Scrapper

GUANTÁNAMO

THE RAPPER HAD THREE NAMES: his father had named him first, then he had given himself a rap name, and then later still he gave himself a Muslim name. The freedom of life under an alias, then the charge of a truer name, the strived-for self, after the alias had become a product, commodified, shrink-wrapped, labeled with parental-advisory stickers. His publicist asked reporters to call him by his Muslim name but the reporters put his rap name in parentheses, didn’t care if this wasn’t who he was anymore, preferred its controlled danger.

Now the rapper could move freely again, work within his new title. The rapper had given up one name to become a new person and in the press briefing his first day at Guantánamo he listened as the base commander offered his own names for the new world he wanted the rapper and the documentary crew he’d accompanied to see: These were not prisoners, the commander said, but detainees. This was a detention facility, not a prison. The detainees had not been captured, only rendered, turned over, extradited. This was not a court. The soldiers did not work in a courthouse. This was a military tribunal, meeting in the Expeditionary Legal Complex.

Language replaced what could no longer be borne, terrorist became enemy combatant became unprivileged belligerent, each phrase meaning less than the one before. The official view of the legal complex could only be photographed from one particular location, a three-foot square spray-painted onto a walkway, requiring a certain kind of tunnel vision. They were permitted to capture only what lay between two green lightposts, the legal complex barely visible over a series of fences, silver chain link, green sniper netting, coils of razor wire, a red anticar barricade. The barest aperture through which to glimpse a secret. There could be no photos of detainees’ faces, no photos of large stretches of the coastline, no images of unoccupied guard towers, a rule that admitted there were unoccupied guard towers. Whether they followed the rules or not, every photo would be either approved or deleted at the end of every day and there would be no appeals.

The commander: buzz cut, pressed uniform, stern face. Everything about him so expected it was hard to fix his features in memory. The commander didn’t say but the rapper knew whatever he asked the detainee could be used against the detainee. The rapper had come to help him but not in the military courts, only at home, in the public eye. The slow progress of art: the crisis was happening now but the solution waited in the future. The detainee’s release hearings were under way again. He was uncharged and never convicted of anything but he had not been sent home and this was what the rapper had come to make happen. But even if art could move the masses — and this the rapper no longer knew, although he had staked his life on the question — it would not move them soon. The director said they’d have to hit the festival circuit before any general release, could maybe seek a streaming deal to speed up the process. Six months, a year.

The photographs:

Approved: The personal items given to each detainee. Orange jumpsuit. White underclothing. Blue flip-flops. Blue laceless shoes. Olive-green jumpsuit. A bottle for water. A copy of the Koran. Comfort items, prayer rugs, sudoku. A clear plastic container to store these possessions.

Approved: The spoon, the spork, the plastic knife. Yellow cake. Onion and garlic. Soft fruit. Bread. Tiny packets of salt and pepper and ketchup and honey, all the tiny condiments of the tiny life.

Approved: A single shelf of the detainee library. An array of foreign-language newspapers. USA Today. Teen paranormal romance translated into Arabic. Materials for a living-skills course on home budgeting and résumé writing.

Approved: A plush recliner in a room meant for a single detainee’s television privileges, to be enjoyed in leg chains, also pictured.

Approved: A photo of the commander standing in the hallway of one of the detainee camps. Photographed from the rear to hide his face. The walls and floor of the camp gleaming. The clean silence of a photograph.

Approved: A painted arrow stenciled onto the concrete, pointed toward Mecca. So detainees knew which direction to send their prayers.

Approved: Cans of nutritional supplement, a single stretch of feeding tube. Supplies stockpiled against a growing hunger strike.

Approved: A hospital bed inside a chain-link fence. The detainee medical clinic.

Approved: A sign reading detainees in vicinity — maintain silence.

Approved: A sign bearing the slogan safe humane legal transparent.

Approved: A sign reading no photography.

Deleted: A white board in the commander’s office with a handwritten note: top story this week — rules inconvenience reporters.

Deleted: A photo of a water tower, though the water tower could be seen online, on publicly available maps.

Deleted: A photo of a communications antenna, despite the same.

Deleted: A length of film where a detainee’s face accidentally showed in a window.

Deleted: A length of film where a migrant kitchen worker stopped facing away, turned toward the camera.

Deleted:

Deleted:

Deleted:

Deleted: They couldn’t remember everything. This was the point. They had outsourced their memory to film and photograph and their memory was being deleted.

Deleted: The face of Adnan Fahim.

Adnan Fahim. This was the man the rapper had come to see. Detained in Yemen in 2002 on suspicion of giving material support to terrorists. Twenty-one years old at the time. Active for less than three months from first contact to capture. Held and interrogated overseas in a top-secret black site for four years, then transferred here, interrogated again, during the years referred to as Bad Old Gitmo. Torture between 2002 and 2008 meant everything they’d made him say wasn’t admissible in court but so far no release was forthcoming, only more hearings, more imprisonment. They hadn’t questioned him in five years. All previous evidence was tainted but reports suggested the government had once expected him to be charged in 2006 under a retrospective law changing the definition of material support. By then he had already been designated an enemy combatant, before there was an official definition — but then the definition turned out to be if the president said you were an enemy combatant then that was what you were.

