Dont forget us here, p.29
Don't Forget Us Here, page 29
Our work was more than practical. From the beginning of Camp X-Ray, we had been creating, and those small acts were our escape. Some of us wrote on Styrofoam cups and plates. We used spoons or twisted the tiny stems off apples to write poems or draw flowers, hearts, the moon. We made flowers out of stickers we found on fruit. These were tiny expressions of our former selves breaking through, resisting the identities imprinted on us. These simple expressions were as necessary as food and water, and they were always punished. Even an etching of a flower was not a flower; it was a message to Osama bin Laden and a national security threat. For years, it was a game we played with the camp admin. We took nothing and made something, and what is more human than that? In turn, they took whatever we made and punished us to prove that we weren’t.
We continued to push our boundaries when the Arab Spring finally arrived at Guantánamo. Some brothers marched through our blocks chanting slogans for change. We threw out our block leaders and elected new ones. We protested the camp again and demanded reforms and better living conditions. We protested for better classes. Guantánamo Spring wasn’t violent—there was no blood or killing or beating, but no one knew about it but us.
By now, it was clear that Obama wasn’t going to close Guantánamo. With a new law passed by Congress, he wasn’t even releasing brothers anymore, even ones who had been approved to be released. Instead, they made our detention more bearable and humane. The camp admin under Colonel Thomas had relaxed the rules even more than we expected. We got new health care, better food, video calls with families, uncensored letters, books, CDs, newspapers, magazines, and even PlayStation 3s. We got a refrigerator and microwave. I had never seen or even heard about a microwave before Guantánamo. Shah liked to use it to dry his fancy boxer shorts. For eight years it was against SOPs for detainees to have cold water. Then one day we were able to put a cup of water in a refrigerator.
Instead of battling navy guards, we became friends with them. The navy, which had been in charge of Guantánamo since 2005, had one year left under its command and that made for a unique situation with the guards—they stopped caring about punishing us and enforcing SOPs that made no sense. Now they gave us all sorts of contraband, like watches, DVD players, sunglasses, and even sewing needles. The camp administration knew about everything but watched us from a distance. They were testing us to see if we would fight less with fewer rules and less interaction with the guards. It worked. They left us alone for the most part, and though they conducted block searches every now and then, they barely ever confiscated any of our contraband. It was a game we played: How much could we get away with? One of the guards told me, “Be careful with that stuff. The administration writes reports about everything, and one day they’ll use those reports as an excuse to lock down the camp.” We’d learned to be skeptical, but for now, we couldn’t help taking advantage of our new freedom.
More important than the things they gave us was the freedom we had over our lives and our contact with the world. It might sound simple, but just being able to have a pen and paper in my cell changed my life. I could write whenever I wanted. Being able to have a clock and a watch gave me power over my life I hadn’t had in years. I created a daily regimen to make the most out of every day. I’d wake up and pray, do some exercise in the rec yard, and then read before breakfast. I had time scheduled for classes with Shasha, reading, and tutoring brothers in Arabic and English. Every day I set aside time to walk around the rec yard with Adnan and Omar to talk to brothers and collect stories for my two books.
The first book evolved out of the stories I had collected for Andy. I called it “Moments from Guantánamo,” and it was just that—a big collection of small moments from our daily lives that captured the conflicts and friendships I didn’t want lost forever to this place. I always had a notebook and pen in my pocket, even when I played soccer in the rec yard. We collected stories about black sites and torture and countries that helped kidnap and sell us to the CIA. We collected stories about sexy late-night pizza parties thrown by female interrogators for detainees who were cooperating with interrogators. As much as we’d seen, we were constantly surprised by the stories brothers had to tell, stories we never could have imagined or made up.
The other book was inspired by our interrogators. For years they had accused us of being al Qaeda and Taliban. When I came to Guantánamo, I didn’t know a lot about those groups—I don’t think many brothers did. So Adnan and I decided we would learn everything we could about al Qaeda and the Taliban and write a comprehensive history of them and how they related to Guantánamo. We talked to brothers and detainees who knew firsthand stories about bin Laden fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan or his activities in Sudan, guerrilla wars, al Qaeda training camps and ideology, and Taliban history. I even interviewed one of the founders of the Taliban and several of bin Laden’s bodyguards. I thought that if I knew everything about al Qaeda and the Taliban, about what the Americans called extremists, then I would be able to understand what they saw in me that justified keeping me for so long. I would learn what crimes I had committed. But I didn’t find what I was looking for.
I wrote mostly in Arabic, but practiced writing stories in English for Andy, trying to make each letter a perfect gift for him. I’d write a story and give it to Shasha to read first, and he would give me notes for revising. Sometimes I asked guards to read the stories to see what they thought, and then I made more changes to get the stories just right. Every couple of weeks I sent Andy my stories as letters through legal mail. Working on these books helped me make sense of this place and what had happened to us. It was my way of processing and even reclaiming the power to tell the world who I was in my own words, not the interrogators’. They could control my life, but I wouldn’t allow them to define it.
