How Laurie Anderson Brought Guantánamo to New York
by Andy Worthington
I’ve been very busy lately — mainly with the launch of Fast For Shaker, a new campaign for Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in Guantánamo — and didn’t have the time until now to write about a fascinating project by the artist Laurie Anderson, who staged an event, in New York — “Habeas Corpus” — where she beamed in, live, a giant 3D projection of former Guantánamo child prisoner Mohammed el-Gharani.
Mohammed was one of at least 23 juveniles held at Guantánamo, although only three were officially acknowledged. See Al-Jazeera’s important new documentary, Growing up Guantánamo, for more about this — it focuses on Asadullah Rahman, an Afghan who was just ten when he was seized and sent to Guantánamo with two other Afghan boys.
At Guantánamo, where Mohammed was held between 2002 and 2009, he was subjected to torture, as the US denied his true age (14 or just 15 when he was seized) and tried to tie him in to all manner of ridiculous plots — like an invented al-Qaeda cell in London, which he was supposed to have been part of, even though he was only 11 at the time, and had never left Saudi Arabia, where he was born to parents from Chad. I first wrote about him in my book The Guantánamo Files, in 2007, and then wrote a profile of him in April 2008, Guantánamo’s forgotten child: the sad story of Mohammed El-Gharani, covered a judge granting his habeas corpus petition in January 2009, and his release in June 2009, followed by further complications relating to his return to Chad, despite his parents living in Saudi Arabia — see Mohammed speaking to Al-Jazeera here, for example, and this report from an investigator with his lawyers at Reprieve in December 2009, and please, if you have time, read the long interview with him, by the journalist Jérôme Tubiana, which was published in the London Review of Books in December 2011.
Laurie Anderson’s three-day installation attracted widespread media coverage, I’m glad to note, and I love the photos accompanying this article — of Reprieve’s founder Clive Stafford Smith and strategic director Cori Crider standing with Mohammed at the New York event. See coverage in Rolling Stone, The Intercept, the Guardian, Newsweek and the Nation.
As John Knefel wrote for the Nation:
Fourteen years after 9/11, the United States still suffers from the many sins of George W Bush, Dick Cheney, and their co-conspirators. Arguably, President Obama’s greatest mistake in office was to effectively immunize the previous administration from any official accountability, thus shifting the burden from the government to civil society to reckon with the crimes committed by the US during the “Global War on Terror.” In the absence of criminal trials for top policy makers — or a comprehensive truth and reconciliation commission — artists, activists, journalists, and human-rights advocates have been forced to tell the stories that both the Bush and Obama administrations would rather ignore.
For those reasons, “Habeas Corpus” is a wholly necessary work of art; as is a recent documentary about Omar Khadr, another child held at Guantánamo; as is the recent autobiography of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who is still imprisoned on the island. And yet, what art cannot do is ensure that GWOT-era crimes won’t happen again.
Even now, indefinite detention without charge or trial remains a feature of Guantánamo. The US government continues to insist that a subset of the prisoner population there, sometimes called the “forever prisoners,” are too dangerous to release but impossible to charge with a crime because of a lack of usable evidence.
Below, I’m also cross-posting Laurie Anderson’s fascinating article from the New Yorker, which explains how she came to meet Mohammed, how the show developed, and why it is so important.
Laurie’s article contains a fascinating section about Shaker Aamer, for whom I have been campaigning for many years — not just in the last week setting up Fast For Shaker, but, in the last 11 months, through the We Stand With Shaker campaign, and before that, for many years, as a journalist and campaigner. As with many prisoners, Shaker was a source of comfort and advice for Mohammed, and Laurie describes her conversation with him about Shaker as follows:
We talked about Shaker Aamer. Shaker, the last remaining British resident at Guantánamo who was pulled in at the same time as Mohammed, was brought to Guantánamo on the same plane, shackled, and blindfolded. He had taken care of Mohammed and had become his mentor. The only time that Mohammed cried was when he talked about people who had been kind to him. When he talked about Shaker, he broke down. Shaker Aamer is still in Guantánamo, now in solitary confinement. The day that Mohammed was released, he was the only one who was able to yell to him, “All the best! Goodbye! Goodbye!”
