Aesthetics of Terror, Forms of Resistance

Much of the conversation around the aesthetics of the War on Terror declared by the US government after the 9/11 attacks has appropriately focused on a visual register. Called a media war, or a war over representation, the regime of surveillance propelled by the fear of an unspecified terror has drawn further attention to the dynamics of visibility. As Henry Giroux has shown, “a visual culture of shock and awe” accompanied the military campaign.Footnote ⁹ Images of nighttime bombing raids of cities in Iraq; tanks in the streets; bodies strewn on the ground; drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia; and the resonant imagery of significant events—George Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” banner or the televised capture of Saddam Hussein and the inspection of his mouth—have tried to counteract the narrative inaugurated by the spectacle of the falling World Trade Center towers in New York City. As the killing of Osama Bin Laden and his burial at sea show, though, such orchestrated spectacles are perfectly mirrored in the accompanying architecture of blurring, invisibility, and erasure. One may think of these twin dynamics—the production of state-sponsored spectacles and the vast suppression of information through ubiquitous censorship—as emblematized in the photographs that have come to symbolize Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. The former, featuring kneeling orange-clad detainees with faces gagged and muffled, was staged by the US government to parade a kind of victory over the attackers and reclaim dominance, whereas the latter inadvertently emerged as raw (often pornographic) footage in the public sphere to reveal the truth of the brutal excesses of ordinary soldiers. The two sets of photographs compete with but also complement each other, signaling the complex dynamics of visibility and invisibility that have guided the way we apprehend the War on Terror.

Accordingly, many of the strategies called into play by artists and activists to challenge the War on Terror have tried to restore to visibility the bodies and sights being censored, often by countering spectacle with scenes of ordinary life, or by changing the scale of vision itself. The best example of such attempts is the drone visualization project, which seeks to combat the “out of sight, out of mind” logic of unmanned aerial vehicles by mapping all the drone strikes that have taken place in Pakistan since 2004, against a simple red screen that reveals the exponentially increased intensity of the strikes under the Obama administration.Footnote ¹⁰ Similarly, the drone art project takes away the pretense of “just a bug splat”—the notion that a person being killed by a drone looks just like a tiny bug being crushed to the drone operator—by creating a giant art image of a child’s face looking up at the sky, so that it becomes clear that it is a human life being taken.Footnote ¹¹ Josh Begley, a data artist and web developer, invented an app called Dronestream in 2012 that tracks and sends a push notification to the user every time a drone strike is carried out by the United States.Footnote ¹² Numerous other activist attempts—the release of information about the killings of civilians by WikiLeaks, the public memory project of Guantánamo, the Iraq Body Count, and the Intercept’s comprehensive archive of the drone papers—further try to not just restore information to the public sphere, but also combat the spatial separations between us and them, looking for new ways of visualizing such relations.Footnote ¹³

As Teju Cole notes, however, the task of closing the “empathy gap” created by the global War on Terror is most often assigned to fiction. Cole opposes the kind of imagination novels create—the rich interior lives for a range of characters in fully realized social settings—to drones, which “ignore the inherent complexity each person possesses and reduce their victims to pixelated objects on a screen thousands of miles away, all without due process and often resulting in civilian deaths.”Footnote ¹⁴ To force recognition of these two together—the power of fiction and the deaths by drone, Cole famously tweeted “Seven Short Stories about Drones” in 2013.Footnote ¹⁵ Each tweet begins with the opening line of a classic work of fiction: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, and Albert Camus’s The Stranger. But the promise of each scene is immediately cut short by a drone strike, ending the story before it could even begin, thus pairing the devastated lives leveled by drones with the untold stories we will never access. It may seem that such a project indexes the rise of new forms of media and corresponding new strategies, and proclaims the end of narrative as each novel is reduced to 140 characters and each story ends in the same way. In fact, however, Cole stages the continuing power of literature and of reading to define one’s humanity in relation to others, precisely by imagining the faceless people in Sudan, Yemen, or Pakistan as involved in the same rich, peculiar, individual lives as Mrs. Dalloway or Ishmael. That he does so to close the empathy gap not by resorting to the level of the visual, but through narrative itself, speaks to the ongoing power of old forms of media to challenge new regimes of hypermediation.

A 2016 song by the British artist Anohni further evokes precisely these questions of imagining empathy across distance as the song “Drone Bomb Me” imagines a nine-year-old Afghani girl singing to the sky. A song of surprising beauty and intimacy, the sexiness of the beat and the haunting vocals contrast with the brutal, anguished lyrics calling for destruction. The shock of the collision of seduction and blunt violence produces the effect. Anohni has explained that she was thinking of an Afghani girl whose family has been killed by a drone attack, who now wishes to also be killed. Capturing the misery and desperation of the victims of the War on Terror, the love song sounds like an unlikely serenade to the drone itself. Even more surprisingly, the well-received video of the song features supermodel Naomi Campbell in two avatars—one sitting in a chair facing the camera, with tears streaming down her face lip-syncing the song, the other dancing seductively, surrounded by a group of dancing, almost menacing black male models.Footnote ¹⁶ That Campbell, hardly a figure known for her human rights activism, ventriloquizes the feelings of an Afghani girl or even substitutes for her is perplexing enough, but the vaster iconography of blackness in a video about the US government bombing Afghanistan is equally inexplicable. The visual work of black bodies in various media, coding suffering and fetish alike, raises unresolved but deeply resonant questions about the status of racial forms, especially as they circulate across the globe in postcolonial settings as well as in postcolonial scholarly inquiry.

