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Guantánamo Kid–The True Story of Mohammed El SARGASSO 2017-18, I & II SARGASSO 2017-18, I & II SARGASSO 2017-18, I & II SARGASSO 2017-18, I & II Sargasso, a peer-reviewed journal of literature, language, and culture edited at the University of Puerto Rico’s Río Piedras Campus, publishes critical essays, interviews, book reviews, as well as poems and short stories. The journal seeks original submissions that have not been published elsewhere, including new translations. Sargasso particularly welcomes material written by or about the people of the Caribbean region and its multiple diasporas. Comparative work is also welcome. Unless otherwise specified, essays and critical studies should conform to the guidelines of the MLA Handbook. Short stories should be kept to no more than 2,500 words in length and poems should be kept to thirty lines or less. See our webpage and Facebook page for open calls, submission guidelines, and additional information. For inquiries or electronic submission, write to: [email protected]. Postal Address: SARGASSO Department of English College of Humanities 13 Ave. Universidad, Ste. 1301 San Juan, Puerto Rico 00925-2533 Guantánamo: What’s Next? Don E. Walicek & Jessica Adams, Issue Editors Keishla M. González García, Administrative Assistant Regino E. Boti y Barreiro, front & back cover images Marcos Pastrana, layout Local Editors Don E. Walicek, Editor Katherine Miranda, Contributing Editor Lowell Fiet, Founding Editor María Cristina Rodríguez, Book Review Editor Editorial Board Jessica Adams, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Sally Everson, University of the Bahamas Mary Ann Gosser-Esquilín, Florida Atlantic University Edgardo Pérez Montijo, University of Puerto Rico, Arecibo Peter Roberts, University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Ivette Romero, Marist College Felipe Smith, Tulane University UPR Administration Jorge Haddock Acevedo, President of the University of Puerto Rico Luis A. Ferrao, Chancellor, Río Piedras Campus Agnes M. Bosch Irizarry, Dean of Humanities, Río Piedras Campus For online resources, access to past issues, and purchase and subscription form visit: http://humanidades.uprrp.edu/ingles/?page_id=312 Opinions and views expressed in Sargasso are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily shared by the editors or its Editorial Board members. All rights return to authors. This journal is indexed by HAPI, Latindex, MLA, and the Periodical Contents Index. Copies of Sargasso 2017-18, I & II, as well as previous issues, are on deposit in the Library of Congress. Filed September 2019. ISSN 1060-5533. SARGASSO 2017-18, I & II IX Don E. Walicek & Jessica Adams Guantánamo and the Future 3 Hail Mary 3 Habeas Corpus 5 Erotics of La Parda 6 7 Since 1898 7 Little Boats 8 Sovereignty 9 José Sánchez Guerra & Don E. Walicek 13 “Yo he caminado un poco”: Entrevista con Lennox Lambert Farquard Alexandra S. Moore 35 “I Live Guantánamo Every Single Day”: Interview with Mansoor Adayfi ESSAYS Esther Whitfield 49 Art, Ecology, and Repair: Imagining the Future of the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base Table of Contents Jorge Rodríguez Beruff 67 U.S. Military Bases and Strategic Political Culture in Cuba Ruth McHugh-Dillon 75 “This Place Is Australia Itself ”: Manus, Guantánamo, and Embodied Literary Resistance in Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains Diana Murtaugh Coleman 105 On the “Phobia of Hope” and Everything After Jessica Adams 129 Guantánamo and the Limits of Circum-Caribbean Emancipation José Sánchez Guerra, translated by Don E. Walicek & Jessica Adams 157 British Caribbean Migrants in Guantánamo (1902-1950) David Lautner 175 Guantánamo Public Memory Project, an internet archive based at Columbia University Jelena Lukic-Mezin 178 Witness to Guantánamo, a website by Peter Jan Honigsberg Katharina Muhr 181 “Guantánamo Bay: The Hunger Strikes,” a short video produced by Mustafa Kahlili & Guy Grandjean Astrid Schmalzhofer 185 Close Guantánamo, a website by Andrew Worthington and Tom Wilner Marcella Slugovc-Sternad 188 Guantanamo Kid–The True Story of Mohammed El-Gharani, a graphic novel by Jèrome Tubiana & Alexandre Franc SALAAM 191 195 SARGASSO 2017-18, I & II It is the natives, all the wretched of the earth, who, breaking out of their reservation, are now called upon to reinvent the very concept of the human, through a restructuring of the world system created by the discovery and conquest of the New World by the West. —Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World hat is the future? To what extent does Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Wreflect a Caribbean future? What explains the bay as a force that impacts what’s next in so many instances around the globe? Guantánamo Bay is a place that foreshadows the conditions and ideolo- gies that are poised to unfold elsewhere. Yet, it is also a place that appears suspended, floating in an eternal present in which past and future can be indistinguishable. Revealing patterns that are both loyal to repetition and willing to adapt to