Frank Smith, Guantanamo. Trans. by Vanessa Place, Les Figues Press, 2014.
excerpt
In January 2006, responding to pressure from the American press, the Department of Defense released three hundred and seventeen verbal trials from Guantanamo naval base, the prison camp used to house accused terrorists. From these documents comes Guantanamo by Frank Smith. Appropriating language from the interrogation minutes, Smith shapes these questions and answers into a literary world as faceless and recursive as the interrogations themselves, leading us away from the comfort of reason and the hope of resolution. In this bilingual edition, translated into English by Vanessa Place, Guantanamo unsettles the categories of law and poetry, innocence and guilt, translation and interpretation.
In January 2006, responding to pressure from the American press, the Department of Defense released three hundred and seventeen verbal trials from Guantanamo naval base, the prison camp used to house accused terrorists. From these documents comes Guantanamo by Frank Smith. Appropriating language from the interrogation minutes, Smith shapes these questions and answers into a literary world as faceless and recursive as the interrogations themselves, leading us away from the comfort of reason and the hope of resolution. In this bilingual edition, translated into English by Vanessa Place, Guantanamo unsettles the categories of law and poetry, innocence and guilt, translation and interpretation.
“A mutant offspring of Kafka, Lyotard, and William Carlos Williams, Frank Smith’s volume haunts the precincts of a world-class ethical blight. Poignant, disturbing, and skillfully translated by a leading voice in contemporary thought, Guantanamo remains the name of pernicious irresolution and offshore strike back. Our own rogue penal colony, Guantanamo becomes the site for provoking a cannonade of interrogatory language and testimonial breakdown. Facing the Military Tribunal’s relentless pursuit of unnerving detail, Detainee, in a sudden if unbearable ironic swerve, asks as a final plea to be deported to the United States—home ground of his dream world. As if all this torture had been merely an initiation, a hazing ritual souped up by the protocols of some border patrol bureaucracy. . .”—Avital Ronell
“A composition with a strange status, which lays a finger on the heart of the links between humanity, justice and language.”—Blandine Sorbe
XI
The presiding judge reads the instructions for the hearing. / The presiding judge offers to give the Muslim oath. / The presiding judge confirms that the tribunal will hear two witnesses. / The clerk reads the items of evidence in their entirety. / Th Personal Representative establishes each unclassified piece separately. / The Personal Representative includes statements made in previous interviews in the file.
XI
Le Président du Tribunal lit les instructions d’audience. / Le Président du Tribunal propose le serment musulman. / Le Président du Tribunal confirme que deux témoins seront entendus par le tribunal. / Le Greffier lit les éléments de prevue dans leur intégralité. / Le Représentant Personnel établit chaque pièce non classifié séparément. / Le Représentant Personnel inclut au dossier les déclarations prononcées lors des interrogatoires précédents.
Guantanamo creates a disarming atmosphere much like Tristano’s, if in a completely different sort of world. Where the latter is full of dream language and bizarre collaborations of imagery, Frank Smith’s book is stripped down to bare bones. And yet, hidden in its structure is a kind of suspicious air, just as mutative and singularly memorable as Tristano in the reading experience it provides.
The foundation of Guantanamo takes the bulk of its text from seven transcripts released by the Department of Defense in 2006, comprised of interrogations of suspected terrorists that took place at the Guantanamo naval base. From these, Frank Smith has tapered down the bulk of the records to strange clipped scenes of little windows into private versions of a situation that feels very much like total hell. The viewpoint shifts back and forth from the perspective of the interrogator to the interrogated until it feels like some kind of dislocated voice mashed between the two. Soon we don’t know whose side we’re on, who is innocent and who is to blame. The antiseptic nature of the interview model, modded by Smith to read in bursts of verse, seem somehow at once menacing and whitewashed, like we are skirting around something so fucked it almost has no feeling on the page. I love when something not alive can make me feel like it is hiding something, like I have to read what is just underneath the actual image on the page, and Guantanamo is overflowing with such layers.
The information supplied tells so little of what we know to be the political story, but it is fascinating in how it covers itself up, and how among all the back and forth, the denials of the suspects against the endless barrage of allegations of their work, what little scenes of anguish crop open for a second. “Arabs should go anywhere except Jalalabad,” says one suspect. “All Arabs opposing the Taliban there would have been killed instantly. So what do you think? Should I have stayed, or tried to escape? They would have killed me if I had stayed, just like any other Arab. So I decided to flee. I did not know where to go.”
I don’t know what the truth is, or what comes from these documents. The more the questions are asked, the less the answers seem to lead us anywhere but to the fact that no one knows exactly what they are—no one can see what they have become a part of until they are outside it, and what is good and what is bad mutates the same way language does, while at its center is something no one can control. For all the horror Guantanamo carries, what it does not say and cannot say is by far the most deadly. - Blake Butler
In a footnote to Mark Sanders’ intro to this book by Frank Smith, we learn that the transcripts collectively known as the Reprocessed Combatant Status Review Tribunal and Administrative Review Board Documents are publicly available at the U.S. Department of Defense website; that it would take a French journalist/poet to turn these docs of no “original language” (the reports are in English but the “interviews” with High Value Detainees were conducted using many languages and translators) into a French-language collage only to be translated back into English by Vanessa Place and subsequently published in a bilingual en-face translation by Les Figues Press is the place to begin in this multilingual game of telephone made possible by the Freedom of Information Act. VP’s task of translating FS’s use of the untranslatable-into-English pronoun “on” becomes a repeated moral challenge: “It is said at the time he was captured, the interrogated had a Casio watch, model F-91 W, used by Al Qaeda to make explosives. / The interrogated says that this evidence is surprising. That millions of people around the world wear this kind of Casio watch. That if it is a crime to own one, why not condemn the stores that sell them and the people who buy them? That a watch, that’s not a logical or likely piece of evidence.” Or consider this excerpt translated from verse: “We say a doctor comes through / each morning / but is satisfied to provide a single pill, / always the same. / We say we do not speak English / but we talk about ti every day to the doctor, / that we show him where it hurts, / and that we suffer from urinary problems. / The doctor seems to think we are joking / and he laughs. / We apologize, / but one of our testicles was damaged / when we were beaten. / We say that what would be good, / would be that by doing a full X-ray, / we would know exactly what’s wrong. / We say that since we arrived / in Cuba / we have suffered terribly. / That the other day, soldiers confiscated / our pen. / Yet we had permission to have / this pen / in the room.” As citizens of the world, we all “know” about Guantanamo, or do we?
