Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s book Guanta? namo Diary is a work that deals intensely in complicated themes. Concerns of morality, accusations of terrorism, and descriptions of torture abound in his story, but it is the subtle undercurrent of fatality throughout the publication that I discover most challenging. Slahi uses references to both death and the remainder as a metaphor for the trauma that those imprisoned in Guanta? namo Bay include suffered.
Slahi toxins no time in drawing after this sort of images in his writing. At the beginning of the first section, he says, inch… I provided all my holes at the beginning of the expedition, that was like the border between death and lifestyle. ” (5). In this passage, Slahi begins by assessing his trip toward captivity with a state of indeterminatezza. It parallels the idea of purgatory, in which one that has passed off their life on the planet is forced to hold in the stability, unaware of what lies in advance. This is exactly what offers happened to Slahi, living he knew has been sculpted from him, and he will not know what destiny awaits.
The second portion of the same passing connects to concepts of death plus the afterlife as well, but in a different way. Slahi says: “I desired I had been better to people. I wanted I were better to my loved ones. I regretted every mistake I produced in my life, toward God, toward my family, toward anybody” (5). His reflections on his own existence and misgivings are much just like those of somebody lying on their deathbed. The moment faced with the inevitable end, people frequently look again at everything they failed to do. The moment faced with the end of his life as he knows it, Slahi does the same. In drawing this kind of comparison, he subtly highlights his chasteness as well. A guilty person might in the end have misgivings about what they did, an innocent one rather reflects on what they did not do.
The symbolism becomes more obvious as the novel begins to delve much deeper into Slahi’s story. When Slahi is definitely loaded onto the plane to Guanta? namo, he identifies himself because “a living dead” (28). After being forced to go through extreme difficulties during his transfer, this individual begins to observe himself to be truly dehumanized by his captors. The concept of being “a living dead” connects for this. A dead body is sometimes viewed as more of a subject than an actual person, the majority of cultures begin to see the soul or perhaps self since having currently departed from it. Slahi feels that he is “a living dead” because although he is a conscious, inhaling and exhaling human being, he is being treated like a without life body that can be tossed about and mistreated.
Slahi’s experiences once he truly reaches the interior of Guanta? namo result in a new slew of imagery associated with death. Next one of the for a longer time blacked-out paragraphs, Slahi talks about, “… we decided to go on a hunger reach, many detainees took portion, including myself. But I can only strike for 4 days, and I was a ghost” (60). In many civilizations, ghosts or spirits signify an imprint of great stress, left behind following the individual is long gone into the what bodes. There can be certainly that this line follows that which was likely a description of a large amount of shock, one of the few lines toward the conclusion of the passage that is not blacked out makes mention of the detainees being tortured. The food cravings strike is the detainees’ cry for help, but it is as lost upon their captors just as the cries of your ghost attempting to communicate with the living.
By the second part of the publication, Slahi features stepped back in its history to give the target audience some regarding his your life before Guanta? namo. In describing certainly one of his early on experiences inside the hands of Mauritanian government bodies, he says, “I was watching all my items on earth becoming passed around as if I’d already died” (89). At this time, Slahi details the situation in a manner that still protests the idea of his being lifeless. He has not yet recently been ripped away from the life he knows, which is somewhat amazed by the dehumanizing treatment he receives.
One of the more dazzling of the death-related images Slahi provides comes much later in the book, at the beginning of chapter six. Right here, Slahi states, “I seemed like somebody who had been going through a great autopsy while still alive and helpless” (266). This follows the finish of chapter 5, by which he is actually abused and after that forcefully heavy into a stupor. The autopsy sentence assumes on a dual meaning. Slahi had only undergone an abundance of physical harm, and so he’d indeed have looked like a body slice and bruised body that had gone through autopsy. Yet throughout the new, he as well undergoes sort of mental autopsy”a forced dissection of his own brain, in which he’s a voiceless participant, struggling to protest. Mental and bodily autonomy certainly are a large a part of what we identify as human. With these types of rights thieved from him, Slahi feels he can little more than a body on the table for assessment.
The final reference to death comes on the second-to-last web page of Guanta? namo Diary, tying returning to all of Slahi’s earlier symbolism. He says, “As I create these words and phrases, many siblings are hunger-striking and are determined to carry on, no matter what. I am very concerned with these friends I are helplessly viewing, who will be practically dying and who have are sure to suffer irreparable damage even if that they eventually plan to eat” (371). Here, in describing his fellow detainees as “practically dying, inches Slahi helps it be clear the fact that symbolic fatality that happened when he was unjustly locked up in Guanta? namo Gulf is not a story exclusive to him. Many of those imprisoned alongside him are also harmless men whose lives have been ripped away from them. They as well have been lowered to little more than a body system count in the eyes with the U. H. government, and Slahi’s new is a weep to the American people to offer these individuals all their lives backside.
Works Cited
Slahi, Mohamedou Ould, and Lewis Siems. Guanta? namo Diary. New York: Small, Brown and Company, 2015. Print.