change, the bay’s past underscores the dramatic variations of historical timespace and challenges politicians, prisoners, poets, and other observers to reimagine the conventions meant to help us make sense of the passage of time. Responding to questions about what Guantánamo means provides in- sights that can transform how we see the future. In The Dialogic Imagination, the Russian philosopher and semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) used the concept of the chronotope to explore the inseparability of space and time in human social action. Considered in this light, Guantánamo Bay reveals that Walicek |Adams some places are strategically poised to inhabit the future. It points not to a sin- gle chronotope so much as a set of chronotopes, each of which is differentiated by spatiotemporal parameters and, at the more granular level, divergent views of humanity. The patterns of life and death that transcend these chronotopes bring into relief dominant views of the world that exclude large numbers of people from the category of human. These are often people who have been enslaved, degraded, colonized, or marginalized on the basis of characteristics such as race, nationality, religion, and socioeconomic status. But chronotopes also transmit strength and hope. In virtually each and every incarnation of this place, history embraces resistance to bring together space and time. Migrants, refugees, prisoners, conscientious objectors, and others who have lived near its shores—like those who perished trying to find sanctu- ary there—have questioned the premise that violence should shape the fu- ture. Evidence of these general patterns abounds even in the context of the War on Terror. We encounter it, for example, in writings by former prisoners that document their experiences of incarceration at Guantánamo Bay. These texts show that their perspectives diverge not only from those of their cap- tors and the institutions responsible for their incarceration, but also from a broader mindset that shuns knowledge of their names, their histories, their languages, and the realities of U.S. imperialism.1 The writings of Mourad Benchellali, Ahmed Errachidi, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, and other former prisoners insist that the future should be shaped by an insistence that much can be learned from the past. Time and space at Guantánamo Bay also come together in plans for the future that never materialized. Consider the example of the Royal Commission of Guantánamo (also known as the Mopox Commission), a large-scale scientific initiative of the Spanish Crown under the charge of King Carlos IV of Spain. Working between 1796 and 1802, its members completed a detailed assessment of the space’s natural resources and also produced numerous maps, elaborate technical papers, and policies that would serve as a guide for building two highly efficient modern cities in Guantánamo Bay. The cities, called La Paz and Alcudia, were to be inhabited initially only by white populations, but they were also imagined as the homes of special group of refugees, among whom were French slaveowners who fled St. Domingue during the events that would become known as the Haitian Revolution. The historian Jonathan 1 See Spivak for related comments on challenges that the humanities faced in the aftermath of 9/11. SARGASSO 2017-18, I & II Introduction: Guantánamo and the Future Hansen explains that these cities were never built, mainly due to the limited funds of the Spanish government and potential immigrants’ lack of interest in the eastern part of Cuba (which many of them saw as too close to Haiti) (38-39). However, in the 1990s, tent cities for unwanted Caribbean refugees were built on the same ground where the cities were to stand. One of their functions was to keep Haitian asylum-seekers out of the U.S. It is essential not to be bound by what western imperialism has made of this space—the degradation of morals, of the environment, of international relations, of ethics and justice. Talking in an informed and forward-look- ing way about Guantánamo requires stopping, starting again, coming back around, holding contradictions in tension and simultaneously giving atten- tion to hope. When paired with a steady survey of the horizon, this process means that Gitmo can provide insights that assist in effectively addressing not just the problems that cluster around the bay, but also manifestations of them in other places, among them everyday practices of incarceration, lan- guage, and racialized violence in the U.S. and the Caribbean. Today in the U.S., the country with the highest incarceration rates in the world, more than forty states have super-maximum security—or “super- max”—prison facilities primarily designed to hold people in long-term isola- tion. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 80,000 men, women, and children are held in solitary confinement, an experience that often either triggers or exacerbates mental health problems.2 In the Carib- bean, incarceration rates are among the highest in the world, with St.
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