Disclosures: I’ll be teaching this book in my graduate Contemporary Poetry Seminar in the Fall, using it as springboard for the start of many necessary conversations.
Favorites: The dizzying sum is greater than the at times mind-numbing parts. - Timothy Liu
Smith’s book-length poem is a document of, among other things, the War on Terror, the plight of prisoners, U.S. misdeeds, conceptual art, and the cruelly circular logic that keeps detainees behind bars. Smith took the transcripts, released in 2006, of interviews with Guantánamo detainees, and arranged their testimonies and the summaries that accompanied them into various verse and prose forms. Conceptual poet and defense attorney Place (Statement of Facts) turns the stark French (provided en face) into inescapable English. Sometimes the prisoners speak in flat free verse: “When the Americans came to my house,/ they ordered me to lay on the ground,/ and I obeyed.” Sometimes prose blocks (with virgules built in) furnish chilling litanies: “We interrogate the interrogated, the interrogated answers the interrogator./ The interrogator questions the interrogated.” Even stranger paraphrases suggest that the bureaucratic, impersonal operations of the international system exist beyond the reach of law. Prisoners explain how they were picked up by mistake or framed by local enemies; they describe journeys from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Yemen, and elsewhere into the belly of a global war machine. Smith’s arrangements emphasize the absurdity of bad translation, the Guantánamo administrators’ inability to separate incomprehension from malice or understand what the detainees say. - Publishers Weekly
This is a really interesting exercise on a number of levels. Frank Smith took selections from some transcripts from tribunal hearings at the Guantanamo prison in Cuba, translated them into French, and then performed what translator Vanessa Place calls a “Reznikoffian poetic interpolation to the text.” Place, when translating these into English, didn’t look at the “original” transcripts—I put original in scare quotes there because, as Place notes, the tribunals aren’t held only in English. Questions are asked in English and then translated into whatever language the detainee speaks, and the detainees’ responses are translated back into English. Given that the detainees in this book are from all over the region—Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and more—this act of multiple translations illustrates the point that no real original can exist.
The book itself makes for fascinating reading, in large part because of the stories Smith chooses to draw from. HIs speakers are all men who claim to have no connection with the Taliban or al Qaida, and we are given no reason to challenge their stories. Indeed, given the sordid history of the US treatment of detainees from the start of that military action in 2002, and given the number of detainees who have been released/cleared of all charges, there’s good reason to believe these men are telling the truth. Or that they at least represent that group of men who were taken captive on little to no evidence.
By taking this tack, however, the book also acts as a sort of polemic, and I question the target it aims at. The acknowledgements thank President Obama, “without whom this book would not be possible.” I question why the author lets President Bush, who oversaw the operation from the beginning, who was responsible for the grossest mistreatment of prinsoners, who started the military action in the first place off the hook without even a mention. And while I believe that President Obama’s foreign policy leaves a lot to be desired, I also think it’s dishonest to lay the blame for the fact that Guantanamo is still open and prisoners are still housed there at his feet. The fact is that Congress has acted to keep Guantanamo open and the prisoners there, over President Obama’s objections. Obama has a lot to answer for, and deserves no end of criticism for many of his policies, but not for this, and certainly not alone. The acknowledgement feels like an unnecessary and dishonest slap at the wrong person.
Still, it’s a fascinating book, and well worth the time reading when it comes out in July from Les Figues Press. - newindesmoines.tumblr.com/
As a law student, I feel that the most important demographic that this book should reach is law students—but for various reasons, it will never reach them.
When reading Guantanamo, I thought back to my Constitutional Law class and our discussions of the constitutional rights of foreign nationals. We learned about the debate through the lens of Guantanamo, specifically Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT), which was challenged on constitutional grounds. As the introduction of this book informs, prisoners in the U.S. are guaranteed habeus corpus relief from unlawful detention. Such relief is generally called for when there is no knowledge of charges by or evidence against the detained person.
The introduction by Mark Sanders talks about translation and how Frank Smith drafted this book in French based on actual interrogation reports. It implies that there is no text under the text, only layers of translation with no correct source document: not only is there the language barrier between the author and the interrogation, but there is also the communication barriers between the Middle Eastern citizens and the U.S. interrogators. Law is very much the same way in having no definitive text. It is a mosaic bible made and revised by humans, primarily rich white American men (even still!) in this country. And yet, those who endeavor to work in it have their very human blind spots, such as the war vet in class who did not want to reconcile with “terrorists” having rights—that the Supreme Court should not pander to terrorists in giving them due process in our courts of law.
The text itself revolves around a trinity of ambiguity, vegetables, and the United States of America. The ambiguity in the writing comes from the use of the French pronoun on to show the absurdity and inhumanity of Guantanamo’s process. You observer a recurring narrative that the reader is unsure of is two continuous characters or two general bodies: (1) “the terrorists”; and (2) “the administrative body conducting de facto trials.” Vanessa Place translates on in a variety of permissible ways depending on tone, or not, or maybe creating her own tone in an unsettling way. Sometimes we are pronounless.
