Don't Forget Us Here

Mansoor Adayfi Don't Forget Us Here (2021)
Mansoor Adayfi was sent to Guantánamo Bay detention camp in 2002 on suspicion of being something significant within al Qaeda. He wasn't. He was an eighteen year-old farmer from Yemen who had the misfortune to visit Afghanistan where he was kidnapped and sold to the American military - then paying big bucks for anyone who might have information on Osama and his angry pals, yet surprisingly ill-equipped to tell the difference between a fervent jihadist and some bloke who worked on his dad's farm. It would seem that a great many of those interned at Guantánamo Bay were sent there by the same criteria, namely looking a bit brown and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Mansoor didn't get out until 2016 and, regrettably, not even because the US military ever truly realised that it had been in error.

I'm sure we've all heard about what happened to detainees at  Guantánamo Bay, the force feeding, the beating, the sleep deprivation, the endless cycle of humiliation. Mansoor experienced the worst of it and this, at long last, is his story; and it's one hell of a story, the kind of thing which could only be communicated by one who lived through it. Much of it makes for harrowing testimony, although Adayfi holds back from describing the worst of the horrifying details, doubtless fearing they might unbalance the tone of the book which, against expectation, somehow keeps its account on an even, objective keel. Most of the indignities imposed on inmates of the camp seem to have been based on brutality and denial - sleep, food, basic rights - more than directed sadism because those running the camp were at least trying to keep their prisoners alive long enough to answer their misdirected questions; so the situation wasn't entirely comparable to what happened at Auschwitz and other places, although was nevertheless an atrocity which should be remembered in the hope of preventing its repetition.

Mansoor describes three main phases of his fourteen years at Guantánamo Bay - first a period of brutality and hunger strikes, a moderate thaw during the early years of the Obama administration, then a resumption of the brutality once the US government began to realise it had perhaps incarcerated the wrong men and might have to say sorry. Some small degree of sunlight is intermittently shed upon the horror, because persons deprived of hope and with so little to lose will tend to take their pleasures where they can find them; and because the one thing the US government got right about Mansoor and his brothers was the strength of their faith, and it was their faith which got them through the worst times, and which kept them from ever becoming the fanatical monsters their captors so obviously needed them to be.

So our unflinching documentation of the very worst forms of governmental and cultural hysteria and oppression is tempered with accounts of the tiny moments of beauty and even humour which characterised life at Guantánamo.

We had so little in our cages, a brief glimpse of beauty and the magnificence of Allah's creation could carry our spirits for days or weeks.

The most surreal of the lighter moments comes at the point when, during the first years of the Obama administration and consequent relaxation of certain rules, inmates conspire with staff to play practical jokes on newly arrived guards. It all goes a bit 'Allo 'Allo! in places, particularly with the bedtime stories.

'Okay,' the block sergeant said. 'Let's divide up. Who wants to read stories?'

'You can't be serious,' another new guard said.

'They can't sleep until someone reads them a story,' the block sergeant said, 'or tells them one. It's up to you.'

'What kind of story do we tell them?'

'Just read to them from the books they have.'

'Story time, please!' Abdul called out. 'I'm tired.

These lighter moments, incongruous though they may at first seem, really fortify the account, providing stark contrast to the terrible crime which has been visited upon these men for no good reason by reminding us that deep down, we are all very similar, with the same sense of right and wrong - although I'm not sure this is true of at least a couple of the guards and I won't be gratuitously thanking any khaki strangers for their service any time soon. Anyway, ludicrous though it will most certainly sound, aspects of daily life at Guantánamo Bay remind me a lot of working at Royal Mail for twenty years - the more light-hearted bits, obviously.

I've never read anything quite like Don't Forget Us Here, and nothing with quite the same power or sense of humanity, nothing which connects the reader to the broader human experience in quite the same way. Everybody should read this book, and I really mean everybody.