Writing poetry was the balm that kept Guantanamo prisoners from going mad
Former inmates say they wrote thousands of lines
- Thomas Coghlan, Chronicle Foreign Service
Sunday, July 17, 2005

Peshawar, Pakistan -- During three years in Guantanamo Bay, Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost says that poetry kept him from losing his sanity. By the time of his release this spring, he had written more than 25,000 lines in his Cuban prison cell.

During the first year of his imprisonment, the 44-year-old Afghan prisoner didn't even have paper or a pen. Instead, he scratched lines of verse with his fingernail into Styrofoam cups.

One poem reads: "Just as the heart beats in the darkness of the body, so I, despite this cage, continue to beat with life. Those who have no courage or honor consider themselves free, but they are slaves. I am flying on the wings of thought, and so, even in this cage, I know a greater freedom."

"Poetry was our support and psychological uplift," said his brother and fellow Guantanamo inmate, Badruzamman Badr, in an interview at the family home in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, where they have lived as expatriates since 1975. "Many people have lost their minds there. I know 40 or 50 prisoners who are mad. But we took refuge in our minds."

Dost was already a respected religious scholar, poet, journalist and author of 19 published books before his arrest about a month after the Sept. 11 attacks. His prison writings would significantly increase that number, he said.

Along with thousands of poems in his native Pashto, he completed a book intended for future poets with an alphabetical list of all the rhymes in the Pashto language. He also wrote a book of Islamic jurisprudence in verse form and translated Arabic poetry into Pashto.

Both brothers deny that they ever supported al Qaeda. They admit they felt initial enthusiasm for the Taliban but say they became disillusioned with the unworldly attitudes of the movement, particularly its opposition to the education of women.

Instead, they say, their arrest by Pakistani intelligence officers on Nov. 17, 2001, was an attempt by their political enemies to frame them. Both are proponents of Pashtun nationalism, a movement to create an independent state for ethnic Pashtun tribes on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border, and wrote for three magazines that promoted the cause.

After their arrest, they were held for three months in Peshawar, then transferred to U.S. custody at Bagram Air Base outside Kabul and to a detention facility in Kandahar, in southeastern Afghanistan, before being flown to the U.S. Naval base lockup at Guantanamo Bay on May 1, 2002.

U.S. authorities in Pakistan declined to comment about the case, but Pakistan Embassy spokesman Zafar Ali Khan said: "In late 2001, the Pakistani authorities had good reason to be suspicious of them. The authorities were receiving guidelines on people that the Americans wished to question. Many Afghans who had been involved in terrorist activities in Afghanistan had moved to Peshawar at that time. These two men were arrested and passed to the Americans. The U.S. has subsequently questioned them and established during the past three long years that they were, in fact, innocent.''

So far, 234 suspected "enemy combatants" have been freed from Guantanamo and 520 remain imprisoned, said Maj. Susan Idziak, a spokesperson for the detention facility.

Although Dost, who was freed in April, is happy to be home with his wife and eight children, he frets about the whereabouts of his poems. To date, he has received about 2,500 lines from the U.S. military.

His concern that his poems and other writings may never be returned is not surprising, since he took particular pleasure in composing satirical verses at the expense of his captors. In one 14-line poem, he compared Guantanamo to the monotonous bowls of boiled rice and black beans that made up the prison diet.

"He said that the food was like the prisoners. Black and white, good and bad mixed up together without distinction, without verification. It was expressed in a very comic way," said his brother. "Many prisoners learned this poem. We whispered the lines to each other."

In another poem popular with his fellow prisoners, he satirized what the prisoners saw as the sexless appearance of their male and female guards. Short- haired women and clean-shaven men in their identical fatigues often seemed indistinguishable to Muslim prisoners, used to men with long beards and fully cloaked women, Badr said.

The last line of the poem read: "They may have weapons and missiles, but we can find no sign of manhood in this army."

U.S. Army linguists read all the poetry found in Dost's cell, Badr said.

"In interrogation, the Americans often said to him, 'We understand the allusions in your poetry.' "

Capt. Jeffrey Weir, a Guantanamo spokesman, said he could not comment on when Dost's writings would be returned to him but said documents are subject to "intelligence screening." Petty Officer Chris Sherwood, a spokesman for Southern Command in Miami, which oversees Guantanamo, said "inmates' mail is translated, and any information considered sensitive for security reasons is blacked out before it is sent.''

Dost says he was interrogated more than 100 times at Guantanamo but was never subjected to physical torture in Cuba. Although he never witnessed desecration of the Quran at Guantanamo, he said an Arab prisoner had told him interrogators threw a Quran on the floor and stepped on it.

