Pat by Richard Hanson

Guantanimation I: Unless We by Fadia Faqir

I also wanted to look at people from Sheffield who are campaigning against war.  The day after visiting L, I met up with Pat outside Sheffield Town Hall.  Once a month, generally on the 11th, as an anniversary of the first inmates entering the prison, there is a vigil to remember Guantanamo Bay prisoners.

The vigil consists of a square marked out on the pavement to represent the area of a prisoners cell.  A volunteer sits in the ‘cell’, dressed in an orange boiler suit. There is information about prisoners displayed, but essentially it’s a silent protest.

‘The idea of marking out a square was to show … a representation of the space people are held in at Guantanamo Bay, and the orange boiler suit is obviously the uniform of Guantanamo Bay.  The information on the placards we change quite regularly depending on what’s going on.

‘We don’t get many arguments against what we’re doing, its more a kind of blank response. But we have had some quite positive responses from young people who want to know more about the situation, and they want to know things that young people want to know, like, is she really a prisoner, how does she go to the toilet, how long does she have to be there, all sorts of things.

‘Sometimes you get people who poke you or try to get a response from you, or ask you what you’re doing but mostly people will just read the placards. There’s usually somebody handing out leaflets and talking to people if they want. In the early days we did have a table with petitions for people to sign, but we found that it went better just with the vigil and not try to do too much.

‘When I was younger I would have said I was a pacifist, my mother’s a Quaker, which might have had something to do with it, though she wasn’t very active.  There was the whole Vietnam stuff during the 60s and 70s … and I guess that was quite attractive, so it was the sort of thing I would identify with and its just grown from there I suppose, something I never grew out of.  A lot of people do, grow out of it, get real and wear suits and become part of the establishment.

‘I think when you’re young you tend to have very black and white views on things, and I can see now why people take up arms.  I’m not sure, if I was in the position of some people who did take up arms, I don’t know, I can’t really say … until I’m in that position I don’t think I can really say.  I campaign against war and the idea of war as an abstract concept, but…

‘While you are safe you’re not threatened at all, you can say this is wrong this is right, but when you’re in that situation you see it from a different angle, its not that straightforward.’

And finally Pat quotes a line from Christy Moore: ‘Only the very safe can talk about wrong and right.’

This piece is written from the point of view of a Saudi detainee in Guantanamo. He holds on to what is familiar geographically, culturally and socially to survive a waterboarding session.

 

The persona in this poem perceives the West as irrelevant. In the introduction to The Wretched of the Earth Jean Paul Sartre calls it the ‘Unless’. ‘When a Frenchman says to another Frenchmen ‘the country is done for … the speaker includes himself with his fellow-countrymen. And then, usually, he adds ‘Unless . . .’, which springs from national intersubjectivity. He went on to argue that Franz Fanon’s discourse has no ‘unless’ and does not aim to draw some domestic lesson, i.e. benefit for the coloniser from the colonial encounter in Algeria. ‘For the fathers, we alone were the speakers; the sons no longer even consider us as valid intermediaries; we are the object of their speeches.’ The western Subject, normally in charge of representation, has been skilfully turned into an almost invisible ‘object’ when the Third World ‘finds itself and speaks to itself’ through its own voice. In Fanon’s writing the European Subject, which seeks to produce an Other to consolidate its own subject status is simply irrelevant.

The detainee consider us all responsible for the violations of his human rights. In his eyes we are irrelevant yet responsible.