On Postcolonial Critique Now

Reading under the sign of the postcolonial has always been a difficult endeavor. In part, this is a result of the vast scope of the term, under which much of the cultural production of what has variably been called the Commonwealth, the third world, or the global south comes into view.Footnote ¹⁷ If, as Franco Moretti influentially claims, despite all divisions of core, semi-periphery, and periphery, there is but one world literary system, “simultaneously one, and unequal,” it is further difficult to study postcolonial literature as literature without attending to the political situation that renders it both connected to the core and in a profound state of dependence or inequality to it.Footnote ¹⁸ Perhaps this is why once the key literary concepts that undergirded postcolonial inquiry in its heyday (from the late 1970s through the end of the century) that helped anchor analysis of a dominant figure like Salman Rushdie—the frame of nation as narration, the model of the national allegory, the chosen form of magic realism—tended to give way in the twenty-first century to more varied practices, it has been difficult to find definitive articulations of postcolonial forms and formalisms.

Theories of genre in particular have been strangely absent. Perhaps such is the massive shadow cast by Jacques Derrida, who declared that the law of genre, which mandates that genres are not to be mixed, works only to establish a limit, a norm, or interdiction that must inevitably be crossed, contaminated, and transgressed.Footnote ¹⁹ But despite widespread tendencies to separate formalist study from historicist approaches, to oppose methods of surface reading (including the study of genre and form) to symptomatic or suspicious approaches, or aesthetic questions to ideology critique, in much postcolonial inquiry, the two are near impossible to keep apart. This is why Moretti remains helpful, especially when he channels the Brazilian critic Roberto Schwarz to show that “forms are the abstract of social relationships: so, formal analysis is in its own modest way, an analysis of power.” It is worth retaining this insight even as the taxonomy Moretti advocates—“a division of labor between national and world literature” may too uncomfortably repeat the division of labor of political economy.Footnote ²⁰ Thinking of forms and genres across an interconnected and unequal world system may, in fact, generate insights both about form and power.

Moretti’s model in some ways remains captive to the hierarchy it seeks to illuminate, but other recent attempts to articulate peripheral forms offer exciting new ways of conceiving of postcolonial reading methods.Footnote ²¹ Given the ferment in the larger literary sphere over critique and whether it is even possible anymore, it is worth considering how a determinedly political and activist text like Guantánamo Diary—promoted by the ACLU and presented as a key document of testimony in an appeal for the freedom of its author—also raises questions of genre, and in doing so, shows a path that is best trodden without separating form from ideology. Indeed, Fredric Jameson demonstrated the way to such analysis a long time ago when he insisted on tracing an ideology of form that surfaces the repressed historical unconscious of a text’s seemingly magical resolutions.Footnote ²²

This is especially true for transnational or global literatures that cannot be fixed in any one national location. How do genres—often thought of as expressions of the nation itself—travel, circulate, or transmogrify? And what happens when these genres are not easily classified as core or peripheral to follow Moretti’s typology? What happens when a genre—and my example is the slave narrative—is at once hegemonic, insurgent, and compromised? When Slahi speaks of freedom echoing the words and narrative strategies of a Harriet Jacobs or an Olaudah Equiano, what kinds of transhistorical connections might we establish that shed light on a desired postcolonial present and future? Such questions are especially resonant in a time of flux for the field of postcolonial studies—once clearly demarcating the literature and culture of the erstwhile colonies and a rewriting of the colonial encounter, but more recently lending itself to a broader understanding of transhistorical connections and solidarity among subjugated peoples.

If attention to genre enables such connections and dialogues, so does a turn to contemporary forms of empire and revived colonial dominions, especially in relation to the rhetorical and ideological forms of US empire. While the purview of postcolonial studies has traditionally been British colonialism and the literature of that encounter and its legacies, many scholars have called for the necessity of engaging with present forms of nation and empire rather than attending to the historical encounter between colonizer and colonized alone. In response to the 9/11 attacks, calls to explore the political questions of Islam and terrorism rather than a celebration of post-nationalist cosmopolitanism and hybridity became remarkably urgent.Footnote ²³ Priyamvada Gopal and Neil Lazarus, for instance, urge the field to generate a new “history of the present” that places past imperialisms in dialectic relation to contemporary ones, declaring that “after Iraq,” the field must change.Footnote ²⁴ Lazarus refuses the “apocalyptic lexicon” of “9/11” or “ground zero” but insists that the events unfolding from that date—particularly the US invasion of Iraq—does and should mark a watershed for the field of postcolonial studies. Drawing on David Harvey’s The New Imperialism, Lazarus shows that the shift from a neoliberal to a neo-conservative imperialism reveals “the unmistakable, and unmistakably brutal, face of US globalism: the power of the American state, now frankly projected and bent on world domination.”Footnote ²⁵

