Jun

29

Gitmo Poetry.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

June 29, 2007 |

When I first heard about a collection of poems written by prisoners and former prisoners of Guantanamo Bay, it was described to me as “the poetry of al Qaeda”, by someone who was afraid the poems would be used to pass messages through a terrorist network. I don’t claim to be an expert on politics (I leave the politics to smarter people) but the description struck me as supreme ignorance. While some extremely dangerous people may be imprisoned in Gitmo, fewer than half of the prisoners there have been charged with any crime. And, though I may be naive, I can’t believe twenty-two poems by seventeen detainees and former detainees are a threat to national security. If they are, then there is some comfort in knowing poetry has such power. In fact the release of the collection has been reported in, among other places, The Wall Street Journal, which isn’t known for its poetry coverage.

The so-called war on terrorism is not a new phenomenon. Terrorism is not a new tactic, not even for the United States, where the beginnings of revolution must have been regarded by the British crown as acts of terrorism. Terrorism didn’t begin with Islam, and it won’t end when the last U.S. soldier is brought home. I’m not condoning terrorism or trying to justify the senseless violence that is both the act and often the by-product of terrorism. Instead I think we need to understand our own government’s policies better, and we need to understand the people of other countries better. There is a reason the Guantanamo Bay facility is an embarrassment to a country that should be an example to the rest of the world.

We also mustn’t forget that the Middle East is literally, the cradle of civilization, and has a long tradition of literature which includes such familiar classics as The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and the Tales of the Arabian Nights, which were, at one time, as popular and controversial as Harry Potter is today. There is also a long and thriving literary tradition, including the work of 1988 Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, who passed away almost a year ago and whose last novel, Karnak Cafe, has just been published in English translation. For a broad overview there are editor James Kritzeck’s Anthology of Islamic literature, from the rise of Islam to modern times (Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1964) and Modern Islamic literature: from 1800 to the present (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970). And there is also the still-thriving tradition of poetry. In addition to the new collection there are such collections as Modern Arabic Poetry (Columbia University Press, 1987), edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi and An anthology of modern Arabic poetry (University of California Press, 1974), edited and translated by Mounah A. Khouri and Hamid Algar. What’s striking about reading these collections is that, in the poetry of East and West, there are fewer differences than similarities. We worry about the same things, we love the same way. We are the same people.

Of course there is more to any culture than its literature, and I can’t think of the Middle East without thinking of Saudi Aramco World Magazine, which, in each bimonthly issue, reveals a world that is historically, scientifically, economically, and culturally more complex, more developed, more fascinating, and more beautiful than the glimpses we get in movies or the horrors we see in the news channels. We have to be informed, to understand the Middle East to stop repeating the mistakes of the past. Former Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky perhaps said this best in his review of the book when he said, “They deserve, above all, not admiration or belief or sympathy–but attention. Attention to them is urgent for us.”

He may only have been speaking of this small collection of poems, but he could just as easily have been speaking about all the countries of the Middle East, and beyond.


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1 Comment so far

  1. lksqeklqcv on July 3, 2007 9:03 am

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