The rapper was allowed into the windowless cell first, directed to take his seat across from the door. The commander said the detainee would be brought shortly but there could be delays. They would let the rapper get tired, let him lose his nerve. There were no clocks inside the room, no cell phones or watches allowed. A nervous boredom accumulated. He smelled the sour stink of his body, already sweating in the humidity and the tight box of the cell. He had been instructed not to touch the detainee — always the detainee, never Adnan Fahim—and also not to ask him for any information possibly deemed classified. There would be no one else in the cell with them but a guard would be posted outside, with the commander listening on a monitor nearby. If at any moment his line of questioning veered from his instructions, then the interview would be terminated.

The door opened. Adnan Fahim entered alone, his slim frame draped by an olive-green jumpsuit, a body belt of chains hanging from his wrists to his ankles. Adnan was one hundred days into a campwide hunger strike but he wasn’t allowed to starve himself and so the man before the rapper didn’t match the mental image of a hunger-strike victim. The rapper had seen a file photo of Adnan but the photo was from years earlier and the Adnan chained to the chair was older, his face more tired, more worn. Only the sharp expression in Adnan’s eyes had not changed. This was a man the rapper believed he could talk to, who would make a compelling testimonial against the persistence of the camp, help reignite the rage necessary to close it.

Their conversation was allotted ninety minutes but it did not last ninety minutes. The rapper believed Adnan had made only a small mistake, despite the events that followed. A paperboy. His crimes were indirect, passive. The rapper expected his help to be welcomed but soon it was clear this wasn’t the case. The rapper thought he was angry for his own reasons but when confronted with Adnan’s anger his reasons withdrew, childish and petulant.

The two men took turns talking but the conversation was frustrating from the start.

The rapper said, I’ve come to ask for your cooperation. I want to make a movie about you, to bring attention to the problem of your detainment, your treatment. How you are cleared for release but haven’t been released. The government hasn’t said yes but they will. They wouldn’t have brought me here otherwise.

Unless, Adnan said, they brought you here so I could discourage you.

Already Adnan looked disappointed. The rapper continued, speaking faster: I want your name to be on the lips of outraged citizens, calling for your release. I want the president to hear them calling your name.

The president of the United States already knows my name. I know this. He thinks of me while he lies in bed at night. About what he ordered done to me.

It isn’t the same president now, the rapper said. The president who had you tortured isn’t president anymore.

There is only one president, Adnan said. You vote or don’t vote, it makes no difference. There is just one president.

You’re wrong. Every president is problematic but this president is different.

Adnan leaned back in his chair, lifted his chained hands in an apology, one he couldn’t have meant. Their time was short. This wasn’t what the rapper had come to speak to him about. He needed permission, access. It would be impossible to speak to Adnan again as long as he was in the detention camp but they couldn’t silence him forever.

They can, Adnan said. They have.

Adnan said he didn’t want to die but his hunger strike was already one hundred days old. Every day the guards came, strapped him into a restraint chair, used it to prevent him from forcing himself to vomit. Fifteen hundred calories in two blue-and-white cans. They’d tortured him ten years ago and they were torturing him again, this time with nasal tubes and lubricant and nutritious slime. Adnan gestured again, invited a survey of his body. The chains on his hands and feet, the anonymous clothes. The scarring and irritation of his nasal passages, his throat. How he was losing his voice because he was so rarely allowed to speak freely.

Adnan asked, How old are you?

Thirty-three, the rapper said.

Thirty-three. I’m thirty-three too.

I know. Your age was one of the reasons—

You want to think we are the same.

Yes.

We are not.

I know.

Thirty-three. Your country at war a third of your life.

Yes.

And I have been imprisoned a third of mine.

Yes.

In your country, if I had shot a man in my youth, could my crime be almost an accident, an inevitability, an unavoidable outcome of a system?

Some people would say so. Some people would say all those things.

A crime, yes, but the crime of having been younger, less educated, less patient. There would be those who would protest my harsh treatment.

Yes. A killer but a killer at a disadvantage.

Material support. That’s my crime.

The rapper wanted to speak but couldn’t. He had come to see a wronged man speak in his own defense but what was he getting instead? His sympathy unfairly played against him.

Adnan continued: Material support. I moved money. I was poor and my father was dead and I was twenty-one years old and I was angry at the country the old men said killed my father and the old men said Vengeance and they said Your anger is righteous and they said God is on our side and they said The feelings you carry are true feelings and they said You do not have to hurt anyone and they said We only need you to help us move money.

The rapper whispered, Don’t say this. They can hear you and they will never let you go.