The whole book goes like this, in deadpan call-and-response, with occasional breaks into a very sparse poetry, absent of any embellishment. It is not quite as dry as the interrogation proceeding, but only not quite.
And at the end, nothing happens. Not in this book, or in the thing it is modeled after as conceptual art, until the shifting mind-mass of law went in the direction of abolishing the kangaroo courts, and setting some of the particulars free. The undangerous ones. Hopefully—but how are we supposed to know?
The worst kind of ambiguity, yet depicted flawlessly. -Rory Fleming
Frank Smith’s 2010 novel Guantanamo is an odd little creature. It is a fiction based on 380 released formal interrogation protocols from the detainment facility in the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. Guantanamo mirrors, reflects and projects some of those interrogations without every really assuming the character of a play or a drama. Formally, it consists of 29 short chapters of unequal length, each containing an interrogation, or rather, an excerpt from an interrogation; no chapter exceeds 6 pages, some take up only 2 or 3. Reading the book feels like perusing a portfolio of delicately wrought small dialogues (with the odd monologue now and then), although it is in fact composed of pieces or fragments: every reader knows a formal interrogation is a ritually rigid situation, with clearly marked beginnings and ends, the protocols of which, after all, are meant to convey to their readers (judges, intelligence officers, military officers etc.) a fully informed opinion of the particular interrogation in question, an impression that those readers can then base further investigations on. We, as readers of Guantanamo know that, although the book doesn’t tell us. It hides the official, rigid nature of many of these dialogues. In fact, the excerpts, as a rule, offer us no indication whatsoever where in a full interrogation a particular piece is supposed to be placed. These are, for all intents and purposes, fragments, but only implicitly, they are not marked as such. For the reader they feel like very concentrated doses of story. There is a certain disconnect, a lack of introduction, say; now and then changing voices can even cause a jolt to the reader, but the readers have to infer the fragmented nature from their own knowledge. After all, some familiarity with the general process of formal interrogations can be expected. In this sense, there’s a certain schizophrenic feel to the whole enterprise of Guantanamo, which vacillates between old fashioned storytelling and écriture engagée in the form of documentary drama à la Heinar Kipphardt. Come to think of it: ‘vacillates’ might be the wrong word: it marvelously succeeds in doing both.
The book relies so much upon shared knowledge between the writer and his audience, there is so much implicit, unsaid, blacked out, that the book, for the uninitiated, for the reader out of touch with current events and the broader implications of names, dates and events in the book, can seem a modern cousin of turn-of-the century short prose, in particular of books like Sherwood Anderson’s momentous Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of short, interconnected prose, less concerned with playing narrative games and more with exploring storytelling and the connections between the long and the short form. A similar effect is achieved by Edgar Lee Masters’ canonical collection of poems, Spoon River Anthology, which, despite the difference in genre, is perhaps even closer to Guantanamo. Books like these (and traces even of texts like Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood) come to mind, because the book’s basic impulse is to tell stories, in a simple but effective language. We as readers get to know an array of prisoners, and we learn of the way that they came to be arrested and incarcerated by the United States in the infamous detention facility on Cuba. With a story per (small) chapter, it could become repetitive due to the form of the interrogation, but the book as a whole has my rhythmic, musical feel to it; Smith plays with the ways to present dialogue. Some chapters are simple question/answer dialogues, written down like scenes in a play. Others keep the alternating rhythm of the interrogatory, but embed it in prose, adding words like “asked” and “replied”. This is the most common solution, as well as the most fascinating, fascinating because the subject of these sentences is invariably “on”, a French subject pronoun hard to translate into English. The best equivalent in English would maybe be “one” used as pronoun, in order to be a substitute for the pronouns ‘I’ / ‘you’ / ‘they’ / ‘we’. depending on the context. On seems to the speaker of French, like its German equivalent man, a simple, extremely common word, but its usage (cf. Le Bon Usage) is actually rather complex and the implications for Guantanamo infinite.
Without unpacking French grammar at this point, suffice to say that the word tends to mean something rather global. It is often used to subsume a group of persons under an umbrella pronoun, in the sense of ‘In Louisiana we like to dance’, or ‘In Louisiana, they like to dance.’ The use of it as an equivalent of ‘we’ is particularly common in colloquial language. This, like many other uses of the pronoun, ally the speaker with the action of the sentence or even with a group of people engaged in the action, but intuitively, one would expect that a pronoun supplanting the “interrogator” in the sense of “the interrogator asked…” would be equivalent to the English ‘he’ or ‘she’, for example. In a very strange way, this method achieves two objectives, it quietly dissolves boundaries between the two actors, and it makes us as readers complicit in the act of questioning, as well as in the process of being questioned. At the same time, it is a remarkably common word to use; no-one who regularly reads French would stumble over it. It’s not jarring, not difficult, not even particularly odd. It is quite astonishing how Smith manages to wring effect from simple means without having to highlight the effect, without forcing it on the reader. It is only when considering a translation that you start to weigh pronouns, that you notice how important and effective Smith’s use of language is. The ‘on’, arguably, is meant not just to provide a he said/she said structure. Instead it contains a suggestion as to who is speaking and who is spoken about, who is only relayed, read and perceived second-hand, and who is providing the first hand account. Guantanamo is quite obviously interested in providing not just stories, but it impresses on its readers how people come to be in such a prison, and what happens to their language within. The brackets, the constraints, the limits to the stories that detainees can tell, this is as important in Guantanamo as the stories they do tell. The short prefatory note already announces the distance of the detainees to open speech:
This focus, and the lack of explicit condemnation, the matter of fact description, this allies Guantanamo with a select group of (mostly) mid-century documentary plays. At the same time, Frank Smith declines to arrange his small chapters into a strong narrative, one that is implicitly condemning at least, he does not do what so many other writers did: write a novel composed of voices but roughly following a plot or an ideologically motivated narrative. Reading an isolated chapter near the end seems as much of a reading experience as reading one from the beginning. It is, however, Smith’s achievement that the book, as a sequence, and as a poetical artifact, makes sense, without coherence being forced upon the reader by an overarching storyline. In this, Guantanamo differs strongly from those other documentary plays. Three particularly important and excellent instances of the documentary fictions I mentioned are Peter Weiss’ The Investigation, Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter of Robert J. Oppenheimer or Karl Kraus’ massive, violently apocalyptic masterpiece Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit (not translated into English, but available in French as Les Derniers Jours de L’humanité, translated by Jean-Louis Bresson and Henri Christophe). All three of them have one thing in common: their fragmented nature, their use of widely available sources as basic material, and their emphasis on human dignity and on the forces that endanger or destroy it. There is Kipphardt’s Oppenheimer, nuclear physicist, his voice borrowed from the tapes of McCarthy’s quizzical henchmen, who warned about the dangers of modern warfare. There is Karl Kraus’ Viennese public, vibrating with apocalypse as the first World War approached, and finally soldiers, journalists and others during the horrific darkness of that war, their voices and publicly recorded statements creating a smattering of tones and registers in one of the 20th century’s most epochal plays. Finally, there are the voices of witnesses, judges and defendants in Weiss’ play about the Frankfurt Nazi trials, where those responsible for Auschwitz were dragged into court. Weiss’ play is arranged in a way that has us follow him into a genocidal cascade, ending with the burning of the murdered Jews in Auschwitz’ ovens.