That the rhetoric of the War on Terror replicates longstanding divides of the West and the non-West, of the savage other who seeks to decimate the civilized, democratic, freedom-loving West, seems immediately clear. This is especially evident when we consider the “theological intensity” with which the Bush and now the Obama government waged the attack.Footnote ²⁶ For Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton, the very question of “postcolonial terror requires that we turn back to the colonial archive of violence and repression, to records of the colonial formations of sovereignty, policing, and surveillance, which find such prominent afterlives in counter-terroristic formations today.” Boehmer and Morton point out that the field has tended to largely sidestep “perhaps one of the most pressing postcolonial issues of our age, the contemporary neo-imperial hegemony of the United States.” They urge the field to rethink its “critical vocation” in direct relation to the War on Terror, in order to conceptualize “how . . . terror [is] colonialist or neo-imperialist.”Footnote ²⁷

One of the fundamental questions being debated here is how we might understand current US imperialism in relation to past European imperialisms that have given shape to the key concepts of postcolonialism. For Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, contemporary forms of empire differ significantly from earlier ones because “imperial power is distributed in networks, through mobile and articulated mechanisms of control.” Empire is therefore more diffuse, with neither an outside nor a center, as they believe that “our postmodern Empire has no Rome.”Footnote ²⁸ As Ann Stoler reminds us, however, neither flexibility nor partial visibility are deterrents to empire; rather one must settle on “a notion of empire that puts movement and oscillation in the center . . . as polities with protean rather than fixed taxonomies.” Accordingly, she enjoins us to remember that “every empire imagines itself as an exception.”Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, it may be said that the US takeover of Iraq represents a reversal of the “universal historical verdict” of the destructiveness of imperialism as the United States seeks to “reinvent the imperial tradition and reintroduce imperial rule—and on a global scale—for the twenty-first century.”Footnote ³⁰ Certainly, such apologists of empire as Niall Ferguson tap into nostalgia for the British Empire in order to goad the United States into taking up the fabled “white man’s burden.”Footnote ³¹ Jonathan Schell reminds us of the clear similarities across new and old forms of imperialism in a succinct summary: “the gigantic disparity between the technical and military might of the conquerors and the conquered; the inextricable combination of rapacious commercial interest and geopolitical ambition and design; the distortion and erosion of domestic constitutions by the immense military establishments, overt and covert, required for foreign domination; the use of one colony as a stepping stone to seize others or pressure them into compliance with the imperial agenda; the appeal to jingoism on the home front.”Footnote ³²

In the face of such resurgences of colonial and imperial logics, to say that something has shifted in the state of the field of postcolonial inquiry in the twenty-first century would likely arouse little skepticism. What would provoke disagreement is the nature of this shift. For some, the shift may signal a welcome demise of an antagonistic mode of criticism or the passing of a moment of difficult high theory. For others, the field has changed by the useful loosening of a single framework (whether hybridity, mimicry, or subalternity) to describe irreducibly heterogeneous life-worlds, and for still others such a shift may presage the demise of a confusing set of arguments and counter-arguments that seem to do little other than maintain perpetual auto-critique. Rather than rehearsing or challenging these positions, I would like to suggest that the three aspects of the field that have remained unresolved—the relation between the literary text and literary theory or method (largely a question of how we think formally and historically together, by tracing genres and how they travel), the place of the United States (especially for the study of contemporary postcolonial literature, much of which emanates from or is entangled with the United States), and the theorization of race in a truly global context—all benefit from placing a text like Guantánamo Diary at the center of the field, in the stead of something like Midnight’s Children, which has long enjoyed exemplary status. Doing so is not meant to prescribe a particular or automatic politics, but to revive the conjunction of the study of power, resistance, and forms of new humanism that have always animated the core of the impulses that gave birth to the field. For the rest of this essay, I will turn to an analysis of Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary, a testimony that immediately stages such questions as to how the United States might be seen in relation to the postcolonial world, how questions of genre and their circulation across the globe illuminate political and ideological concerns, and what these tell us about the possible ethics and aesthetics of postcolonial reading in the present.

Guantánamo Diary and the Slave Narrative

That the 372 pages of Guantánamo Diary, cleared for public release in 2012, culled from a 466-page manuscript written by hand in Slahi’s “single-cell segregation hut” (xv) in 2005, evoke the horror of slavery by testifying to degradation, senseless violence, and cruel and inhumane treatment is beyond doubt. Slahi’s tortured body, “in shackles 24 hours a day” (14), unmistakably recalls the visual iconography of American slavery’s chained bodies. His resolve to return home to his family, his commitment to maintaining his humanity amid humiliation, and attempts to create bonds with fellow inmates and guards further echo slavery’s primal scenes. The fact that a majority of the detainees were not captured by the US military, but sold for a bounty in Afghanistan and Pakistan also recalls the history of slave trading on the African coast.Footnote ³³ What Orlando Patterson influentially termed the production of “social death” as a key technology of violence in slave societies across history certainly appears in the techniques of extreme isolation, sexual humiliation, and repeated physical beatings the detainees endure.Footnote ³⁴ Assigned ISNs (internment security numbers), their heads shaved, cavities searched, and bodies “stored in a bunch of cold boxes” (39) or chained together in a coffle, the detainees are also forbidden to speak to one another, a plan designed to produce maximum disorientation and dependence on the interrogator. The CIA interrogation manual, The Kubark Manual (1963), emphasizes the necessity of inducing such dislocation in the captive being interrogated. Not only is it recommended that “the interrogator determine his diet, sleep patterns, and other fundamentals” but also that the victim be made to experience “being cut off from the known . . . plunged into the strange” to feel helpless and lost to complete the process of natal alienation Patterson describes during the seasoning of slaves.Footnote ³⁵