Another couple of key passages for me: firstly, Laurie talking about how mention of Guantánamo is treated by people in general in the US, even over 14 years since the “war on terror” was declared by President Bush:
I spoke with a few close friends about the project, and several of them had a lot of reservations. The word “Guantánamo” sets off sirens. People would literally recoil. Their heads would move back almost as if I’d just punched them. One of the saddest parts of this project was hearing from several groups of kids who told me in different ways, somewhat shyly, that they were afraid to talk about Guantánamo because they might get “on some kind of list.”
And secondly, Mohammed’s words, during Laurie’s meetings with him in Africa:
Mohammed concluded his stories looking right into the camera lens and addressing President Obama, “Please honor your promise and close Guantánamo,” he said, calmly. I noticed that Kat [Craig, of Reprieve] was quietly crying, her armor not as thick as I had imagined. And I could see that she was crying because Mohammed was speaking for himself, and because he was so clear and assertive.
I wish I’d been able to see the show.
Below is a short video of Mohammed speaking, as used in the show, and below that Laurie’s article:
Key in the Ocean from Canal Street Communications on Vimeo.
Readers may also want to see another important New York artist, Patti Smith, talking about Guantánamo on Democracy Now! last week, remembering her song for the German Guantánamo prisoner Murat Kurnaz, “Without Chains.”
Bringing Guantánamo to Park Avenue
by Laurie Anderson, New Yorker,
September 23, 2015
I’ve been trying to describe an upcoming project called “Habeas Corpus,” and it’s much harder than I thought. There are just too many angles. “Why are you doing this?” my friends keep asking. Sometimes I no longer know myself.
I am what is known as a “multimedia artist.” I chose that description because it doesn’t mean anything. Who isn’t multimedia these days? But it allows me to work in many different ways — music, writing, performance, film, electronics, and painting — without provoking the art police, who love to tell artists to get back into their category.
Cori Crider of Reprieve with a giant, real-time projection of her client, former Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed el-Gharani, at "Habeas Corpus," an exhibition by Laurie Anderson in New York on October 2, 2015.For the past six months, I’ve been collaborating with a former Guantánamo detainee, Mohammed el Gharani, preparing a work of art that we are making together. From October 2nd through the 4th, we will be streaming the image of Mohammed into the Park Avenue Armory. He will be sitting in a chair in a studio in West Africa, and his live image will be broadcast to New York City and wrapped onto a large three-dimensional cast of his body. His figure — more than three times life size, inspired by the Lincoln Memorial, in Washington, D.C. — will sit in the cavernous drill hall.
I had planned this as a meditation about real time and telepresence: how to be there and not there at the same time. Like all former Guantánamo detainees, Mohammed is not allowed to come to the U.S. I had imagined “Habeas Corpus” as a work of silent witness, deriving its power from live streaming, technology, and stillness — a work of equally balanced presence and absence.
But things were shifting. As it turns out, my collaborator Mohammed is eager to speak about his ordeal. And once he began to talk, the project changed direction. So, in the installation, once every hour, when Mohammed takes a break in West Africa, the statue will shift to playback, and it will speak. We recorded these playback sections in June. They include several hair-raising and moving stories about Mohammed’s time in Guantánamo. We also made a film, which will be shown in an adjoining exhibition room, in which he talks at greater length about what happened to him.
Gradually, the truth about Guantánamo has come out. For the most part, these prisoners were never the bad guys. They were not the worst of the worst. Most of them knew less about Al Qaeda than I did. They were taxi drivers, students, photographers, journalists, and goat herders. Many were purchased by the U.S. from the Northern Alliance, in Afghanistan, for five thousand dollars. Some have been held for almost fifteen years, many in solitary confinement. All interrogated. Most tortured. Most of the remaining prisoners have been cleared of all charges, but they remain in Guantánamo with no recourse.