Already they will never let me go, Adnan said, so what does it matter if I speak the truth? I was young and ignorant and I wanted to do something to end my fear. I was afraid because I was angry and I wanted to end my anger too. I am still angry but the guards now are not the guards of my youth. They no longer strike me. They no longer beat me awake. They do not know the short shackle or the waterboard. They let me wear my clothes, let me see the sun, let me read my books and pray my prayers. They do not let me starve myself but they believe this a kindness. The men who tortured me are long gone, gone home to America or back to Iraq or Afghanistan, and I do not resist those who have taken their place. Every soldier is not the same soldier. The men I hate I will never see again but I wait for their names to be spoken. In their absence I will hate no one else.

The conversation was allotted ninety minutes but it did not last ninety minutes. The rapper walked around the table to knock on the door and signal the guard, then returned to his own seat. Before the detainee was taken from the room he tried again to speak to the rapper but now the rapper wouldn’t listen, couldn’t meet his gaze. Their conversation did not end with goodbye, and later the rapper would find he did not believe the conversation had ended.

Once back in the States the director explained her new intent: a white room, a restraint chair, the standard operating procedure for force-feeding hunger strikers. She did not speak in the vernacular of the military. She never said detainee, only prisoner, only victim. She did not say detention center, only prison, only torture, violation of free will, civil rights.

The rapper did not need the argument. The rapper had already volunteered.

The rapper arrived in the white room, dressed in the orange jumpsuit the crew provided, allowed them to chain his hands and feet. The surprising weight of the cuffs. The rapper shoeless, hatless. He sat down in the restraint chair, wondered briefly where the crew had acquired the equipment. They strapped the restraints around his hands and feet, the chair cold against his sweating skin, then fastened another strap across his forehead, holding his skull angled backward. Then the nurses hired to play nurses, then their teal scrubs and purple latex gloves, the measuring of the feeding tube, ear to xiphoid process. The rapper had been instructed to stare straight ahead into the camera but he couldn’t resist a glance to the side, to watch the purple gloves coating the end of the feeding tube in lubricant. Once he saw he couldn’t unsee. Then the purple glove across the forehead, the thumb opening his nostrils. The tube slipped in, pushed past. The rapper squirming in the chair, another set of gloved hands gripping his head to hold him steady. He heard himself groan, heard himself grinding his teeth. He tried to keep his mouth closed but the tube was bypassing the mouth altogether. There were tears in his eyes and who wouldn’t cry at this, how could anyone not. Another inch of tubing, his head thrashing side to side, and the purple gloves kept working. Inch after burning inch. How to know how many inches had gone in? His eyes were closed and he couldn’t open them to check. The unbearable burning increasing. The tube wasn’t anywhere near his brain but his brain was what burned. Arching his back didn’t provide any reprieve but when he wouldn’t stop bucking a third nurse came to hold him down, this one’s hands ungloved. One of the rapper’s arms pulled free of the restraint strap and the ungloved nurse pinned his freed hand to the armrest, applied strength against frightened force.

Stop, the rapper begged.

I can’t, he said.

The tube snaking back out of his nostrils. His body relaxing, a deep breath gathering, but when he opened his eyes the purple gloves were dipping the tube back into the lubricant.

Please, please don’t.

When the rapper started screaming a nurse slid his arm around the rapper’s neck, applying pressure to put his head against the headrest, placed another ungloved hand across his forehead. The bluing tattoos on the nurse’s arms reading like faded threats. The muted sounds of the nurse’s attention. How the nurses never spoke. How they instructed only with their hands.

Please, the rapper said. Stop. Stop it. Please stop.

The flatness of the imperative, spoken in the weak voice of a prisoner.

This is me, he said. This is me.

This is me, he said. I can’t do this.

This is me.

The three men released him, their hands returning to comfort, to assure the end of the demonstration. The rapper cried as they rubbed his shoulders, as they gently touched his head and face. Less than three minutes from beginning to end. The feeding tube never fully inserted. The nutrients hanging untouched from an IV stand, like oatmeal in a plastic bag. The rapper moaning with his face in his hands.

When he watched the finished video he knew exactly when they would fade to white, at the worst moment of his disgust with himself, his failure to suffer once what Adnan Fahim was suffering twice a day. The unfreed man, left behind after all the men who had brought him to his prison were sent home, at the end of the bad days. As if the bad days of a prison ended when the guards decided they did.

See the rapper in his street clothes, face-to-face with the rapper in the orange jumpsuit trapped on the screen, the rapper watching himself on the director’s laptop, in the director’s hotel room. Watching it again, his failure to commit. The fade to white reversing, the rapper’s face returning to the screen, himself sitting in the restraint chair, unmolested again, alone inside the frame. Tears in his eyes but the words read off cue cards. The rapper on the screen saying the words scripted before the demonstration began, the way the rapper had always known he would be expected to end his statement.

Peace, the rapper heard himself say. His eyes bloodshot, his lip shaking.

Peace, he said again.

Peace and good morning.