The extensive torture Slahi suffered, in Guantánamo, but also at the US military’s Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and in a prison in Jordan, testifies to the inhumane treatment of thousands of Muslims in the last fifteen years, giving rise to numerous “scenes of subjection.”Footnote ³⁶ And the US government’s insistence on extrajudicial procedures for the 779 men transported to Guantánamo has created not just a “legal black hole,” but as Amy Kaplan explains, “the start of the ‘road to Abu Ghraib,’ one island in a global penal archipelago, where the United States indefinitely detains, secretly transports, and tortures uncounted prisoners from all the world.”Footnote ³⁷ When transported from Afghanistan, where the detainees were held in a prison notorious for atrocious conditions (where many died of beatings, malnutrition, cold, or suffocation), they were tied together and blindfolded. The stench of their tortured human bodies evokes the hold of a slave ship, exposing the falsehood of the claims of justice overseen by the US flag. Slahi experiences the “expedition” as “the boundary between death and life” (5) and calls himself “a living dead,” echoing Patterson’s terminology (28). The logo of Guantánamo—honor bound to defend freedom—further repeats the logic of the slaveholder, determined to stand for right, honor, and Christianity in defense of the peculiar institution. Similarly, the first photographs released of Camp X-Ray on January 11, 2002, show kneeling men outfitted in orange jumpsuits, wearing eye goggles, face masks, and ear muffs with hands and feet shackled facing the barbed wire that they cannot even see as guards bend over them. For many, even as “the image is hypermodern,” “alongside it, unbidden, the history of American slavery rises up.” Treated like chattel to be moved, thrown, huddled, each man taken off the plane is told: “You are now the property of the U.S. Marine Corp.”Footnote ³⁸

Moreover, Slahi’s narrative seems to neatly repeat the material conditions of the production of a slave narrative. It is written to prove his humanity to an uncaring audience and to try to move it by way of descriptions of suffering to some kind of action, or at the very least, to restore a sense of morality. Seeking to manufacture empathy, the memoir also attempts to bridge the gap between “us” and “them” by appealing to a common humanity. Just as abolitionist editors and champions supervised the conditions of production and circulation of slave testimony, Slahi’s narrative has been edited by a noted human rights activist and journalist, Larry Siems, and promoted via websites and petitions by the ACLU. Accordingly, the paratextual apparatus of a slave narrative—letters and testimonies guaranteeing the good character of the author and veracity of the narrative about to follow—also seems repeated in the extensive commentary that prefaces the text, with a timeline of detention, a note on the literary collaboration that generated the text, and an introduction by Siems. Slahi learned English from his captors and interrogators, who were often unwilling and pitiless teachers. His narrative, full of omissions and redactions, was first written by hand in his fourth language, English, and transcribed, reorganized, condensed, and streamlined by his editor, as well as by the US government, who redacted sections for national security, thus echoing the twin dynamics of visibility and invisibility, transparency and opacity that have characterized the literature of the War on Terror. Siems confesses that even though he hopes his grammatical corrections and restructuring for length and coherence manage “to capture the accomplishment of the original,” the “more than 2,500 black-bar redactions censoring Mohamedou’s text” remind us, “on almost every page, of how much we have yet to see” (xiv). The original manuscript was marked “SECRET” and “NOFORN” —both a threat to national security and ineligible for circulation among foreign nationals. The published text appears with ominous black bars throughout, often with individual phrases or sentences redacted, but sometimes several pages at once. Siems provides his own speculative annotations to the redactions, trying to fill in the missing information by cross-referencing publicly available sources like declassified government documents, US Senate investigations, and published news reports. At the time of this writing, Slahi has neither met Siems, nor has he seen a copy of the published book nor had a chance to approve the edits. That the document is thereby compromised as an authentic representation of what life is really like at Guantánamo is thus not in question, again replicating the familiar compromised status of slave narratives, bounded by the ambitions and limitations of abolitionists as well as the hostility of an acutely prejudiced audience and indicating the necessity of learning to read with and against the grain.

