The Art of Keeping Guantánamo Open
By Erin L. Thompson, TomDispatch
10 December 17
Few Americans ever took in the vastness of the prison outsourcing system the
administration of George W. Bush set up from Afghanistan to Iraq, Thailand
to Poland, the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean to Guantánamo Bay
in Cuba. In those years, I began referring to that global network of prisons
as our own Bermuda Triangle of injustice. At one point, it housed at
least 15,000 prisoners from Abu Ghraib and Camp Bucca in Iraq to the "Salt
Pit" in Afghanistan and, of course, Guantánamo. They were often kept under
the grimmest of conditions, involving in a striking number of cases torture
and sometimes death. All those prisons, large and small, were borrowed or
built to ensure that captives in the Bush administrations Global War on
Terror, the innocent and the guilty alike, whether taken in battle, traded
for bounties, or kidnapped by the CIA off the streets of global cities as
well as in the backlands of the planet, would be -- every last one of them
-- beyond the reach of the law, American or international.
And that couldnt have been more intentional. An administration whose top
officials had torture methods -- the euphemism of that moment was enhanced
interrogation techniques -- demonstrated in the White House wanted a free
hand to do whatever it damn pleased, including waterboarding, slamming heads
off walls, depriving prisoners of sleep, or just about anything else. They
were going to take the gloves off, as the phrase of the era went, and no
judge, no legal system was about to stop them. Their lawyers in the
Department of Justice even redefined severe physical or mental pain or
suffering in the classic legal description of torture so that an act would
not be considered torture if intent wasnt there -- and the only way to
know about intent would be to ask the potential torturer. (Even then, he or
she would need to have specific intent to cause pain" in mind.)
In this web of CIA-operated black sites extending across significant parts
of the planet, the jewel in the crown, a veritable recruitment poster for
jihadist groups, was Guantánamo. It was tantalizingly just 90 miles
offshore from American justice and pioneered those iconic orange jumpsuits
for its prisoners that would later be adopted by ISIS for its torture and
murder videos. There, prisoners could be kept more or less forever without
either charges or trials, a system for which Donald Trump has shown
remarkable enthusiasm.
TomDispatch has been covering all of this for years and yet I felt I first
came face to face with Guantánamo only the other day in the strangest,
quietest way imaginable. I went to meet Erin Thompson, author of
Possession: The Curious History of Private Collectors from Antiquity to the
Present. She then took me through Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo,
the first show of paintings and other works by some of the prisoners there,
which she had curated. Who even knew that they painted, no less with a
startling proficiency? Though the works were (as she describes today) in
some way faceless -- untitled and largely without human images -- something
about finally "meeting" those prisoners (and ex-prisoners), however
facelessly, cant help but take your breath away and remind you that we are
all, however uncomfortably, in the same grim world.
-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
The Art of Keeping Guantánamo Open
What the Paintings by Its Prisoners Tell Us About Our Humanity and Theirs
We spent the day at a beach in Brooklyn. Skyscrapers floated in the distance
and my toddler kept handing me cigarette filters she had dug out of the
sand. When we got home, I checked my email. I had been sent a picture of a
very different beach: deserted, framed by distant headlands with unsullied
sands and clear waters. As it happened, I was looking not at a photograph,
but at a painting by a man imprisoned at the Guantánamo Bay detention camp.
Of the roughly 780 people once imprisoned there, he is one of 41 prisoners
who remain, living yards away from the Caribbean Sea. Captives from the Bush
administrations Global War on Terror began to arrive at that offshore
prison in January 2002. Since Guantánamo is located on a military base in
Cuba and the detainees were labeled alien enemy combatants, they were
conveniently to be without rights under either United States or
international law and so open to years of whatever their jailers wanted to
do to them (including torture). President Barack Obama released 197 of them
in his years in office, but was unable to fulfill the promise he made on his
first day: to close Guantánamo.
The man whose painting I saw has been held for nearly 15 years without
trial, without even having charges filed against him. The email came from
his lawyer who had volunteered to defend a number of Guantánamo detainees.
Some had been released after she helped them convince a military tribunal
that they were no longer threats to the United States. The others remain
in indefinite detention. Many of her clients pass their time by making art
and, of all the unexpected things to come into my life, she was now looking
for a curator who wanted to exhibit some of their paintings.
Collecting the Art of Guantánamo
Im a professor at John Jay College in New York City. It has a small art
gallery and so one day in August 2016 I found myself in that lawyers
midtown Manhattan office preparing, however dubiously, to view the art of
her clients. She was pushing aside speakerphones and notepads and laying out
the artwork on a long table in a conference room whose windows overlooked
the picturesque East River. As I waited, I watched from high up as the water
cut a swath of silence through the city. When I finally turned my attention
to the art, I was startled to see some eerily similar views. Painting after
painting of water. Water trickling through the reeds at the edge of a pond.