Both brothers say they suffered harsher treatment at detention facilities in Afghanistan, including intimidation with dogs and sleep deprivation. There and on three occasions, they say, they were photographed naked and had their beards and hair shaved. They also saw guards there kick the Quran. Such treatment was in contrast to the latter stages of their time in Guantanamo, when they say conditions improved steadily.

"The Americans gave me books toward the end,'' said Badr, who speaks English fluently. ''I read Ernest Hemingway and Charles Dickens."

He added: "We don't hate the U.S. for being Americans,'' he added. "Hating a nation for being a nation is completely wrong. We criticize America if we don't agree with their policies."

In his cell, Dost wrote thousands of lines in a strict Pashto form of poetry somewhat similar to the sonnet: 14 lines of 14 syllables, rhyming alternately after an opening couplet. A year after his imprisonment, when the detainees began receiving paper and pencils from the International Committee of the Red Cross, he was able to accelerate his output.

Other prisoners also composed verse, he said, including Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, the former Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, who destroyed all his religious poetry before a room search by the prison authorities, fearing it might be used in evidence against him.

For the major Muslim feast of Eid last year, Dost composed a poem written from the viewpoint of a child of a Guantanamo inmate.

Part of it read: "Eid has come, but my father has not. He is not come from Cuba. I am eating the bread of Eid with my tears. I have nothing. Why am I deprived of the love of my father? Why am I so oppressed?"

When he read it aloud, many of his fellow inmates wept.

Yet as he received a steady stream of guests in the library of his large Peshawar home, Dost was surprisingly magnanimous about his experience in Guantanamo.

"The positives have outweighed the negatives," he said. "I was not unhappy for being detained because I learned a lot. I wrote from the core of my heart in Guantanamo Bay. In the outside world I could not have written such things."

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IN THIS WEEK'S TLS
A new Sappho poem
Martin West
21 June 2005


Full story displayed (for the original Greek, please see this week's issue of the TLS)


Since classical times, Sappho has been a source of fascination and romantic construction. The ancients, who had nine books of her poems at their disposal, were unstinting in their admiration. Some called her a tenth Muse. Strabo, writing in the time of Augustus, calls her a wonder, “for in this whole span of recorded time we know of no woman to challenge her as a poet even in the slightest degree”. In modern times, with only fragments of her poetry remaining, she has remained one of the most famous and evocative names from antiquity, a figure viewed by some with narrowed, by others with widened eyes; a socio-historical enigma, a littérateurs’ Lorelei, a feminist icon, a scholars’ maypole.

It is difficult to judge her for ourselves when so little of her work remains. What we have
consists on the one hand of quotations and more general references in ancient authors, and on the other hand of torn scraps from ancient papyrus and parchment copies, mostly from the Roman period and, more often than not, so tattered that they yield only a few words or letters from any given line of verse. In modern editions the fragments are numbered up to 264. But many of these do not contain a single original word. Only sixty-three contain any complete lines; only twenty-one contain any complete stanzas; and only three – till now – gave us poems near enough complete to appreciate as literary structures.

A recent find enables us to raise this number to four. In 2004, Michael Gronewald and
Robert Daniel announced the identification of a papyrus in the University of Cologne as part of a roll containing poems of Sappho. This text, recovered from Egyptian mummy cartonnage, is the earliest manuscript of her work so far known. It was copied early in the third century bc, not much more than 300 years after she wrote.

Parts of three of her poems are represented. As usual, all are in a fragmentary state. But the second one, it turned out, had been partially known since 1922 from an Oxyrhynchus papyrus of the third century ad, and by combining the two texts we now obtain an almost complete poem.

When we had only the Oxyrhynchus portion, we had only line-ends, preceded and followed by line-ends of other poems, and it was not clear where one poem ended and the next began; the left-hand margin, where this would have been signalled, was missing. That question is now settled. We have a poem of twelve lines, made up of six two-line stanzas. The last eight lines are virtually complete. The first four are still lacking two or three words each at their beginnings. But we can make out the sentence structure and restore the sense of what is lost, if not the exact words.

Here is the poem in my own restoration and translation. The words in square brackets are supplied by conjecture.

"[You for] the fragrant-blossomed Muses’ lovely gifts
[be zealous,] girls, [and the] clear melodious lyre:

[but my once tender] body old age now
[has seized;] my hair’s turned [white] instead of dark;

my heart’s grown heavy, my knees will not support me,
that once on a time were fleet for the dance as fawns.