Doing so would necessitate accepting the analogy to slavery, but understanding both what it makes possible and what it leaves obscured because expectations of genre inevitably shape one’s reading. For instance, reading Slahi’s text as a diary has raised questions of fact, credibility, and objectivity, drawing attention to the authenticity of voice for some readers.Footnote ³⁹ Reading it as a confession would perhaps re-enact the logic of the Kafkaesque US interrogators, viewing any words as evidence of predetermined guilt. Viewing it as a human rights memoir or life writing alongside other such human rights bestsellers would necessitate a consideration of its construction of self and audience.Footnote ⁴⁰ As an “unprecedented international publishing event,” as its publisher phrases it, Guantánamo Diary would also benefit from a consideration of humanitarianism and celebrity, as Benedict Cumberbatch, Jude Law, Alan Cumming, Hari Kunzru, and many other public figures read out selections from the text in their own voices on the extensive website The Guardian has devoted to it.Footnote ⁴¹ As some read his words with anger, some with irony, and others with humor, the haunting absence of Slahi’s own body becomes even more poignant. As Barbara Harlow has shown, it is even possible to consider the vast body of literature emerging from the existence of Guantánamo Bay as a detention center since 2002 as comprising its own genre—an “ever-expanding Guantánamo bibliography” that could be called “extraordinary renditions.”Footnote ⁴²

For Scott Korb, however, an associate editor of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, the argument for reading Guantánamo Diary as an American slave narrative comes from the fact that the slave narrative is “an original American art form.”Footnote ⁴³ As testimony of collective suffering, each enslaved narrator functions as an emblem of thousands of others who could not yet speak. The pattern the slave narrative as form acquired—telling the story of the acquisition of literacy, as well as a paratextual apparatus assuring readers of the good character and truth of the author—thus ultimately offers a monument to what Korb terms “the human desire to be free.” Korb suggests that just as “slavery and its literature accused a nation and continue to accuse,” Slahi’s narrative works to accuse his readers—“like those who read Equiano and Prince in their moment, and Douglass and Jacobs as the nation divided and then went to war.”

Korb’s ethical and political goal is to channel the American public’s presumed revulsion with slavery into a solidarity with the detainees. Situating the detainees as modern versions of slaves allows him to argue for their human rights and claims to our empathy, rescuing the human from the abstraction of enemy combatant or simply terrorist. It also offers him a way to claim the detainees as American, part of a uniquely American story, and it is difficult to argue with the ethics of that inclusive gesture. Precisely because such a claim of likening an experience of displacement, suffering, or abuse from the global south to the historical atrocity of chattel slavery is part of a wider cultural tendency, however, I wish to pause and elaborate the ethics of such analogies, to probe the insights they enable as well as the ones they may ultimately obscure. To explore the implications of reading Guantánamo Diary as a neo-slave narrative, I will focus particularly on the redactions and omissions of the text, Slahi’s negotiation of exemplarity and exceptionalism, and his relation to the dominant mode of the slave narrative, sentimentalism. To do so, I draw from precisely those reading strategies that scholars of slavery have generated, cultivating a sensitivity to reading the script of torture and violence without replicating that violence. Following that, I will turn to some of the other genres that Guantánamo Diary evokes and signifies on, not in order to deny that the story is indeed made in America, but to draw out its attending narratives that reach beyond the borders of the United States to outline a transnational geography of detention as well as a damning comment on the failed project of postcolonial sovereignty.

Recalling the key formal features of Atlantic slave narratives helps pinpoint the efficacy of the comparison between Slahi and slavery, as well as its limits. Emphasizing a connection between author and reader, slave narratives frequently rely on direct address to the presumed northern reader (often a feminized one), calling on the very empathy of the reader the narrative is designed to produce. The narrator’s humanity is defined and defended through the narrative itself and relies on the reader’s sentimental reaction. Clearly didactic, seeking to educate the reader in norms of humanity, the slave narrative often also advances a claim to difference (for example, Harriet Jacobs insists that a different standard of morality applies to enslaved women and that white women cannot understand what their black and enslaved counterparts experience).Footnote ⁴⁴ Such claims also involve a certain level of opacity, whether for logistical reasons of ensuring the safety of fugitive slaves or gestures to a utopian world beyond the rational one frequently located in memories of a mythic Africa. Slave narratives often come with a series of appendices and other paratexts vouching for the authenticity of the narrator’s voice and the veracity of the experiences represented. Narrative power and authority therefore are inextricably linked to the avowed truth of the narrative. In other words, even as a figure like Frederick Douglass emphasizes literary craft, calling into play such rhetorical forms as the apostrophe or chiasmus, abolitionist readers tend to want to read his body itself as the best evidence against slavery, pitting performance (oratory) against writing (textuality). For Douglass, the response to dehumanization was to seize mastery—of the self, of the book, of his body, and of his public image. To do so, he claimed humanism as his own heritage and situated himself as the real, not belated subject of the Enlightenment, the exemplary man. Consider his famous apostrophe to ships sailing the Chesapeake Bay in his 1845 Narrative: “beautiful vessels” that seem to him “shrouded ghosts.” Addressing the ships to highlight his own bondage, Douglass writes, “You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave. . . . You are freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly around the world; I am confined in bands of iron.”Footnote ⁴⁵ As many have noted, the complex imagery here seeks to transform the contrast into likeness, to remake the ship—a symbol of slavery as Paul Gilroy shows in The Black Atlantic—into a vehicle of freedom.Footnote ⁴⁶