Water churning into foam as it ran over rocks in rivers. Calmly flowing
water that reflected the buildings along a canal.
But above all, there was the sea. Everywhere, the sea. In those paintings
in that conference room and in other work sent to me as word spread among
detainees and their lawyers that I was willing to plan an exhibit, I found
hundreds of depictions of the sea in all its moods. In some paintings,
storms thrashed apart the last planks of sinking ships. In others, boats
were moored safely at docks or scudded across vast expanses of water without
a hint of shore in sight. Clouds bunched in blue midday skies or burned
orange in mid-ocean sunsets. One detainee had even made elaborate models of
sailing ships out of cardboard, old T-shirts, bottle caps, and other scraps
of trash.
Puzzled, I asked the lawyer, Why all the water? She shrugged. Maybe the
art instructor at the prison, she suggested, was giving the detainees lots
of pictures of the sea. The detainees, it turned out, could actually take
art classes as long as they remained compliant. But when there was a
crackdown, as there had, for instance, been during a mass hunger strike in
2013, the guards promptly confiscated their art -- and that was the reason
the lawyers clients had asked her to take it. They wanted to keep their
work (and whatever it meant to them) safe from the guards.
As it turned out, the art doesn't leave Guantánamo that much more easily
than the prisoners themselves. Military authorities scrutinized every piece
for hidden messages and then stamped the back of each work, Approved by US
Forces. Those stamps generally bled through, floating up into the surface
of the image on the other side. The lawyer had even nicknamed one of the
model ships the U.S.S. Approved because the censors had stamped those words
across its sails.
So I found myself beginning to plan an exhibition of a sort I had never in
my wildest dreams imagined I would curate. And I began to worry. A curator
makes so many choices, judgments, interpretations of art. But how could I
make them with any kind of accuracy when I was a woman, a non-Muslim, and a
citizen of the very nation that had detained these men for so many years
without charges or trial? Wasnt I, in other words, the ultimate Other?
Greek to Me
By training, Im a classical art historian. I expand fragments. If I show my
students a broken ancient Greek vase, I use my words to mend it. I pour in
more words to fill it with the memory of the wine it once carried, yet more
to conjure up the men who once drank from it, and still more to offer my
students our best guesses at what they might have been talking about as they
drank.
This mode of dealing with art was known to the ancient Greeks. They called
it ekphrasis: the rhetorical exercise of describing a work of art in great
detail. For them, ekphrasis was a creative act. The speaker often explained
things not shown by the artist, such as what happened just before or just
after the illustrated moment. The maiden in this painting is smiling because
she has just received a declaration of love, they would say.
But faced with this art from Guantánamo, ekphrasis seemed somehow
inappropriate. These artists are still alive, even if entombed. Their
artworks are as they intended them, not the fragmentary remains of some past
world that needs a framework of interpretation. And whatever interpretation
these might need, how in the world was I to provide it? Who was I to pour
my words over them?
And yet I knew that they needed help or why would that lawyer have come to
me? The detainees certainly couldnt curate their own exhibit in New York
because they would be barred from entering the United States even after
being released from Guantánamo. So I told myself that I would have to help
them realize their desire for an exhibit without inserting my own judgments.
I told myself that I would instead be their amanuensis.
From the Latin: a manu, servant of the hand, the term once referring to
someone who aided in an artistic project by taking dictation. Consider, for
instance, John Miltons daughters, Mary and Deborah, who took down his
seventeenth century epic poem Paradise Lost after he had gone blind. They
were his amanuenses. He composed the verses in his head at night. Then, in
the morning, as a contemporary of his wrote, he sat leaning backward
obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it while
they wrote down what he recited. If they dawdled coming to him, he would
complain that he needed to be milked.
I would similarly let the artists speak for themselves through me, or so I
thought. I wrote out a list of questions for their lawyers to ask them,
including What do you like about making art? and What would you like
people to think about when they are looking at your art? Then I waited for
those lawyers to pose them during their Guantánamo visits in the midst of
conferences about legal matters.
The answers were strikingly uniform and seemingly unrevealing. They wanted
people to see their art, they said, and through it know that they are actual
human beings. Really? I didnt get it. Of course, theyre human beings.
What else could they be?
At first, I wasnt too concerned that their answers didnt really make much
sense to me. Thats part of the role of an amanuensis. Miltons daughters
were ten and six when he began Paradise Lost. It would take them all nearly
a decade to finish it. In those years, their father also taught them to read
books aloud to him in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, of which they couldnt
understand a word.