Mohammed was one of the youngest detainees in Guantánamo. He was imprisoned for almost eight years, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one. He was interrogated and tortured for years, and, after the evidence against him was dismissed, he was released by a U.S. federal judge, in 2009. He is now twenty-seven and living in West Africa.
Although my work is sometimes political, I have always tried to stay far away from polemics. I hate it when people tell me what to do. I think, “You don’t even know me! How could you possibly tell me what to do?” So I make work that’s made of questions, not answers. And, as this particular work moved away from a silent meditation toward language and stories, it came to rest on the most basic of all questions: What is truth? What is suffering? What is justice?
The history of this project is a long one. I’ve made works using telepresence before, but, for various legal and logistical reasons, never in the United States. In 1997, I designed a work in a small town in Austria for the cultural center — a thirteenth-century church — and its neighboring high-security prison. My plan was to build a video studio in the prison, where a prisoner would sit still for two months. His image would be beamed onto a life-sized cast of his body that would be placed in the apse of the church. It would be a kind of living statue, made of light and plaster. The work, called “Life,” would be about the function of telepresence in contemporary culture and the contrasting attitudes toward the body held by the church (incarnation) and the prison (incarceration). After working on this for several months, the project was cancelled, for reasons having to do with ownership of the prisoner’s image. Once incarcerated, the prisoner no longer owns his own image and so cannot let anyone else use it. The work was never completed.
Shortly after that, I began working on a collaboration that would have beamed prisoners at New York’s Sing Sing prison into the Whitney Museum, a work highlighting the functions of two very different heavily guarded institutions. A few weeks after this version was abandoned, for technical reasons, I was describing it to Germano Celant, a curator-at-large. An hour after our meeting, he faxed me a terse “have located prison and cultural institution.” We did the project that spring in Milan as a collaboration between the Fondazione Prada and San Vittore prison.
The most difficult part of this work, for me, was the exploitation angle. A prisoner sits motionless for months in a museum, and I sign my name to it as “my” art work. Germano and I decided to spend time in the prison, talking to inmates and looking for a willing collaborator. The prisoners I worked with at San Vittore were white-collar criminals, extremely smart men responsible in various ways for dismantling the Italian economy. They knew Greek and Latin and were charming and courteous. They were allowed to cook in the well-equipped prison kitchen, and they had big knives and wine collections. They were busy writing books and articles and could receive visitors. Most of them were wearing Armani and, sometimes, if it was chilly, some would wear very stylish quilted vests. The only thing that was off about their outfits was the shoes. They were wearing slippers, because they were going nowhere. Ever.
The Italian prisoners discussed the project with us while subtly directing my attention, in their expert and seemingly offhand lawyerly way, toward an inmate who was sitting quietly in the corner. Soon, I was directing all my attention and questions to him. They had, of course, decided who my collaborator would be. Santino was a bank robber and murderer, having inadvertently shot some people on his way out of the bank. He was serving a life sentence. He was also a writer. He began to engage with me in the conversation, asking questions. I said, “Santino, if we collaborate on this project, what do you think about it? How do you see it?” He said, “I see it as a virtual escape.” And I said, “You’re my man.” Finally, the show opened. It was called “Dal Vivo,” or “from life.”
When I saw the living statue of Santino, I was shocked. He didn’t look like a prisoner. He looked like a judge. Distant. Remote. Regal. His girlfriend came to the gallery every day and stood near the statue, but he was unable to see her. The eeriness of real time.
I had always wanted to do this telepresence project in the United States, especially given the privatization of prisons, the rising numbers of prisoners, and the staggering statistic that the U.S. now has, by far, the largest prison population in the world. So when I was invited by the Park Avenue Armory, a couple of years ago, to do an installation, I proposed a version of “Dal Vivo” that would stream the images of twelve inmates from upstate New York prisons who were serving life sentences, wrapping the projections onto three-dimensional, double-sized casts of their bodies.