This state I oft bemoan; but what’s to do?
Not to grow old, being human, there’s no way.

Tithonus once, the tale was, rose-armed Dawn,
love-smitten, carried off to the world’s end,

handsome and young then, yet in time grey age
o’ertook him, husband of immortal wife."

We know of several poems in which Sappho spoke of herself as getting on in years. Here
she addresses a group of younger women or girls, whom she calls (to translate literally) “children”, contrasting their blithe singing and dancing with her own heaviness of heart and limb. It is clear from other evidence that she composed her poetry, or most of it, within an intimate circle of women whom she calls her “companions”. Her house is a house of moisopoloi, “servants of the Muses”. Later writers saw her as a chorus-leader or teacher, to whom people of class in several cities sent their daughters for a musical education. We cannot tell how accurate a construction this is, but it must have been based on the impression given by the poems, and it is consistent with what we know.

In the new poem, however, the focus is on Sappho herself. She recites the symptoms of her ageing, as in another famous poem she recites the physical symptoms of jealous love. Then comes philosophical reflection. In the love poem she tells herself that everything is endurable, because fortunes can be transformed at God’s pleasure. In the new poem she tells herself that growing old is part of the human condition and there is nothing to be done about it. This truth is illustrated, as typically in Greek lyric, by a mythical example. It is a tale that was popular at the time, the story of Tithonus, whom the Dawn-goddess took as her husband. At her request, Zeus granted him immortality, but she neglected to ask that he should also have eternal youth, so he just grew ever older and feebler. Finally she shut him up in his room, where he chatters away endlessly but barely has the strength to move.

Sappho is very economical with the myth, giving it just four lines and ending the poem with it. At first sight it might seem a lame ending. But the final phrase gives a poignant edge to the whole. Tithonus lived on, growing ever more grey and frail, while his consort remained young and beautiful – just as Sappho grows old before a cohort of protégées who, like undergraduates, are always young. The poem is a small masterpiece: simple, concise, perfectly formed, an honest, unpretentious expression of human feeling, dignified in its restraint. It moves both by what it says and by what it leaves unspoken. It gives us no ground for thinking that Sappho’s poetic reputation was undeserved.

The Uses of Libel

What began as subversive poetry 400 years ago is now bringing historians and literary critics together

By JENNIFER HOWARD

If today's politicians feel that they are too often the targets of the slings and arrows of constituents, they should be glad they didn't hold office in early-17th-century England. In that era, members of Parliament, courtiers, and even the king himself came in for abuse at the hands of anonymous commentators who expressed their sentiments in pointed, frequently rude poems known as libels.

"Never was bestowed such an art/Upon the tuning of a Fart," run the opening lines of "The Censure of the Parliament Fart," one of more than 350 Stuart-era libels now available online in Early Stuart Libels: An Edition of Poetry From Manuscript Sources (http://www.earlystuartlibels.net/htdocs/index.html). Occasioned by an episode that took place in Parliament on March 4, 1607, when Sir John Croke, speaker of the House of Commons, attempted to read a message from the House of Lords, and Henry Ludlow passed gas loudly enough to be heard throughout the chamber, the poem goes on to describe the various reactions of notable politicians to the unfortunate emission.

"The Censure of the Parliament Fart" circulated well into the late 17th century, with successive libelers adding verses as the years passed -- a kind of running gag on the gassiness of politicians. "What we would see as analogies have almost a literal power" for Stuart-era readers and writers, says Alastair Bellany, an associate professor of history at Rutgers University at New Brunswick who edited Early Stuart Libels with Andrew McRae, a professor of Renaissance studies at the University of Exeter, in England. Libelers used descriptions of bodily functions, corporeal decay, and sexual deviance to comment on corruptions in the body politic.

"A mixture of outrage and laughter" is how Mr. Bellany describes the libelers' collective attitude. Whether punning on Sir Francis Bacon's name or engaging in graphic speculation on the Duke of Buckingham's sexual proclivities, the writers used this "dodgy genre," as Mr. Bellany puts it, as a way to comment on events and public figures who, because of censorship laws, were otherwise off limits.

Bloody Penalties

The authorities in early-17th-century England kept a tight rein on what could be expressed, particularly in print. The term "libel" derives from the law but "came to define a range of unauthorized and controversial texts, on individuals or topical issues," according to the introduction to Early Stuart Libels. "A remark didn't have to be untrue to be a libel," Mr. Bellany says -- and libelers, if caught, faced penalties that ranged from being pilloried to having their noses slit and their ears cut off.