All three of these writers rely almost exclusively on public documents, but in each case the result is an almost symphonic indictment of outrages committed against humanity. War, genocide, cruelty. Their authors formed part of the public consciousness, and their books were as much an expression of a particular political rhetoric as they were well-turned works of art. Plays like The Investigation were meant to be performed in a way that highlighted the speech onstage, with few details, just a courtroom and the stark words of witness. The implication was that honest words were enough evidence, that they are convincing and powerful enough on their own, although in each case the authors clearly assumed that their audience needed a nudge or a shove to read the plays the right way, hence the narrative closure and structure of the plays. Since their time, however, witnesses, and the reliability and validity of their words have been called into question, most famously perhaps by Shoshana Felman’s and Dori Laub’s amazing work. The problems of trauma, and of the knotted issue of representation have made works like Weiss’ very rare today. Reality has retreated from the battlefield of mainstream literature, as we started to understand how much our perception of reality is filtered and processed, as we started to question the relationships between our convictions and our flawed, second-hand perceptions. Fictions started to engage with culture, literature and other constructs that influence perceptions and form and funnel our representations. At the same time, as Felman and Laub have made abundantly clear, despite what they famously called “a crisis in witnessing”, witnesses exist and are important and oftentimes our only link to historical truth. Many theoretical efforts have been made to interrogate our understanding of the process of witnessing, efforts that have been reflected in poetry and the visual arts. Fictional prose, however, often steps clear of these issues, rarely attempting to deal with them, and even more rarely succeeding at that task. Documentary fiction, as part of other genres, postmodern, historical or cut-up prose, has persisted, with great success, but the likes of Weiss, Kraus or Kipphardt have been few and far between. Guantanamo is an outstanding example of that kind of writing.
The very title of the book is the first indication for us readers as to what game Frank Smith has decided to join. The prison in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba has become a byword for inhumane and unjust treatment. Interrogation practices in Guantanamo have become the focus of tempestuous legal, political and philosophical debates, practices, that is, that have relied occasionally even on torture, something that most first world countries had thought to have banned and banished decades ago. The detainees have, until recently, not had the possibility of challenging their incarceration in civilian courts, and even military tribunals have only been instated upon intense public and political pressure. Criminals, soldiers and innocents alike have been herded into cages and had to submit to often degrading treatment. This is the background of Smith’s book, but only very rarely do the dialogues that we are offered touch upon these issues, not explicitly, anyway. I think it’s fair to assume that Smith presumes all of this as part of the shared knowledge of his audience, and so he does not need to engineer outrage: he can safely expect his audience to be informed about the topic and suitably mad at that abuse of military and political power. The major difference to, for example, Weiss’ play, is that Weiss wanted to teach his audience about the atrocities that happened. Germany at the time was trying to cope with a massive case of collective self-induced amnesia. He used witnesses to create new knowledge and outrage in his German audience that was governed, at the time, by a former NSDAP member, Kurt Georg Kiesinger. Similar motivations powered Kipphardt’s and Kraus’ plays. Their plays would have lost their evocative power had they considered the difficulties of witnessing, the aporias of historical knowledge, to paraphrase Giorgio Agamben. History was there to be uncovered, written down and declaimed on the stage. Frank Smith, composing the poetical artifact that is Guantanamo, didn’t have that freedom. He was restrained by the awareness, the doubt and other difficulties that have beset historiography between the 1960s and today. From these restraints, however, he fashioned a fascinating literary jewel.
So these are the two polar opposites between which Frank Smith’s book is arranged. Anderson’s fiction and Master’s poetry on the one hand, and Kipphard’s harsh plays on the other, but it’s more rigid, more strict and disillusioned than either. Work like Giorgio Agamben’s might explain many of the tensions, but this is not the place to elaborate upon Agamben’s Homo Sacer trilogy. It’s worth noting, however, that Agamben’s very focused upon the processes that one’s state in a legal system plays for one’s ability to form truthful statements. He is probably most famous for his declaration of a “state of exception” that people in extra-legal camps like Guantanamo and in Nazi concentration camps occupy. They are an exception because the law of the respective countries has a gap where these camps are concerned. It doesn’t really discuss them and their odd status. The Bush administration has created that “state of exception” by inventing a special status for the detainees of Guantanamo Bay: unlawful combatants, which put them out of reach both of US domestic law and international laws like the Geneva Conventions. Agamben’s careful discussion of what this means for people speaking of and about their experience in camps like these are interesting and very relevant for Guantanamo, which appears to have been written with the care of someone highly aware of the difficulties in writing about these topics.