Slahi displays a similar rhetorical dexterity, on the one hand reaching out to his imagined American reader on the basis of a shared human dignity, on the other neatly reversing the conflation of Muslim with terrorist and America with freedom by revealing the brutality of his treatment at the hands of his guards and interrogators. As Pankaj Mishra notes, Slahi offers “by far the most intimate account of post 9/11 radicalization—not of Muslims, rather of a significant swathe of the American military-intellectual complex.” To combat being seen as a type—a young Muslim man deemed terrorist without any evidence—Slahi painstakingly individuates himself, while the guards often appear interchangeable in their unrelenting humorlessness and brutality. Both exemplary in his own empathetic abilities (as he seeks to distinguish the guards by asking about their reading habits, for example), and exceptional because he finds a way to emerge as a sensitive and vulnerable human being in the face of the abstraction of enemy combatant, Slahi triumphs as a writer with all the characteristics of a liberal, inclusive, and democratic imagination. Guantánamo Diary offers an extensive anatomy of the American guards—revealing the constitutive power of whiteness, masculinity, and Christianity in their psyches, as well as mulling their worship of their bodies, excessive food intake, and tendency to swear. At the same time, Slahi presents himself as a decent, compassionate, and amusing human being, explicitly inviting the reader’s empathy: “Just put yourself in my shoes and imagine somebody storming your house and trying to mess with your whole private life! Would you welcome such an assault?” (173). He appeals to a common sense of decency and shared vulnerability of all humanity: “What would the dead average American think if he or she could see what his or her government is doing to someone who has done no crimes against anybody?” (257). He explains his thoughts as the unfiltered result of his experiences, parroting no ideology or creed: “I have only written what I experienced, what I saw, and what I learned firsthand. I have tried not to exaggerate, nor to understate. I have tried to be as fair as possible, to the US government, to my brothers, and to myself” (369). But he also draws a line in the sand regarding the limits of empathy, explaining that “You, Dear Reader, could never understand the extent of the physical, and much more the psychological, pain people in my situation suffered, no matter how hard you try to put yourself in another’s shoes” (232).

And yet, despite these challenges, Guantánamo Diary succeeds not only in offering an exposé of US empire, but also in staging the challenges of reading in a time of terror. For Mishra, “the global War on Terror . . . has found in a Mauritanian captive its true and complete witness” largely because Slahi is “no gaudy moralist” who accepts “Manichean dichotomies of good and evil.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Mishra argues that “it is this disavowal of righteousness that makes Guantánamo Diary more than a simple record of atrocity, and gives Slahi’s untutored, disjointed prose a kind of nobility.” Part of the difficulty of reading the prose, however, is not its “untutored” or “disjointed” quality, but the fact of often bizarre redactions by the US government punctuating the text. It is difficult to make sense of the logic behind the government’s redactions. The most extensive cuts are of two polygraph tests administered to Slahi. But a poem he writes is also censored in full. This is part of a wider strategy of the Department of Defense emerging from Guantánamo to label poetry as subversive, claiming that “poetry presents a special risk . . . because allusions and imagery in poetry that seem innocent can be used to convey coded messages to other militants.”Footnote ⁴⁸ And curiously, for the most part, all pronouns referring to female guards and interrogators are censored, even as other documents have clearly revealed the presence and specific usage of female military officers. In one instance, scenes of brutal torture are allowed, but the single word tears is blacked out. Slahi himself omits certain parts of his story. He tells us little about his first wife, for instance, and not much more about his second. He refuses to share details about being raped and sexually assaulted at Guantánamo by female interrogators and often draws a veil over proceedings too terrible to relate: “I am saving you here from quoting the disgusting and degrading talk I had to listen to” (230). In doing so, Slahi echoes the many omissions of historical slave narratives, but also reveals how those features of slave narratives that have become most familiar—like sentimentalism—are paradoxically not available to a figure like him, as the government redacts the word tears when he describes being moved to tears on hearing a few kind words from a guard during torture.

Moreover, Slahi details profoundly conflicted feelings, often drawn to the comfort of human contact even amid torture, drawing consolation, in one poignant scene, from reading and rereading his pillow tag in the absence of any other access to books. The first phase of detention for him involved nearly losing his mind at being torn from his home and family. The second phase consists of accepting that in jail he has neither any control over his body and actions nor any privacy. The third phase, he tells us, is to discover “your new home and family. Your family comprises the guards and your interrogators” (315). He wonders “how could you cry for somebody who caused you so much pain and destroyed your life?” (313) as he realizes that he has “developed a family in jail that I also care about” (315). Especially after his breakdown after extended torture and confessions of the names of any numbers of acquaintances and friends to satisfy the interrogators’ need for “intel,” Slahi earns some privileges and describes being taught chess by a guard, being named “Pillow” by his interrogators, and debating, with a female interrogator, the meaning of the “holy trinity” and the possibility of an afterlife in hell. Even amid sexual violence, sleep deprivation, and torture, Slahi’s thoughts on the complex negotiation of his relationships with his guards and interrogators offer a fascinating commentary on American habits of food and fitness, their conception of a unique destiny, their internal hierarchies of race and ethnicity, and their assessment of the rest of the world. Slahi describes watching Black Hawk Down with his guards and realizing that they “almost went crazy” when Americans were shot, but missed the fact that hundreds of Somalis were attacked and killed in their own homes (320). One interrogator, whom he dubs “I-AM-THE-MAN” (214) glories in defending the United States as all that is good and right, and another, “an admitted Republican,” informs him that “you are my enemy” and seems born to be an interrogator (324). Yet another interrogator warns that “today we’re gonna teach you about great American sex” and forbids him from praying while being raped (230). It is worth noting here that Mishra reads the spectacle of torture of the detainees as a response to “a profound sense of individual and collective emasculation” brought about by the 9/11 attacks. The ritualized theater of violence and inhumanity that comprises the camp seems to clearly exist to prove that American masculinity and whiteness are reaffirmed daily. Perhaps this is what makes Slahi say, “I was in a worse situation than a slave: at least a slave is not always shackled in chains, has some limited freedom, and doesn’t have to listen to some interrogator’s bullshit all day” (314).