WHILE I WROTE about our lives, other brothers used the art classes to express their experiences in drawings and paintings. Of course, as always, we had to work to get better art classes and supplies.
“We’re afraid that some of your brothers will use art materials to make poison and kill themselves,” one of the officers said to me.
“Why would we want to kill ourselves in such a caring environment?” I responded.
We protested. We asked for better teachers who were artists. We asked for better materials and more paints. We asked for colors—colored paints, colored paper, color photographs. Eventually, we convinced them that we weren’t a threat to ourselves and they let us have colored paints we could use in the classroom. And then Adam came and art at Guantánamo really took off.
Adam was an Iraqi art teacher with a PhD who truly cared about making sure we had the tools and inspiration to dig deep and express ourselves through art. It didn’t matter if we were drawing a flower or building a ship out of cardboard like Moath, Adam believed art allowed us to be who we really were. He worked with the camp admin to find brushes and paints that brothers could use in their cells instead of just in the art class. He made sure that each brother in art class had his own box of pastel paints. When I had a class with him, I didn’t know what to draw and he told me just to draw something that I loved or missed. I was embarrassed at first, but he knew how to encourage me and I drew a beautiful rose. Too bad the camp admin wouldn’t let me keep it. Adam knew how to inspire brothers to look inside themselves for creativity.
By the time art classes got better, the class had been moved to a building outside of the camp—constructed in 2007 but never used. We could just walk through the camp gate, through the rec yard, right to class, but the body searches never stopped—security concerns!—so most brothers didn’t want to go. There was one brother, Sabri, one of the camp’s best artists, who always went. Art was so important to him; he would put up with any humiliation just to have access to paints and a canvas. In this hell, being able to create art transported him away.
In art classes, we could draw whatever we wanted from photographs, books, magazines, or our memories, so long as it wasn’t about being at Guantánamo or being tortured and didn’t show guards or the military or anything political that would make the camp mad or embarrass America. But we had to finish our drawings in one class, and we couldn’t take them back to our cells or blocks. With much protest and some patience, even that changed.
Little by little we were allowed to put up artwork in our cells. The first piece that went up was a ship Sabri drew before art classes began. Sabri used to use his letter-writing time with the Red Cross to draw instead of write letters. A brother who was in love with the sea had asked him to draw a ship. With just a short little Red Cross pen and legal paper, Sabri drew a beautiful ship over four feet long covering eight separate sheets of paper. The details were beautiful. Now the brother hung it up in his cell using soap. Everyone admired that drawing, even the guards.
One of the most important developments was when the camp admin allowed the Red Cross to bring us photos that we could keep in our cells. Photos of animals, cars, motorcycles, the sky, the sea, oceans, trees, and flowers, my favorite. We had spent years with no color in our lives except for the orange of our clothes, the green tarps covering all the fences, the gray of raw concrete, and the dull green paint on our cell walls. Those photos brought color into the block and into our lives again.
We couldn’t have real flowers or trees, but we could make them, and that’s what we did. Most of our early creations began in art class with a simple outline drawn on cardboard, like a flower. If we were making a flower, we gathered photos of flowers from magazines. We couldn’t use scissors—a security risk—so we asked the guards to cut those flowers for us or we tore them ourselves. Then we glued them to the cardboard cutout in the shape of a flower, making a beautiful collage. I loved flowers and missed them so much. When I’d made a bunch of flowers, I created a cardboard vase for them. Eventually, I grew a large collection of many different flowers in beautiful colors. Creating these pieces was teamwork. Some guards had blisters on their fingers and joked, “I found my new career: cutting cardboard.”
I made many of those vases and gave them to friends—guards, nurses, and some camp staff. I was good friends with an Italian navy guard who helped me practice English. He told me one day that he was going home to visit his mother and that she worried about him working at Guantánamo. I saw how much he loved her, and that made me miss my mother even more. Before he went home, I gave him a vase with cut flowers I had made. Guards weren’t allowed to accept gifts from us—according to SOPs, they weren’t even allowed to talk to us!—but just like he broke the rules to talk to me, he also broke them to accept my gift for his mother.
“Please, send my best regards to her,” I said. “Tell her this gift is from 441.”
He smiled and I could tell it was a happy smile. When he came back from his holiday, he came to visit me on the block.
“When I told my mom who made those flowers, her jaw dropped to the floor,” he said. “She asked me a lot of questions about you. She doesn’t worry about me now.” This warmed my soul. “She says thank you and sends you her best regards back.”
She was a complete stranger to me, but knowing that his mother had sent me her regards—that still warms me to this day. We started to feel like humans again. I had missed that part of my life very much. I wanted to be seen as a normal person again, not as a terrorist. Oh Allah. How I missed that part of my life.
MOATH’S WINDOWS DIDN’T just appear; they evolved over time. We lived in windowless cells and Moath asked himself, How can I open a window? At first, he took photographs from magazines and pasted them on his wall with soap. He had trees and mountains, but they were just photographs on a wall. Then he thought of something else—a windmill. Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a windmill in his cell? So he made one out of Styrofoam cups and hung it in front of the AC vent. The guards didn’t make him take it down. They liked it, and he asked himself, What else can I build?