I was used to being an amanuensis myself. When I was a year and a half old
and my mother was still pregnant with my sister, my father had an accident
and broke his neck. The fractured edge of a vertebra sliced into his spinal
cord, leaving his arms and legs paralyzed. As soon as we were old enough --
and I cant remember a time when we werent considered old enough -- my
sister and I would spend hours a day being his hands. We opened mail, paid
bills, slid computer disks in and out of the desktop that he operated by
stabbing at the keys with a long pointer held in his mouth. Through us, two
daydreamy little girls, he did all the work of a stereotypical man of the
house -- fixing broken appliances, hanging Christmas lights, grilling steak.
To be an amanuensis is, by the way, anything but a passive act. After all,
there wouldnt be enough time in the world if you had to tell your own hands
what to do in every situation: reach for the coffee cup, close that finger
around its handle, bring it to your mouth. In the same way, an amanuensis
must anticipate needs, prepare tools, and know when somethings missing.
And this sense that something was missing -- honed from my years with my
father -- was growing in me as I looked at the artwork and thought about
those responses. It was the midsummer of 2017 and the exhibit was set to
open in the fall. The file cabinets in my office were filled with
paintings, overflowing into piles on the floor that came up to my shins.
After the struggle to pry those artworks out of Guantánamo, I didnt know
how to say that one piece should be seen by the world and another should
stay a prisoner in some dark drawer.
Freedom of the Seas
So I asked again -- this time by emailing Mansoor Adayfi, a former detainee
working on a memoir about his time at Guantánamo. He explained that the
cells of detainees were right by the sea. They could smell and hear the
surf, but because tarps blocked their view, they could never see it. Only
once, when a hurricane was coming, had the guards removed those tarps from
the fences that separated them from the water. A few days later, when they
went back up, the artist-inmates began to draw pictures of the sea as a
substitute for what they had glimpsed during that brief moment of visual
freedom.
Suddenly, those endless visions of water -- that is, of freedom -- made
sense to me. And I understood something else as well. Guantánamo is a
system designed to paint the men it holds as monsters, animals, sub-humans
who don't deserve basic rights like fair trials. That was the reason those
prisoners were speaking, but not speaking, in their art. Why would they say
anything that risked a further fall from whatever precarious hold on
humanity they still had?
They hoped someday to be released, which was unlikely to happen if the
authorities became convinced that they bore any anger towards the United
States. And even release would not mean freedom of speech, since they would
be sent to countries that had agreed to host them. Dependent on the good
graces of these governments, they would continue to live constrained lives
in constrained circumstances, needing never to offend these new sets of
authorities either.
I was indeed the Other. I might misinterpret and misrepresent, but so
undoubtedly would anyone else in our world speaking for those artists. And
they were incapable of speaking for themselves.
So I added an essay of my own to the catalog, becoming ekphrastic. I pointed
out what was movingly missing in their artwork. It wasnt that there werent
people in their paintings. It was that those works had invisible holes
where the people should have been. All those unmanned boats, sailing across
those open waters, were carrying invisible self-portraits of the artists as
they hardly dared to imagine themselves: free. Even when there were no
boats, the famously mutable sea served as the perfect disguise. Its winds
and waves and rocks represented the all-too-human emotions of the artists
without ever making them visible to the censors.
It was, of course, so much less dangerous for me to interpret what they were
saying than for them to say it directly. I had held many doors open for my
father when I was his amanuensis, running ahead to make sure the path was
clear and that there were no surprising flights of stairs. If there were, it
was up to me to find a new way.
This is what I wanted to do for the artists. Open doors, scout out paths --
but their choice of doors, their choice of paths, not mine. They had told me
they wanted people to see them as human beings and that was the case I tried
to make for them.
As it turned out, I evidently succeeded a little too well. After the exhibit
opened and received a surprising amount of media attention, the artists
lawyers noticed that the authorities were taking longer and longer to clear
artworks to leave Guantánamo. Then, three weeks ago, the Department of
Defense declared that all art made at Guantánamo is government property.
Detainees reported that their guards then told them any art left behind if
they were ever released would be burned and works in their cells deemed
excess would simply be discarded.
As with so many policy decisions about Guantánamo, the true rationale for
this one remains hidden. My guess: the U.S. authorities there were surprised
that the artwork they had been scrutinizing so carefully for hidden messages
had a unifying one they had missed: that its makers were human beings. Which
is precisely the realization the authorities need to stop the rest of us
from having if Guantánamo is to remain open.
Erin L. Thompson, co-curator of Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo with
Charlie Shields and Paige Laino, is an assistant professor of art crime at
John Jay College. Her book, Possession: The Curious History of Private
Collectors from Antiquity to the Present, was an NPR Best Book of 2016.
Follow her on Twitter at @artcrimeprof.
[Note: The exhibit Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantánamo is on display in
New York City at the President's Gallery of John Jay College, 899 10th
Avenue (6th Floor) until January 28, 2018.]
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