Although various readers have found analogies and antecedents to Guantánamo Diary in Lewis Carroll, Samuel Beckett, Dostoevsky, and above all, Franz Kafka, the single analogy that has been most consistently used to comprehend the terror of this extraordinary testimony is that of the history of slavery. I belabor (and eventually qualify) the comparison in part because it works so well. Not only does Slahi himself liken his detention to slavery, several other critics, including Amy Kaplan and Anne McClintock, argue that the detainees at Guantánamo recall the specter of African American slaves. But each time the analogy is invoked, it performs a particular kind of cultural work, and it is necessary to understand the specific effect of each invocation in order to fully parse the critique being made visible. Otherwise, it is far too easy to resort to history not to probe it further but to derive from it a moral clarity that seems missing in the present day. It is further useful to recall Cole’s commentary on the “empathy gap” present today and to wonder why seeing Muslim detainees as human seems to require summoning the specter of black slaves. Such a call may well speak to the limits of American readers as well as the compromised globalism of much of human rights activism.

For some readers, locating Slahi by means of an analogy to slavery helps restore greater historicity to his story and places the seemingly anomalous and apocalyptic War on Terror declared in 2001 in a much larger history of US empire. The fact that the United States gained the lease of Guantánamo Bay in 1903 in the aftermath of the 1898 Spanish-American war itself recalls a longer imperial legacy. Kaplan similarly reminds us that slaves once landed at Guantánamo, as did Haitian refugees in the 1990s (some of whom were quarantined as AIDS victims), seeking to layer these histories in a productive manner. The geopolitical work of such analogies is often dismally visible, for example in the conflation of refugees and terrorists in Europe recently, or terrorists and immigrants in 2001 in the United States. For McClintock, the atrocities summoned by Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib can only be understood as haunted by an “imperial déjà vu” (51). To fathom the kind of paranoid empire the United States has built in the wake of 9/11, McClintock urges that we “illuminate the continuities that connect those circuits of imperial violence abroad with the vast, internal shadowlands of prisons and supermaxes—the modern slave-ships on the middle passage to nowhere—that have come to characterize the United States as a super-carceral state” (52). Kaplan argues that “the imperial outpost of Guantánamo” evokes a long history of “images of shackled slaves, infected bodies, revolutionary subjects, and undesirable immigrants” (840). For her, the opportunity to ask “Where is Guantánamo?” necessitates asking, “Where is the United States of America?”

Although such accounts forward evocative and historically layered forms of comparison, it is worth noting that several other comparisons have also been forthcoming. Various commenters have turned to the theories of bare life and the figure of the homo sacer or the musselman forwarded by Giorgio Agamben to theorize the state of exception that 9/11 inaugurated.Footnote ⁴⁹ As Judith Butler explains, the circular logic of the process of indefinite detention means that “the state produces, through the act of withdrawal, a law that is no law, a process that is no process.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The International Red Cross likens the detainees in the photographs of Camp X-Ray to “caged and restrained animals.”Footnote ⁵¹ Amnesty International terms Guantánamo “a gulag for our times,” while for Mark Danner, the interrogation of victims like Slahi “resembles nothing so much as a postmodern globalized version of the Salem witch trials: zealous inquisitors, untroubled by doubt, applying a relentless violence to conjure up a fantasy world born of the collective terrors of their own imaginations.”Footnote ⁵² Danner explains that not only does Slahi’s account reveal what it feels like to be collateral damage, it also offers valuable geopolitical critique about “the vast and brutal American interrogation mechanism, stretching around the globe in an archipelago of black sites housing hundreds of detainees at the mercy of untold numbers of interrogators.” It is perhaps such attempts to connect the offshore prison to the racialized violence of the carceral state at home that do not always clearly emerge when the only frame for reading is that of the historical slave narrative. The present-day immediacy of the US empire is starkly revealed in the narrative and requires to be flagged as such. Stoler’s notion of a “carceral archipelago of empire,” which distributes “convict islands, detention centers, pauper and children’s and penal colonies throughout the globe” might serve as a better point of reference for the flexible yet real empire of the United States in the present day.Footnote ⁵³ Moreover, various scenes when Slahi responds to his suffocation and beating by saying “I can’t breathe” recall the routine killing of black men by police officers, summoning domestic theaters of state violence.