I was like Moath’s assistant and helped him with all his big projects. For the windows, we started with a simple shelf for his cell. We melted soap in water for a few days until it was softer than dough. Next, we ripped up a lot of recycled paper and soaked it with the soap. Then we shaped it into pieces that would fit into the corner. We used more melted soap to glue the pieces to the wall and we had to stand there holding them securely until they dried. It took hours, and sometimes we took turns holding that shelf up until the soap dried. When it was dry, it was so securely attached to the wall, it could actually hold books. We waited to see how the camp administration would react. They didn’t say anything, so we made more. This single invention allowed us to keep and organize things in our cells. This is how we created the desks and shelves for Shasha’s classroom.
Then Moath built a small model ship with masts, sails, and rigging. He built it from cardboard, mop string, cups, and shampoo bottles, cutting all the pieces with nail clippers. It was incredible. It looked like it was made of wood. Word spread, and Colonel Thomas and the general requested to see it. The camp administration took it and brought it back after a few days. After that, the Camp VI commander said guards could cut cardboard for whatever we needed.
And so began the cardboard industry at Guantánamo. We discovered that soap could also glue together larger cardboard pieces from the boxes used to bring our meals. Moath and other artists would draw up plans for something they wanted to make, breaking it down into parts that could be constructed from cardboard. Guards became a very important part of our work, cutting the shapes we needed. Without rulers or tape measures to measure accurately, we made our own from sheets and towels. Before gluing, we used the concrete floor to sand the edges smooth so that each piece fit perfectly together. That was the hardest part—the cement was smooth, so it took a lot of work. Assembling the first joint in a new piece of furniture could take an entire day or two to dry, and someone had to hold it in place the whole time. We took turns. The act of creation took teamwork and patience—supplies abundant at Guantánamo. We started with more shelves, but moved on to desks, storage boxes, side tables, dressers and cabinets for clothes, toilet covers, Qur’an stands, chairs, picture frames… if we could imagine it, we created it.
Most blocks had cells they turned into workshops. Some brothers hoarded cardboard so they could build desks or dressers, which required lots of boxes and took months to save. Moath and other craftsmen supervised and gave instructions, and when everything was ready, they would go to the cell to install the pieces together. I wasn’t a craftsman, but I was always helping Moath, especially when he built his ships.
When we were gluing a mast one day on a ship Moath was building, he turned to me with the most serene look on his face. “When I’m working on my ships,” he said, “it’s like I’m out at sea, free from this place.”
Keeping busy kept our minds calm and distracted from where we were.
Supplies were limited and the only place to get colored paints, glue, and nice paper was in art class. Going to art class still meant going through body searches, so many brothers didn’t go. We asked the camp admin to let us have art materials on the block. It was too hard to change SOPs, but the camp commander told guards to let us have supplies in our cells.
“Not a lot,” he said. “Just a reasonable amount.”
In time, Adam, the art teacher, got us glue, acrylic paints, and other materials to use outside of class to make our work better. He was very popular among our brothers for his kindness and support. He had trouble getting brushes for the paint, but after a long discussion we managed to get brushes with soft plastic handles instead of wood.
With paint and clean paper we crafted real furniture—chairs you could sit in, desks you could write on—that looked like it was made from wood. The camp administration also agreed to let us have more glue, tape, Velcro, and markers. They saw the value in keeping us busy. If you wanted to make something, you had to collect cardboard, glue, paint, paper, bottle caps, and other things. We started a market, selling to one another. You might pay thirty pieces of cardboard and ten bottles of glue for a used cabinet. Even more for a new one. Sometimes we used real US dollars to buy from each other, or guards would take our money and buy us supplies, which required trust and secrecy on both sides.
We didn’t stop with furniture. We made things we weren’t allowed to have or even to see. We made trees—yes, trees!—that stood six feet tall, full of beautiful green leaves, fruit, and birds. You would never believe they weren’t real. We made jambiya, Yemeni ceremonial daggers, and dallah, long-spouted Arabic coffeepots. We made model cars, motorcycles, and even the mosques of Makkah and Jerusalem. One brother saved ice-cream sticks for months and made a palace with a beautiful garden. It took him over a year to finish. He was always asking other blocks for their ice-cream sticks. One of the most beautiful pieces was an ornate lantern made by a Bedouin brother. When we had blackouts in the camp, our brothers called out, “Bring the lantern!”
Moath made his windows this way. He built the frames from cardboard with hinged shutters he could close. Inside, he made a sculpture with trees and birds, and behind them a painting of the sea and beautiful skies. This was his window to the outside world and the home he dreamed of having one day. They weren’t just his windows; they were ours, and that included the navy guards who helped cut the cardboard.
The most important piece we created was the communal library Moath designed. It took us six months to build. When it was finished, it was six feet tall, with shelves for books, magazines, and CDs. Underneath the shelves were rows of drawers that opened with handles made of shampoo-bottle caps. Below the drawers were cabinets with beautifully painted doors. We had an indexing system with cards so we could find what we wanted easily. We had nothing, and from that nothing we created life and order.