His approach, which consists of formally innovative, but not intrusively difficult small chapters, is likely to be inspired by the work of William Carlos Williams, whom he quotes in an epigraph at the beginning of the book:
In a footnote to Mark Sanders’ intro to this book by Frank Smith, we learn that the transcripts collectively known as the Reprocessed Combatant Status Review Tribunal and Administrative Review Board Documents are publicly available at the U.S. Department of Defense website; that it would take a French journalist/poet to turn these docs of no “original language” (the reports are in English but the “interviews” with High Value Detainees were conducted using many languages and translators) into a French-language collage only to be translated back into English by Vanessa Place and subsequently published in a bilingual en-face translation by Les Figues Press is the place to begin in this multilingual game of telephone made possible by the Freedom of Information Act. VP’s task of translating FS’s use of the untranslatable-into-English pronoun “on” becomes a repeated moral challenge: “It is said at the time he was captured, the interrogated had a Casio watch, model F-91 W, used by Al Qaeda to make explosives. / The interrogated says that this evidence is surprising. That millions of people around the world wear this kind of Casio watch. That if it is a crime to own one, why not condemn the stores that sell them and the people who buy them? That a watch, that’s not a logical or likely piece of evidence.” Or consider this excerpt translated from verse: “We say a doctor comes through / each morning / but is satisfied to provide a single pill, / always the same. / We say we do not speak English / but we talk about ti every day to the doctor, / that we show him where it hurts, / and that we suffer from urinary problems. / The doctor seems to think we are joking / and he laughs. / We apologize, / but one of our testicles was damaged / when we were beaten. / We say that what would be good, / would be that by doing a full X-ray, / we would know exactly what’s wrong. / We say that since we arrived / in Cuba / we have suffered terribly. / That the other day, soldiers confiscated / our pen. / Yet we had permission to have / this pen / in the room.” As citizens of the world, we all “know” about Guantanamo, or do we?
Disclosures: I’ll be teaching this book in my graduate Contemporary Poetry Seminar in the Fall, using it as springboard for the start of many necessary conversations.
Favorites: The dizzying sum is greater than the at times mind-numbing parts. - Timothy Liu
Smith’s book-length poem is a document of, among other things, the War on Terror, the plight of prisoners, U.S. misdeeds, conceptual art, and the cruelly circular logic that keeps detainees behind bars. Smith took the transcripts, released in 2006, of interviews with Guantánamo detainees, and arranged their testimonies and the summaries that accompanied them into various verse and prose forms. Conceptual poet and defense attorney Place (Statement of Facts) turns the stark French (provided en face) into inescapable English. Sometimes the prisoners speak in flat free verse: “When the Americans came to my house,/ they ordered me to lay on the ground,/ and I obeyed.” Sometimes prose blocks (with virgules built in) furnish chilling litanies: “We interrogate the interrogated, the interrogated answers the interrogator./ The interrogator questions the interrogated.” Even stranger paraphrases suggest that the bureaucratic, impersonal operations of the international system exist beyond the reach of law. Prisoners explain how they were picked up by mistake or framed by local enemies; they describe journeys from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Yemen, and elsewhere into the belly of a global war machine. Smith’s arrangements emphasize the absurdity of bad translation, the Guantánamo administrators’ inability to separate incomprehension from malice or understand what the detainees say. - Publishers Weekly
This is a really interesting exercise on a number of levels. Frank Smith took selections from some transcripts from tribunal hearings at the Guantanamo prison in Cuba, translated them into French, and then performed what translator Vanessa Place calls a “Reznikoffian poetic interpolation to the text.” Place, when translating these into English, didn’t look at the “original” transcripts—I put original in scare quotes there because, as Place notes, the tribunals aren’t held only in English. Questions are asked in English and then translated into whatever language the detainee speaks, and the detainees’ responses are translated back into English. Given that the detainees in this book are from all over the region—Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, and more—this act of multiple translations illustrates the point that no real original can exist.
The book itself makes for fascinating reading, in large part because of the stories Smith chooses to draw from. HIs speakers are all men who claim to have no connection with the Taliban or al Qaida, and we are given no reason to challenge their stories. Indeed, given the sordid history of the US treatment of detainees from the start of that military action in 2002, and given the number of detainees who have been released/cleared of all charges, there’s good reason to believe these men are telling the truth. Or that they at least represent that group of men who were taken captive on little to no evidence.
By taking this tack, however, the book also acts as a sort of polemic, and I question the target it aims at. The acknowledgements thank President Obama, “without whom this book would not be possible.” I question why the author lets President Bush, who oversaw the operation from the beginning, who was responsible for the grossest mistreatment of prinsoners, who started the military action in the first place off the hook without even a mention. And while I believe that President Obama’s foreign policy leaves a lot to be desired, I also think it’s dishonest to lay the blame for the fact that Guantanamo is still open and prisoners are still housed there at his feet. The fact is that Congress has acted to keep Guantanamo open and the prisoners there, over President Obama’s objections. Obama has a lot to answer for, and deserves no end of criticism for many of his policies, but not for this, and certainly not alone. The acknowledgement feels like an unnecessary and dishonest slap at the wrong person.
Still, it’s a fascinating book, and well worth the time reading when it comes out in July from Les Figues Press. - newindesmoines.tumblr.com/
As a law student, I feel that the most important demographic that this book should reach is law students—but for various reasons, it will never reach them.