Guantánamo Diary thus serves as a chilling anatomy of US imperial power in the twenty-first century—its unreasoning, arrogant, circular, and sadistic nature; its profoundly antidemocratic totalitarian agenda; its disregard for any state’s sovereignty, any rule of law, any international norm of human rights. For one interrogator, Slahi meets all the criteria for a “terrorist check list”—“You’re Arab, you’re young, you went to Jihad, you speak foreign languages, you’ve been in many countries, you’re a graduate in a technical discipline” (192). Another concedes that Slahi may be innocent, but claims that “sometimes we arrest people for the wrong thing, but it turns out they are involved in something else” (201). Echoing politicians like Dick Cheney, who said, “I’d do it again in a minute,” the interrogators have been “prepared, schooled, trained, and pitted to meet their worst enemies” (312). The transnational geography of detention Slahi outlines, circling Jordan, Egypt, Mauritania, Britain, and Canada, in addition to the United States and Cuba, cannot be explained as an Atlantic story alone. In showing how the world sees and responds to US power, Slahi’s document exists as a powerful analysis of contemporary forms of empire. As Slahi tells his US interrogators, “You’re taking advantage of me being from a country with a dictatorship. If I were German or Canadian, you wouldn’t even have the opportunity to talk to me, nor would you arrest me” (202).

The number of genres alluded to in the narrative thereby far exceed the parameters of the slave narrative, as Guantánamo Diary serves as an epic, a legal brief, a prison memoir, and a counter to the Senate Intelligence Committee Report. Evoking Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Beckett, Slahi’s intolerable narrative must be read not just as a repetition of Douglass or Jacobs, but as Slahi’s own story, written by himself, and an indictment of all of us who acquiesce in the empire of terror. Judith Butler has written eloquently about sovereignty and precarious life in the wake of Guantánamo, asking us to probe what makes a life grievable.Footnote ⁵⁴ To fully fathom the tragedy of Slahi’s narrative, it is necessary to recognize that his claim to humanity and to the reader’s empathy also goes beyond comparisons and resemblances. Numerous aspects of the diary do not fit the mold of a slave narrative, as the book serves to indict the Mauritanian state and its failed project of sovereignty. Reading Guantánamo Diary also calls for a reckoning with Mauritania—its own history of slavery, its status as a weak or failed state, and its incomplete project of sovereignty. Moreover, Slahi’s story is neither about race nor about the theft of his labor, and the specter of the Muslim terrorist does not seamlessly emerge from the figure of the African slave. The United States did not require labor from the detainees nor ultimately information or intelligence. It is also worth remembering that the government did not redact Slahi’s comparison to slavery, but it did redact a poem he wrote in its entirety, thus prompting the question of what new forms his poetic imagination may have opened up and why those may have seemed more subversive to the censors.

Thinking deeply about form, then, need not involve a retreat from ideology critique but rather a re-animation of the conceptual core of postcolonial studies—its critique of colonial power and the search for revolutionary alternatives. Slahi’s generic echoes and antecedents open up richly suggestive avenues for comparison, as well as ones that seem to close inward, and forestall the imagination rather than open it outward. They ask us to learn to read new genres arising from the present in dialogue with their genealogies, but not by retrofitting them into received forms. Reading Guantánamo Diary as a slave narrative raises the specter of the United States’ own repressed history of slavery—still unaccounted for—and prevents accepting the watershed logic of 9/11 as an eruption, unforeseen, and uncalled for, an end of innocence or history. But other useful connections create new itineraries of memories and countermemories that productively link together the peculiarity of US empire in the present to the fate of the postcolony. An advocate of surface reading or a critic of symptomatic criticism might well claim that now that it is widely known that the detainees were innocent, there remains no further need to excavate the truth or surface the unconscious of the text. But connecting the text to a longer history of the naval base itself in a new historicist vein, comparing the compromised sovereignty of Cuba to Mauritania, or placing Guantánamo Diary alongside canonical Western texts ranging from Kafka to Lewis to Douglass expands postcolonial critique by linking past histories of racism and imperialism to present ones, without insisting on a substitution of one by the other. Such an exercise asks us to reconstruct new genealogies that might counter the legal black hole, the space of exception—to intimately bring it into our lives, in the manner of the ex-Guantánamo guard who says that he would welcome Slahi into his home upon release, or indeed, like Slahi himself, who says at the close of the narrative that “he dreams to one day sit with [his readers] around a cup of tea, after having learned so much from one another” (373).

The new and varied reading publics opened up by Guantánamo Diary exact a new comparative literacy from the reader and scholar. They teach us to read nineteenth-century slave narratives alongside the history of colonial terror, contemporary theories of slavery and freedom next to excavations of transnational circuits of carcerality. They also require that we learn to read indelible traces of the past not only in our stories today, but in the very forms that give them shape and make their enunciation possible, or even thinkable. To do so successfully, we will have to breach institutional and intellectual separations, to combine strategies of reading and methods of analysis, and to straddle critical schools rather than oppose them. In the end, Slahi reminds us of the fundamental equation that characterized abolition once: what makes a human a slave or a slave a human is inextricably tied to practices of literacy and the empathetic capacities of the reader. Reading Slahi likewise raises the difficult question of what it has meant for us to read his words, as they came to us, delayed by ten years of censors, edited and reframed, packaged for publication, while he remained in his cell in Guantánamo, prohibited to receive a copy of his own manuscript, absented from the public sphere until recently. What new avenues will be opened up upon his release remain to be seen.