[This interview is reprinted from nthposition. It originally ran in October, 2007. —Ed.]
Andy Worthington: Marc, I'd like to begin by congratulating you and the University of Iowa Press for producing such a beautiful volume. It's really a cut above most books in terms of its production values.
Marc Falkoff: Well, thanks. All credit to the University of Iowa Press.
AW: Even before your book was published last month, you received what must have been a gratifyingly large amount of publicity. I noticed, however, that almost immediately some critics stepped up to question or criticize the literary value of the poems. Do you think they were somehow missing the point?
MF: Yes and no. I've got to say that almost everyone who's reviewed the book or talked about it — on blogs and elsewhere — has recognized that aesthetics are largely beside the point. The prime example would be Robert Pinsky, former Poet Laureate of the United States, who's been very generous in praise of the book, but his approach has been that these are "urgent" texts that require our attention by addressing the human rights issues that the Guantánamo imprisonments raise, and he has shied away from the aesthetic merit of the poems. In a recent interview he said that this isn't like some of the great poetry that emerged from the Soviet Gulag — the work of Mandelshtam, for example — but essentially he remained focused on the poems' political context.
However, I think it's acceptable at some level, to some degree, to look at these poems as aesthetic objects. When you look at them, some people would agree that some of the poems are quite pedestrian, which is understandable given that the book is made up almost entirely of amateur poets. On the other hand, there are some poems that to my mind are quite striking in terms of imagery, metaphor and thematic complexity. But this said, clearly this book is about more than aesthetics, and in fact, even though you mentioned comments about aesthetics, I would say that for the most part the critiques I've seen did not provide evidence of reasoned aesthetic judgments. What they were really were ad hominem attacks against the detainees, made by right-wing bloggers who were outraged that a University Press was publishing poems by Guantánamo detainees, and who responded with bullying tactics, resorting to mockery and ridicule. You may have seen some of the sites on which bloggers invited readers to write "Gitmo poetry," along the lines of: "Roses are red/ Violets are blue/ I'm stuck in Guantánamo/ And when I get out I'll behead you."
AW: That's very good. Almost eerily accurate. I'd say. Tell me about other responses.
MF: Well, the Pentagon was asked about the book before it had been published, and Commander Jeffrey Gordon, the Pentagon's chief press officer, gave his opinion, declaring that poetry was a "tool" that the detainees were using in a "battle" against Western democracies. He had not even read the poems — at best one or two online somewhere — but he claimed that the detainees were not writing the poems in order to create art, but as part of an attack on Western democracies.
Once the book was published, the New York Times book reviewer Don Chiasson wrote that no one should be so hard-hearted as to bring aesthetic judgments to bear on the poems. That's OK, but what he went on to do was perverse. At the same time that I was being decried on blogs as a "useful idiot," a dupe of terrorists spouting jihadist rhetoric, Don Chiasson comes along and says that, because all the poems had to be first cleared by the Pentagon, the Pentagon has cleared and chosen these specific poems and has allowed their publication as a cunning public relations move to demonstrate that dissent is allowed at Guantánamo. So, simultaneously, I'm both a "useful idiot" for terrorists and a dupe of the Pentagon.
Finally, on this point, I do not think you must take aesthetics off the table by any means, but the interplay between aesthetics and politics in the poems raises interesting questions, and is not something to shy away from. Discussions about aesthetic judgments and political context, relating to the ways in which poetry is written and discussed, have been debated for hundreds of years and raise interesting and valid questions, and a review in Slate, by Meghan O'Rourke, captured what a smart discussion of these issues would look like.
AW: That's an interesting point that you make about the interface between aesthetics and politics, and it seems particularly relevant these days, as it seems to me that, over the last few decades, there has been a concerted effort by those in charge of driving this consumer-led society to deflect as much attention as possible away from politics.
MF: Sure, but let's grab hold of the issue. People like to pigeonhole ideas and things, to bring a perfect coherence to the world. I defy anyone to define what literary merit is.
AW: It's in the eye of the beholder, essentially.
MF: Or like the famous Oscar Wilde quote, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written." But to conclude my answers to this question, it's very important for someone who sets himself or herself up as an arbiter of literary merit to retain a self-consciousness about what they're doing, and it's particularly important for this book, because it's easy for people to fall back on assumptions and think, "Oh, they're just terrorists, how can this be art?" This is what happened with Maxine Kumin, who's actually a poet, who criticized the poems. This was a remarkable step to take. Not only did she likely dampen sales of the book and its circulation, but she herself wrote a terrific poem, What You Do, from the viewpoint of detainees —
AW: US detainees?
MF: Yes, prisoners of the United States, in Guantánamo, or in Abu Ghraib. It suggests that what she was saying was, "Leave the poetry about Guantánamo to me." A lot of these things that look like aesthetic judgments are, whether consciously or not, influenced by political judgments or assumptions.
AW: I can't believe she did that. It's like she was saying, "Only poets should be writing poetry. Not prisoners held without hope."
MF: Absolutely. And what's also important to remember is that I didn't decide, "Oh look, the 17 best poets in the world are at Guantánamo," so the book is doing a different cultural job as well. These are the poems and the stories of men held without charge, trial or conviction, men entirely denied their day in court, denied that space in which they should be allowed to tell their stories. Their stories should be told in legal briefs and oral arguments, but these have been denied to them, so they must take place in a different venue. And so they have to tell their stories through poetry, or at least be given the opportunity to do so. The poem, in this context, is much more than an aesthetic object. In this context, the poem is a symbol, a sign of their humanity, their will to create. And it also functions as a proxy for the justice system and the rule of law.