We spent months meeting people and talking to wardens. We got in touch with the Prison Mindfulness Institute and many of the organizations that work with prisoners teaching them meditation techniques. At the end of three months, we were told that Homeland Security would never allow this to happen in the U.S. because of the live-streaming element.
Next, Alex Poots, the artistic director at the Armory, said, “O.K., what’s Plan B?” I didn’t have a Plan B. I had been so determined to make this work, and so disappointed when it didn’t happen, that I had little energy for yet another new idea. I finally came up with a halfhearted pageant — a series of events, on floats or in cars, that would represent moments in history and consciousness. The installation was going to be a road, then a zone, then a no man’s land featuring scenes of cave people looking at the moon, a backward clock, the Kennedy Cadillac in Dallas.
I had temporarily unplugged my “tweedar” — the detector I use to measure the nauseatingly mannered content of art works. Projects like “My art is counting all the steps I took from here to the gallery and then assigning them corresponding musical notes and then playing them through the buttonholes of the shirt of my dead father.” I’ve done enough of these myself to be able to identify them pretty quickly. Nonetheless, my tweedar was locked in the red zone.
The project was foundering. I had no idea how to push it forward anymore. Then, last March, through a series of quick and unlikely circumstances, I met Ben Wizner of the American Civil Liberties Union, who suggested getting in touch with Reprieve, an international human rights group that works with prisoners facing capital punishment as well as detainees from Guantánamo. I remember the first call I made to Reprieve. I was speaking in a high, manic voice about real time and talking statues and virtual appearance. I was talking too fast. The line kept glitching out. I was breathless, the way I get when I’m really excited about a project. It sounded idiotic and incoherent. However, after a couple of minutes, instead of a polite “thank you,” the voice on the end of the line said, “Tell me more.”
I was talking to Kat Craig, an attorney at Reprieve, and after a couple more phone calls, she said that she might have a client who might be interested in working with me on the project. His name was Mohammed el Gharani, and he had been one of the youngest detainees at Guantánamo. She told me that he wanted to know more.
I was dumbstruck. I began to read about Mohammed’s story. He is a Chadian who had been living in Saudi Arabia and had been captured in Pakistan in a raid on a mosque. On the Internet, there was an enormous amount of conflicting information. The basics were clear. I began to learn about the work of Reprieve and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Kat made an appointment to connect me with Mohammed.
The first time I spoke with Mohammed was March 26th. I was getting ready to give a lecture at Harvard University. I kept losing the connection, and I was getting more and more anxious. What would this man make of this project? What could we possibly have in common? Finally, Kat completed the conference call, and I heard his voice. Light. Soft. He spoke English with a mixture of accents: Caribbean, West African, and Arabic. It was surely as awkward for him as it was for me, but we talked anyway about why and how we might do this together. Mohammed said his motivation was to help his brothers in Guantánamo.
My work is basically about stories and what happens when they are told and retold. And what motivations might be behind alternate versions. Mohammed’s redacted story, as well as the obvious inventions about his actions, and how they arose and got entangled, became a big part of our work together.
I have tried many times to imagine the process of interrogation. What does your own story sound like to you after so many repetitions, denials, revisions? What is it to ask and to answer hundreds of questions about your life? In his book “Guantánamo,” the French writer Frank Smith translates the transcripts of interrogations, and the interrogator and the detainee begin to merge. The French pronoun on, as in “one knows” or “one thinks” — our “royal we” — becomes more and more mysterious as we lose track of who’s asking whom and what authority is and what a story is. In the transcripts, there are also chilling pauses “No response from the detainee.” What does this pause mean? Is the detainee being waterboarded? Electroshocked? This is no ordinary conversation. It is language and stories in the service of confession, corroboration, and coercion. Among Mohammed’s first interrogators was a woman who began the session by saying, “Think of me as your mother.”