When reading Guantanamo, I thought back to my Constitutional Law class and our discussions of the constitutional rights of foreign nationals. We learned about the debate through the lens of Guantanamo, specifically Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRT), which was challenged on constitutional grounds. As the introduction of this book informs, prisoners in the U.S. are guaranteed habeus corpus relief from unlawful detention. Such relief is generally called for when there is no knowledge of charges by or evidence against the detained person.
The introduction by Mark Sanders talks about translation and how Frank Smith drafted this book in French based on actual interrogation reports. It implies that there is no text under the text, only layers of translation with no correct source document: not only is there the language barrier between the author and the interrogation, but there is also the communication barriers between the Middle Eastern citizens and the U.S. interrogators. Law is very much the same way in having no definitive text. It is a mosaic bible made and revised by humans, primarily rich white American men (even still!) in this country. And yet, those who endeavor to work in it have their very human blind spots, such as the war vet in class who did not want to reconcile with “terrorists” having rights—that the Supreme Court should not pander to terrorists in giving them due process in our courts of law.
The text itself revolves around a trinity of ambiguity, vegetables, and the United States of America. The ambiguity in the writing comes from the use of the French pronoun on to show the absurdity and inhumanity of Guantanamo’s process. You observer a recurring narrative that the reader is unsure of is two continuous characters or two general bodies: (1) “the terrorists”; and (2) “the administrative body conducting de facto trials.” Vanessa Place translates on in a variety of permissible ways depending on tone, or not, or maybe creating her own tone in an unsettling way. Sometimes we are pronounless.
Asks if has family ties with known terrorists in Pakistan.And so on. Not only does this stylistic choice call to attention the human machinery at work here, but it also creates a haunting, disorienting effect. Who are you supposed to believe? There is no human face that you are supposed to recognize here. There are combating facts which simply do not add up. And here, unlike the real U.S. criminal justice system (for all its flaws), there is no plea bargain to a lesser crime, there are no charges. Your reward for confessing to being an enemy combatant is to remain there, indefinitely, perhaps forever, even if really you were just growing vegetables, at the wrong place and at the wrong time.
Answers exactly what kind of ties?
Rephrases the question, asks if any relatives have ties to terrorists in Pakistan.
Answers has no family in Pakistan. How could this be?
States has “kin” who is a member of a terrorist group responsible for attacks in Uzbekistan.
Answers no one in the family has any connection with any terrorist group in Uzbekistan to speak of. (p. 3)
The whole book goes like this, in deadpan call-and-response, with occasional breaks into a very sparse poetry, absent of any embellishment. It is not quite as dry as the interrogation proceeding, but only not quite.
“The man, his wife, and his mother still believedThe author instead uses this break to tell the straightforward narrative of the de facto defendant(s), in broken up third-person prose, as if these defendants were not allowed to tell their stories directly and that the only voice which spoke for them was the voice of Allah. Their voices are suppressed, and simultaneously horrifying and bland. They are made bland. They are ruled by the farming of vegetables, caring for their families through agrarian life, until they are expulsed then tricked by ill-meaning “friends.” These narratives are frequent and often in this book, and probably in life too. Yet they are rendered “boring” and unaesthetic. I think this is important.
they were being taken to Uzbekistan
but when they reached the other side of the river
a Tajik man informed them that they were actually
entering Afghanistan
and that they would have to fend for themselves,
that Tajikistan had effectively decided
to get rid of its Uzbek immigrants
Some families attempted to object
because they did not want to be abandoned there
but they were threatened with death
if they did not stop complaining.
The man believes they were then
in the area of Ahmed Shah Massoud.” (p. 53-4)
And at the end, nothing happens. Not in this book, or in the thing it is modeled after as conceptual art, until the shifting mind-mass of law went in the direction of abolishing the kangaroo courts, and setting some of the particulars free. The undangerous ones. Hopefully—but how are we supposed to know?
The worst kind of ambiguity, yet depicted flawlessly. -Rory Fleming
Frank Smith’s 2010 novel Guantanamo is an odd little creature. It is a fiction based on 380 released formal interrogation protocols from the detainment facility in the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. Guantanamo mirrors, reflects and projects some of those interrogations without every really assuming the character of a play or a drama. Formally, it consists of 29 short chapters of unequal length, each containing an interrogation, or rather, an excerpt from an interrogation; no chapter exceeds 6 pages, some take up only 2 or 3. Reading the book feels like perusing a portfolio of delicately wrought small dialogues (with the odd monologue now and then), although it is in fact composed of pieces or fragments: every reader knows a formal interrogation is a ritually rigid situation, with clearly marked beginnings and ends, the protocols of which, after all, are meant to convey to their readers (judges, intelligence officers, military officers etc.) a fully informed opinion of the particular interrogation in question, an impression that those readers can then base further investigations on. We, as readers of Guantanamo know that, although the book doesn’t tell us. It hides the official, rigid nature of many of these dialogues. In fact, the excerpts, as a rule, offer us no indication whatsoever where in a full interrogation a particular piece is supposed to be placed. These are, for all intents and purposes, fragments, but only implicitly, they are not marked as such. For the reader they feel like very concentrated doses of story. There is a certain disconnect, a lack of introduction, say; now and then changing voices can even cause a jolt to the reader, but the readers have to infer the fragmented nature from their own knowledge. After all, some familiarity with the general process of formal interrogations can be expected. In this sense, there’s a certain schizophrenic feel to the whole enterprise of Guantanamo, which vacillates between old fashioned storytelling and écriture engagée in the form of documentary drama à la Heinar Kipphardt. Come to think of it: ‘vacillates’ might be the wrong word: it marvelously succeeds in doing both.
