Poets Of Guantanámo find voice in Ventura
VC Reporter, 4/9/09
When he beats his bars and
would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
but a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings I know why the caged bird sings
— Paul Lawrence Dunbar
Ibrahim al-Rubaish’s daughter was only 3 months old when she last saw her father; she’s now 5, and does not know him. The teacher and religious scholar has spent nearly all of his daughter’s life as a detainee at the infamous detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, after mercenaries “arrested” him in Pakistan and sold him to American intelligence forces for a bounty. Like the overwhelming majority of the detainees, often capriciously termed “unlawful enemy combatants,” al-Rubaish’s guilt or innocence is a moot point, one even beyond contention, since he has been charged with no crime; his long days and nights are spent interminably, in solitary confinement for 22 hours a day in a 6-foot by 12-foot cage.
Like many who share his Gitmo captivity, and in keeping with a rich and bitter legacy forged of injustice, with the deprivation of liberty and the loss of nearly everything that once comprised his life, al-Rubaish raised the only voice he was permitted — through art. In the stifling confines of his cell, the former teacher became a poet. In his “Ode To the Sea,” he cries:
O sea, give me news
of my loved ones.
Were it not for the chains of the faithless, I would have dived into you,
And reached my beloved family, or perished in your arms.
Your beaches are sadness, captivity, pain, and injustice...
The anguished work is among the verse collected in Poems From Guantánamo: The Detainees Speak, to be presented this Monday at Ventura’s A Place of Peace spiritual center, as part of its ongoing Monday Night Lecture Series and in concordance with National Poetry Month.
Co-sponsored by A Place of Peace and Veterans for Peace (VFP), along with Center for Constitutional Rights, the event is being presented in theatrical fashion as the poems are performed by local artists and activists, underscoring the gravity of not only the verse itself, but the plight of the poets and their brethren who remain in captivity, despite a chorus of protest from such organizations as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, from American allies and enemies alike, and a multitude of concerned American citizens like Grant Marcus, who organized the event under the VFP auspices.
“Our basic civil liberties — to be free from torture, to have rights of due process and habeas corpus, among others — reach well beyond the Geneva Conventions, reaching back to the 13th century and the Magna Carta,” Marcus notes. While those rights are often taken for granted, for people who happen to be the wrong ethnicity, the wrong religion, or simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, they can disappear in a heartbeat — as they did for Abdulla Majid al-Noaimi, a 24-year-old citizen of Bahrain who, after attending Old Dominion University in Virginia, traveled to Afghanistan to search for a missing family member and wound up in the hands of Pakistani forces. Though he asked to be taken to the Bahrain embassy, he was instead delivered to the U.S. military and shipped without charge or explanation to Cuba.
Al-Noaimi, who was released in 2005, penned:
...I write my hidden longing:
I tried to defend him with my eyes,
But I looked around and
was cornered.
Destiny had found me.
My rib is broken,
And I can find no one to heal me.
My body is frail,
And I can see no relief ahead.
Before me is a tumultuous sea;
The land continues to call me.
But I am sailing in my thoughts...
“It’s our goal with the Monday Night Lecture Series to raise consciousness about issues relevant to our community and our society,” says A Place of Peace representative Teri Kierbel. “These are voices that need to be heard, just as we need not only the opportunity to hear them, but to peacefully respond.”
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