Hence the anonymity preserved by the poems' authors. Libels served as an underground safe zone in which one could let fly with political commentary, find an appreciative audience, and still keep one's ears. The poems circulated hand to hand, at dinner parties, in letters and diaries, and in the miscellanies and "newsbooks" assembled by contemporaries. Some miscellanies of the period are almost entirely made up of libels.

Cathartic as they probably were for those who wrote and read them, libels also played a role in the run-up to the constitutional crises of 1640-42 and the English Civil War that followed -- and have changed historians' understanding of that turbulent time.

In the introduction to Early Stuart Libels, the editors write that libels "help make opposition conceivable: and speakable."

In the 1970s and 80s, many historians subscribed to the idea that Stuart-era Englishmen didn't much care about politics, and that national debate focused on a few familiar points: the royal coffers, foreign policy, the union between England and Scotland. Libels preserve a depth and range of grass-roots political feeling that goes well beyond parliamentary debates. The libels offer "a completely different version of the political narrative of the early 17th century," says Mr. Bellany.

For instance, the death, in 1612, of Robert Cecil, King James I's most powerful minister and adviser, let loose a flood of scandal-mongering epitaphs that harped on his affairs with other courtiers' wives and the syphilitic condition of his genitalia: "Rotten with ruttinge like sores in September/ hee died as hee lived with a faulte in one member."

The mudslinging suggests a greater fear that the country was going to hell in a handbasket: "A cruell monster sent by fate,/ To devoure both cuntrye, king, and state,/ I care not, nor I cannott tell,/ Whether his soule be in heaven or Hell,/ Butt sure I am they have earthed the foxe,/ That stunke alive, and dyde of the poxe."As the court went, the libelers suggested, so went the kingdom.

A 'Sense of Fixity'

Early Stuart Libels is the product of 15 years of archival research and transcribing. Newsbooks and miscellanies that contain libels "survive in all kinds of places," Mr. Bellany says. The British Library, Oxford's Bodleian and the Folger Shakespeare Library, in Washington, have been gold mines, as have local record offices in Britain. Many libraries maintain indexes of first lines; the scholars were also given leads by people who heard about their interest in the genre.

The scholarly work, which was financed largely by Britain's Arts and Humanities Research Council, represents an effort to make these manuscript sources more widely available. Many have never before been published. There are no plans for a print version, nor will the current edition be subject to augmentation or additions; the editors hope that there will be a "sense of fixity" about it, and that it will be referenced by scholars just as a traditional book would be.

In that, it may be on the leading edge of a new, electronic approach to studying and disseminating source material. "This edition seeks in many ways to be a pathbreaking endeavor," the editors note in their introduction. "The electronic medium ... provides a superb opportunity to offer scholarly editions of works otherwise largely inaccessible or unknown to both the academic community and the layperson alike."

There is no charge to access Early Stuart Libels, which can be either browsed online or downloaded. Users can search for poems by first line, by proper name cited, or by manuscript source, or they can browse through sections devoted to specific incidents or episodes, such as Cecil's death and the so-called Addled Parliament of June 1614. Annotations accompany each poem to help the nonspecialist navigate period references.

Anthony Grafton, a professor of history at Princeton University, says the online work may help expand the definition of what counts as a scholarly publication. For one thing, he says, it is more fully annotated than many publishers can afford to make print editions. Those notes help make Early Stuart Libels "a very useful set of texts," he says. "These were things that were not all that accessible."

The collection also reflects a growing sympathy over the past two decades between historians and literary critics. In the wake of work by Stephen Greenblatt and the New Historicists, who argued that literary works are better understood in their historical context, the two disciplines have been paying closer attention to one other.

Historians used to dismiss some literary studies of the 16th and 17th centuries as lacking in historical rigor even while they themselves "often had very narrow definitions of what made a good source," says Mr. Bellany. They wondered how "a rude poem about the Duke of Buckingham could teach you anything."

Those attitudes have given way to an appreciation of literary sources -- from court masques and Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia on down to libels -- on the part of historians, and, for literature scholars, an appreciation of historical sources and methodology.

"Literature and history are colliding in surprising ways," says Mr. Grafton, particularly among scholars interested in the history of publishing and reading. "How do you do interdisciplinary work if you're not going to collapse the disciplines? This sort of project seems ideal."

As for the libelers themselves, they hardly limited their targets to those in public life. Seventeenth-century undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge, for instance, were fond of sending up tutors and school officials, and many samples of their ruder comments survive in the miscellanies. Will you find any of those verses in Early Stuart Libels? "No," says Mr. Bellany with a laugh. "We suppress them."

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