The book relies so much upon shared knowledge between the writer and his audience, there is so much implicit, unsaid, blacked out, that the book, for the uninitiated, for the reader out of touch with current events and the broader implications of names, dates and events in the book, can seem a modern cousin of turn-of-the century short prose, in particular of books like Sherwood Anderson’s momentous Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of short, interconnected prose, less concerned with playing narrative games and more with exploring storytelling and the connections between the long and the short form. A similar effect is achieved by Edgar Lee Masters’ canonical collection of poems, Spoon River Anthology, which, despite the difference in genre, is perhaps even closer to Guantanamo. Books like these (and traces even of texts like Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood) come to mind, because the book’s basic impulse is to tell stories, in a simple but effective language. We as readers get to know an array of prisoners, and we learn of the way that they came to be arrested and incarcerated by the United States in the infamous detention facility on Cuba. With a story per (small) chapter, it could become repetitive due to the form of the interrogation, but the book as a whole has my rhythmic, musical feel to it; Smith plays with the ways to present dialogue. Some chapters are simple question/answer dialogues, written down like scenes in a play. Others keep the alternating rhythm of the interrogatory, but embed it in prose, adding words like “asked” and “replied”. This is the most common solution, as well as the most fascinating, fascinating because the subject of these sentences is invariably “on”, a French subject pronoun hard to translate into English. The best equivalent in English would maybe be “one” used as pronoun, in order to be a substitute for the pronouns ‘I’ / ‘you’ / ‘they’ / ‘we’. depending on the context. On seems to the speaker of French, like its German equivalent man, a simple, extremely common word, but its usage (cf. Le Bon Usage) is actually rather complex and the implications for Guantanamo infinite.
Without unpacking French grammar at this point, suffice to say that the word tends to mean something rather global. It is often used to subsume a group of persons under an umbrella pronoun, in the sense of ‘In Louisiana we like to dance’, or ‘In Louisiana, they like to dance.’ The use of it as an equivalent of ‘we’ is particularly common in colloquial language. This, like many other uses of the pronoun, ally the speaker with the action of the sentence or even with a group of people engaged in the action, but intuitively, one would expect that a pronoun supplanting the “interrogator” in the sense of “the interrogator asked…” would be equivalent to the English ‘he’ or ‘she’, for example. In a very strange way, this method achieves two objectives, it quietly dissolves boundaries between the two actors, and it makes us as readers complicit in the act of questioning, as well as in the process of being questioned. At the same time, it is a remarkably common word to use; no-one who regularly reads French would stumble over it. It’s not jarring, not difficult, not even particularly odd. It is quite astonishing how Smith manages to wring effect from simple means without having to highlight the effect, without forcing it on the reader. It is only when considering a translation that you start to weigh pronouns, that you notice how important and effective Smith’s use of language is. The ‘on’, arguably, is meant not just to provide a he said/she said structure. Instead it contains a suggestion as to who is speaking and who is spoken about, who is only relayed, read and perceived second-hand, and who is providing the first hand account. Guantanamo is quite obviously interested in providing not just stories, but it impresses on its readers how people come to be in such a prison, and what happens to their language within. The brackets, the constraints, the limits to the stories that detainees can tell, this is as important in Guantanamo as the stories they do tell. The short prefatory note already announces the distance of the detainees to open speech:
Nous allons vous poser quelques questionsCut into two lines, it is three things at once: it announces the thematic focus of the dialogues to come, it suggests, through its almost epigrammatic nature, a certain amount of heightened artifice, and lastly, it introduces the dominating voice and interest, the “we”. We will ask you questions, because we are interested in your history.
afin de mieux comprendre votre histoire
This focus, and the lack of explicit condemnation, the matter of fact description, this allies Guantanamo with a select group of (mostly) mid-century documentary plays. At the same time, Frank Smith declines to arrange his small chapters into a strong narrative, one that is implicitly condemning at least, he does not do what so many other writers did: write a novel composed of voices but roughly following a plot or an ideologically motivated narrative. Reading an isolated chapter near the end seems as much of a reading experience as reading one from the beginning. It is, however, Smith’s achievement that the book, as a sequence, and as a poetical artifact, makes sense, without coherence being forced upon the reader by an overarching storyline. In this, Guantanamo differs strongly from those other documentary plays. Three particularly important and excellent instances of the documentary fictions I mentioned are Peter Weiss’ The Investigation, Heinar Kipphardt’s In the Matter of Robert J. Oppenheimer or Karl Kraus’ massive, violently apocalyptic masterpiece Die Letzten Tage der Menschheit (not translated into English, but available in French as Les Derniers Jours de L’humanité, translated by Jean-Louis Bresson and Henri Christophe). All three of them have one thing in common: their fragmented nature, their use of widely available sources as basic material, and their emphasis on human dignity and on the forces that endanger or destroy it. There is Kipphardt’s Oppenheimer, nuclear physicist, his voice borrowed from the tapes of McCarthy’s quizzical henchmen, who warned about the dangers of modern warfare. There is Karl Kraus’ Viennese public, vibrating with apocalypse as the first World War approached, and finally soldiers, journalists and others during the horrific darkness of that war, their voices and publicly recorded statements creating a smattering of tones and registers in one of the 20th century’s most epochal plays. Finally, there are the voices of witnesses, judges and defendants in Weiss’ play about the Frankfurt Nazi trials, where those responsible for Auschwitz were dragged into court. Weiss’ play is arranged in a way that has us follow him into a genocidal cascade, ending with the burning of the murdered Jews in Auschwitz’ ovens.