Mohammed was accused of belonging to an Al Qaeda cell in London in 1998. At the time, Mohammed was eleven and living in Saudi Arabia with his very poor family, tending goats. The U.S. government’s story proposed that a devious and precocious child could somehow find his way from Saudi Arabia to London and link with a major terrorist operation. It was oddly satisfying that Mohammed could use the same ninja power to jump half a world away and appear, like magic, live in the U.S., sitting in the Armory.
I spoke with a few close friends about the project, and several of them had a lot of reservations. The word “Guantánamo” sets off sirens. People would literally recoil. Their heads would move back almost as if I’d just punched them. One of the saddest parts of this project was hearing from several groups of kids who told me in different ways, somewhat shyly, that they were afraid to talk about Guantánamo because they might get “on some kind of list.”
“You should tell it like a case of mistaken identity,” one friend advised. Another fumed, “That’s not a mistake, that’s profiling.” The more I learned about Mohammed’s capture, the more I found out about the moment when the U.S. needed to produce bad guys and used bounties, false information, torture, and fear to create the prisoners they wanted. The more I thought about Mohammed’s story, the more connected it was to profiling in general and what seemed like the weekly event of another black man getting shot by the police. I tried to stay focussed. Don’t take it all on, I told myself. I began to have nightmares, looped visions of prisons.
Yet the more I learned, the more I realized that prosecuting “the war on terror” was all about stories. How you describe your experience. This is something I know well from my work, but I was watching it happen in the world. The U.S. government had declared the detainees “non-persons,” and so they were not eligible for apologies or reparations. The Geneva Conventions did not apply to them. They could be held indefinitely and tortured, but only because the torture was relabeled “enhanced interrogation” and because Guantánamo was not the U.S. There were also no suicides, only “manipulative self-injurious behavior.”
Viewed from another angle, “Habeas Corpus” is also a work about cameras. I just wish Susan Sontag were still around. I know she would write a clear and killer essay about what happened when the camera and the gun got welded together and about how adding lenses to guns increased the deadly aim of drones and how police body cameras and bystanders’ video recordings affect police brutality. And also how cameras are used in prisons.
My aim in this work is also to suggest some of the changes that occur in a culture that increasingly operates on remote. Many transactions happen at a distance — friendships, shopping, and even war. And cameras are the tools and links. There are so many of these conversations lately: Are there more crimes, or are there just more cameras? I’m thinking of the bulky box cameras that people once used to photograph lynchings in the nineteen-twenties and thirties.
This work also became about information. While we’re proud of living in an information culture, there are huge blank spots in what we know. Guantánamo has been called the “American Gulag,” and, along with other offshore black sites, it is a blacked-out area on the map. I’m thinking of the term “information poverty.” There’s so little information about Guantánamo in the U.S. And so much resistance and fear. How can I make something that celebrates our right to find things out for ourselves? The right to be free? How can I do this without being self-righteous and strident?
In April, I arrived at the airport in West Africa, and the hot air clobbered me. I passed signs with many exclamation marks and pictures of people with Ebola and yellow fever. A man snatched my bag. “Give me that!” I yelled, and grabbed it back. We tugged it back and forth for a while. I can’t stand it when people help me with suitcases. At the hotel, I knocked on Kat’s door. We were meeting for the first time. She was sitting in the hot room, unpacking a lot of stuff. She was friendly and chatty. She was clear and confident, and I could see why Mohammed trusts her. There was no air-conditioning in my room, and I lay down and listened to the sounds of constant heavy traffic.
It was a sweltering morning, and I decided to do T’ai Chi in the hotel’s airless gym. “Listen behind you,” are my teacher’s instructions about how to begin T’ai Chi. I was working on the nineteen form and suddenly felt someone looking at me. I turned around and saw a gap-toothed man in his twenties. He gave a half wave and then left. Later that morning, I met him again. He was with Kat, who introduced him as my collaborator, Mohammed el Gharani. The three of us talked for hours in one of the hotel rooms. There was a lot of secrecy around the meetings. Kat was always present. The bond between the two of them was touching. We stopped several times and left Mohammed alone in the room so that he could pray.
