems to pull himself together and finds the strength he needs in his religion, resulting in a strong and self-confident statement in the last stanza:

The book of God consoles me, And dulls the pains I have suffered. The book of God assuages my misery, Even though they declared war against it. I stand tall and smile in the face of misery. I am satisfied. (lines 17-22)

While many Guantánamo Poets rely purely on their religion to find strength, there are also poets that derive strength from their intellectual integrity. They are convinced that as long as they have their own minds and their own thoughts, and hold on to their own virtues and ideals, they are not really prisoners. The most powerful example of a poem in which this idea is expressed is, I think, the second of “Two Fragments” by Shaikh Abdurraheem Muslim Dost:

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But they are slaves.

I am flying on the wings of thought,

And so, even in this cage, I know a greater freedom. (lines 3-6)

Dost uses the metaphor of flight to symbolise the fact that even though his body might be incarcerated, his mind is free to go where he wants it to go, and that is, essentially, the ultimate freedom.

Camaraderie

Human relationships feature prominently in both the works of the Guantánamo and the World War I Poets. Primarily the extremely strong bond they feel with the men who share their experiences. An important difference between the two kinds of poetry is that the poems by the World War I Poets are virtually all written for or about dead comrades with a kind of fatalistic resignation. These poems evoke a feeling of pity and a sense of mourning for the loss of these countless young men, while the Guantánamo poems are filled with hope, good advice and determination to make justice prevail.

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