All three of these writers rely almost exclusively on public documents, but in each case the result is an almost symphonic indictment of outrages committed against humanity. War, genocide, cruelty. Their authors formed part of the public consciousness, and their books were as much an expression of a particular political rhetoric as they were well-turned works of art. Plays like The Investigation were meant to be performed in a way that highlighted the speech onstage, with few details, just a courtroom and the stark words of witness. The implication was that honest words were enough evidence, that they are convincing and powerful enough on their own, although in each case the authors clearly assumed that their audience needed a nudge or a shove to read the plays the right way, hence the narrative closure and structure of the plays. Since their time, however, witnesses, and the reliability and validity of their words have been called into question, most famously perhaps by Shoshana Felman’s and Dori Laub’s amazing work. The problems of trauma, and of the knotted issue of representation have made works like Weiss’ very rare today. Reality has retreated from the battlefield of mainstream literature, as we started to understand how much our perception of reality is filtered and processed, as we started to question the relationships between our convictions and our flawed, second-hand perceptions. Fictions started to engage with culture, literature and other constructs that influence perceptions and form and funnel our representations. At the same time, as Felman and Laub have made abundantly clear, despite what they famously called “a crisis in witnessing”, witnesses exist and are important and oftentimes our only link to historical truth. Many theoretical efforts have been made to interrogate our understanding of the process of witnessing, efforts that have been reflected in poetry and the visual arts. Fictional prose, however, often steps clear of these issues, rarely attempting to deal with them, and even more rarely succeeding at that task. Documentary fiction, as part of other genres, postmodern, historical or cut-up prose, has persisted, with great success, but the likes of Weiss, Kraus or Kipphardt have been few and far between. Guantanamo is an outstanding example of that kind of writing.
The very title of the book is the first indication for us readers as to what game Frank Smith has decided to join. The prison in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba has become a byword for inhumane and unjust treatment. Interrogation practices in Guantanamo have become the focus of tempestuous legal, political and philosophical debates, practices, that is, that have relied occasionally even on torture, something that most first world countries had thought to have banned and banished decades ago. The detainees have, until recently, not had the possibility of challenging their incarceration in civilian courts, and even military tribunals have only been instated upon intense public and political pressure. Criminals, soldiers and innocents alike have been herded into cages and had to submit to often degrading treatment. This is the background of Smith’s book, but only very rarely do the dialogues that we are offered touch upon these issues, not explicitly, anyway. I think it’s fair to assume that Smith presumes all of this as part of the shared knowledge of his audience, and so he does not need to engineer outrage: he can safely expect his audience to be informed about the topic and suitably mad at that abuse of military and political power. The major difference to, for example, Weiss’ play, is that Weiss wanted to teach his audience about the atrocities that happened. Germany at the time was trying to cope with a massive case of collective self-induced amnesia. He used witnesses to create new knowledge and outrage in his German audience that was governed, at the time, by a former NSDAP member, Kurt Georg Kiesinger. Similar motivations powered Kipphardt’s and Kraus’ plays. Their plays would have lost their evocative power had they considered the difficulties of witnessing, the aporias of historical knowledge, to paraphrase Giorgio Agamben. History was there to be uncovered, written down and declaimed on the stage. Frank Smith, composing the poetical artifact that is Guantanamo, didn’t have that freedom. He was restrained by the awareness, the doubt and other difficulties that have beset historiography between the 1960s and today. From these restraints, however, he fashioned a fascinating literary jewel.
So these are the two polar opposites between which Frank Smith’s book is arranged. Anderson’s fiction and Master’s poetry on the one hand, and Kipphard’s harsh plays on the other, but it’s more rigid, more strict and disillusioned than either. Work like Giorgio Agamben’s might explain many of the tensions, but this is not the place to elaborate upon Agamben’s Homo Sacer trilogy. It’s worth noting, however, that Agamben’s very focused upon the processes that one’s state in a legal system plays for one’s ability to form truthful statements. He is probably most famous for his declaration of a “state of exception” that people in extra-legal camps like Guantanamo and in Nazi concentration camps occupy. They are an exception because the law of the respective countries has a gap where these camps are concerned. It doesn’t really discuss them and their odd status. The Bush administration has created that “state of exception” by inventing a special status for the detainees of Guantanamo Bay: unlawful combatants, which put them out of reach both of US domestic law and international laws like the Geneva Conventions. Agamben’s careful discussion of what this means for people speaking of and about their experience in camps like these are interesting and very relevant for Guantanamo, which appears to have been written with the care of someone highly aware of the difficulties in writing about these topics.
His approach, which consists of formally innovative, but not intrusively difficult small chapters, is likely to be inspired by the work of William Carlos Williams, whom he quotes in an epigraph at the beginning of the book:
No ideas but in thingsThis very famous phrase is from a 1944 poem called “A Sort of a Song”, which was published in the collection The Wedge (you can find it in WCW’s Collected Poems (Volume. II)). In Williams’ “Author’s introduction”, he lays out his concept of poetry. He claims that formal invention creates meaning and illumination, “a revelation in the speech that [the writer] uses”. The greatness of Weiss’ work in his time, and Anderson’s, Masters’ and Thomas’ in theirs, derives not from the stories they tell, per se, but from the unique means they have employed to tell the story, to make their work of art. And in his own time, Frank Smith attempts to do the same. For such a small book, there is an enormous amount of thinking contained in here. We could talk at length about how he uses the reader’s entrenched suspicions, how he handles places in the small stories of peregrinations that the detainees tell us, how he makes us complicit in the public acts of mistrust that Muslims are so often subjected to, how he uses translation and language as vectors of speech. All this is in there and much more, but on the surface the book seems so humble. Part of that, again, may be Williams and his admonition that a poet should take “words as he finds them interrelated about him”. Smith uses simple words, imbued with a complex understanding of the ‘interrelations’ in them. On the other hand, how humble is a book that bears the title Guantanamo, thus announcing to the world that it discusses a timely and important topic? One can’t help but feel that the book is carried by a certain sense of importance. Well, that’s as it should be. It is an important topic and it seems to me that Guantanamo is an important book. - shigekuni.wordpress.com/2010/06/12/frank-smith-guantanamo/
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