At first, Mohammed and I were both shy and hesitant. I was one of the few Americans he had met who wasn’t his interrogator, torturer, or guard. I had never talked with someone like him before. I was acutely aware of his physical presence. His back had been seriously injured. He was still missing teeth. His head had been smashed. I couldn’t forget, even for a minute, that it was my country that had done this. It kept making me feel like throwing up. Later, we talked outside in the sweltering courtyard. Mohammed is a runner, and we discussed how hard it is to run in the heat. He said he has two kids.
We went back to the room, and I set up two small clay figures and closed the drapes. I aimed the projector at them, and they sprang to life. I tried to explain: so this will be you, but very big, and it will all happen in a huge space. I showed him pictures of the Park Avenue Armory. We looked at the tiny glowing figures. I doubt that I was giving him any idea of what I was trying to do.
I had a lot of questions, but only managed to ask a few, and they were oblique. I listened. Sometimes I talked about my meditation teacher. I told Mohammed that my teacher said, “Try to practice how to feel sad without actually being sad.” We talked about whether that was really possible. We talked about people who were inspiring. He talked about Nelson Mandela. I talked about my friends and family and the death of my husband. Once in a while, Mohammed bent his head and cried. How was it possible for him to be here talking to me at all? Kat reminded me that asking questions had been central to all his interrogations, and she said that, as his lawyer, she had to remind herself — and him, too — that he didn’t have to answer the questions if he didn’t want to. Mohammed learned English in prison. The first words he learned were, as he put it, “the ‘F’ and the ‘N’ words, because that’s what the Americans called me.”
We drove around with our producer. The sky was dark purple and stormy, the pollution was chokingly thick. We visited several furniture stores looking for the Lay-Z-Boy-style chair that Mohammed would sit in. Since his back had been injured in the torture sessions and stressful physical situations were part of his prison experience, we decided to build a chair, designed especially for him, that would provide enough support to him to sit for long periods of time.
Kat and I also looked for new eyeglasses for Mohammed because the glasses he was wearing automatically darken in the light, and we wanted to be able to see his eyes in the projection. Kat is thorough, relentless, kind, and efficient. I told her that these conversations were making me feel so physically sick, giving me constant headaches. I asked her how she could stand knowing so many details about this much suffering. She gave me a brisk, professional answer. Lawyers, actors, and lots of other people, too, have an armor that separates and protects them from their jobs. I don’t have that, and it was starting to become really difficult.
On later days, Kat and Mohammed and I would talk for hours in the hotel room. He told us about the guard who told all the prisoners, “See this thick wall? You will never get out, and I will throw the key into the ocean, and you’ll be here forever, and my grandson will be guarding you.” He talked about interrogation and about the guards who were taken to Ground Zero before going to Guantánamo. He talked about missing his family. He described pepper spray and forcible cell extraction. He talked about being shackled and blindfolded and thrown onto a plane. We jumped around between the years that he was in the camp and his release. His stories transfixed me. They rolled out in long sentences. He described the day that a detainee told his interrogator that he’d had a dream that a submarine came to Guantánamo to rescue the detainees. That night, he said, Guantánamo Bay was filled with helicopters and ships with their searchlights on, looking for the dream submarine.
We continued after lunch. He said that one of the hardest things to endure was that there was no logic or reason or even pattern to the torture, and that was one of the reasons it drove people crazy. It was random, sudden. He described arriving on the plane with no idea where he was. After almost eight years, his release was finally ordered. He then spent six months in Camp Iguana, where he was constantly asked, “Do you hate Americans?”
For Mohammed, there had been no explanation. “After all this, what is justice for you, Mohammed?” I asked.
“An apology,” he said.
Back in New York, we began to assemble the team for cutting the statue. The plans for the live feed got more specific, elaborate. The brilliant technical director designed increasingly redundant systems for the intercontinental transmissions.