AW: That rather feeds into what was to be my next question, but which you've largely answered. What I wanted to say to you was that, while I was particularly moved by a number of the poems, and felt the burning indignation that fuelled others, the particular forms of Muslim prison poetry that linguistic and cultural anthropologist Flagg Miller explains in his excellent introductory essay — and from which many of the detainees draw inspiration — are only a part of the story. What I found at least as interesting was the book's political context: the enlightening profiles of the poets, many of whom were previously unknown to the public, and your introduction, in which you explain the many obstacles to the publication of the book that you encountered from the Pentagon. I wanted to ask if you could clarify for me whether every poem written in Guantánamo, even those by detainees who have been released, remain subject to declassification by the US military?
MF: Yes and no again. For the poets who are still in Guantánamo, quite clearly the answer is yes. Anything they say is presumptively classified, and has to go through the Pentagon's Privilege Review Team.
AW: Could you explain that?
MF: Sure. Essentially, the military insisted to the courts that anything our clients said to us was a potential security risk. This is bullshit, but the courts were unwilling to step on the military's toes. So if we wanted to publicize anything that our clients said — relating to their treatment, allegations of torture, whatever — it had to be cleared by a Pentagon-appointed censorship team. Or in fact an uncensorship team, as everything is presumptively censored.
AW: Thanks for that. Please continue with the story.
MF: OK, so any poems that the released detainees were able to reconstruct from memory, they were able to do so. This is what happened with the poems by released British detainees Moazzam Begg and Martin Mubanga.
AW: And Abdur Rahim Muslim Dost, the Afghan poet who, as you mention in the book, wrote 25,000 lines of poetry, much of it scratched onto Styrofoam cups and passed from cell to cell?
MF: Yes. When he was released from Guantánamo, almost all of his poetry was held, and as he said, and I described in the book, he asked a reporter after his release, "Why did they give me a pen and paper [which they eventually did] if they were planning to do that? Each word was like a child to me — irreplaceable." Muslim Dost asked for his poems to be returned but was refused. Eventually, he could bring a lawsuit against the US government, but it would probably take years and he would probably lose.
AW: This was when he was free, obviously, before he was recaptured by the Pakistani authorities, after he wrote a book with his brother Ustad Badruzzaman Bader (also featured in your book) about Guantánamo, which was highly critical of Pakistan's intelligence service, the ISI. [Muslim Dost was freed from Guantánamo in April 2005, after which he wrote Da Guantánamo Matay Zolanay (The Broken Shackles of Guantánamo) with his brother. He was rearrested in Pakistan, where he had lived since the 1970s, on September 29, 2006, and is currently held in Peshawar's Central Prison, farcically accused of "violating visa rules and illegal stay in Pakistan"].
MF: Yes. But we heard the other day that a journalist had been allowed to meet him.
AW: Which may be the first step towards securing his release. It goes to show what happens when you mess with the ISI, however. But to return to the poems, does this mean that there are hundreds — or thousands — of poems that could not be included?
MF: For a variety of reasons, Muslim Dost's case shows definitively that there are hundreds of poems that we couldn't gain access to. In addition, I know of at least another dozen or so that were not cleared by the military; for example, several poems by my own clients that the review team refused to clear. Initially, they were wary about the whole process, but they eventually let some poems through and then they put the kibosh on the whole process and refused to let any more through.
AW: What, they reached a point where they absolutely refused to declassify any more poems?
MF: Yes, it came to a complete standstill over a year ago. This doesn't mean that they have stopped clearing all communications, only that they won't clear any more poems.
AW: They're scared of poems.
MF: I think they took a step back when they realized this was coming out as a book. They were concerned about the public relations aspect of it, and realized that they could get away with describing it as a "security risk" and by claiming that poetry couldn't possibly have anything to do with lawyers and litigation. We've tried to use all paths available. For example, we sent some of the poems that had been denied clearance to JTF-GTMO [the Joint Task Force that runs Guantánamo] to be released, but they refused. None of their attempts to articulate their reasons for refusing to permit publication makes sense, and the simplest explanation is that they were attempting to prevent the publication of the book from happening.
AW: They're that paranoid?
MF: This is a group of people unwilling to admit that they made mistakes, who don't ever want to concede that the executive should not have absolute power to do whatever it wishes without being answerable to anybody. I think the government is engaged in a form of "lawfare" — have you come across that term? It's based on a fear that non-state actors, unable to engage in conventional war, have to engage in asymmetric warfare — a horrible example, for instance, was a small group of men hijacking airliners and bringing down the World Trade Center on 9/11. Thought up by the Council on Foreign Relations, and by some hyper-Conservative opinion-makers, "lawfare" theorists suggest that terrorists get lawyers to tie up military commanders with lawsuits, invoking international law and forcing soldiers to second-guess the manner in which they engage with the enemy, for example. But in fact "lawfare" is what the US military is doing at Guantánamo, tying lawyers up in endless knots by filing frivolous motions to dismiss our habeas petitions, claiming that Guantánamo is a law-free zone where men can be abused and held in indefinite detention without any oversight by the courts, ever. The government has engaged in what I consider "lawfare" — making frivolous legal arguments and deploying procedural maneuvers designed only to delay the day of reckoning in the courts about the legality of the Gitmo detention center. That is "lawfare" — the misuse of the legal system for purely military purposes. They have done so, remarkably, with the complicity of Congress, which passed habeas-stripping litigation, and the silent acquiescence of the courts, which have refused to insist on the separation of powers enshrined in the Constitution.