I met with a friend of mine who is a judge, and I described the project to her. She leaned in toward me and said in a half voice: “Do you have legal representation? ” Even though I know my friend and she was sitting there in running shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, her voice had the tone of a judge, and it had not occurred to me to get a lawyer. Her concern and authority suddenly made me very nervous. I thought of all the times in my life when I’ve been completely unqualified to be where I was. This seemed to be one of them.
I flashed back to the night, long ago, when I was playing at the Berlin Jazz Festival. I was in the middle of one of my songs, which are basically stories with many conversational-like pauses. A man from the back of the hall used one of these pauses to yell, “Play jazz!” I froze. He had a point. This was a jazz festival. The problem was that I didn’t know any jazz.
In June, I took my next trip back to Africa. We had assembled a team to shoot the first phase of the project, and we met at the studio. To create the effect of a person sitting in a chair, the figure actually has to be tilted backward, reclining slightly, as if in a business-class airplane seat. Kat, Mohammed, and I talked about what he would say for the playback section of the installation.
We talked about torture and ERFing, waterboarding, and solitary confinement. I began to feel the way I did when I saw the first images of Abu Ghraib. Nauseated. Hot. I could hear myself speed-talking: “But Americans! We’re … we’re … we’re good people,” I was saying. “We’re generous, and we help people.” I kept offering up examples of American generosity. Next, we talked about hunger strikes and beatings. Mohammed concluded his stories looking right into the camera lens and addressing President Obama, “Please honor your promise and close Guantánamo,” he said, calmly. I noticed that Kat was quietly crying, her armor not as thick as I had imagined. And I could see that she was crying because Mohammed was speaking for himself, and because he was so clear and assertive.
I thought of how lucky I was to be working with Mohammed, who is articulate, likable, handsome, and humble. His skills and personality were making the project so easy to do. I know of several human-rights groups who have exhibited paintings and published the poems of prisoners in a well-intentioned effort to show the humanity of the prisoners they work with. While I admire this, it has always bothered me a bit, too. Why should the prisoners have to be creative and likable people? I wanted to think that if the detainee that Reprieve had recommended to me was angry, bitter, and couldn’t write a poem to save his life, I would still want to work with him. Then again, maybe my own ego was starting to get involved. And I didn’t want that to happen.
As an artist, I am committed to seeing things the way they are, not the way I think they could be or should be. But faced with the facts of American racism, sexism, law breaking, and violence, I’m having a hard time maintaining my belief in the across-the-board openheartedness of my countrymen. Also, although there are journalistic aspects to this project, I am an artist first, so, if faced with having to choose between something beautiful and something true, I would choose the beautiful, because I trust my senses more than my rational mind.
The talks went on. We talked about Shaker Aamer. Shaker, the last remaining British resident at Guantánamo who was pulled in at the same time as Mohammed, was brought to Guantánamo on the same plane, shackled, and blindfolded. He had taken care of Mohammed and had become his mentor. The only time that Mohammed cried was when he talked about people who had been kind to him. When he talked about Shaker, he broke down. Shaker Aamer is still in Guantánamo, now in solitary confinement. The day that Mohammed was released, he was the only one who was able to yell to him, “All the best! Goodbye! Goodbye!”
Right now we are in the late stages of planning. The exhibition is becoming real. It’s going to be a crazy week. We finished carving the statue of Mohammed, and it looks like a Cubist work, a series of sliding planes to accommodate the projection. We’re preparing the live show that will happen each night. I’ve just heard that Clive Stafford Smith, the founder of Reprieve, will come to New York for the show’s opening.
I’m holding my breath.
Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album, ‘Love and War,’ is available for download or on CD via Bandcamp — also see here). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign, the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, calling for the immediate release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).
To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to Andy’s RSS feed — and he can also be found on Facebook (and here), Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Also see the six-part definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, and The Complete Guantánamo Files, an ongoing, 70-part, million-word series drawing on files released by WikiLeaks in April 2011. Also see the definitive Guantánamo habeas list, the full military commissions list, and the chronological list of all Andy’s articles.
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