The Mauritanian (Guantánamo Diary)

“Somebody else was deciding everything for me; I had all worries in the world but making a decision. Many thoughts went quickly through my head. The optimistic thoughts suggested, Maybe you’re in the hands of Americans, but don’t worry, they just want to take you home, and to make sure that everything goes in secrecy. The pessimistic ones went, You screwed up! The Americans managed to pin some shit on you, and they’re taking you to U.S. prisons for the rest of your life. I was stripped naked. It was humiliating, but the blindfold helped me miss the nasty look of my naked body.”

Slahi describes his transfer from a prison in Jordan to Bagram, Afghanistan, and later to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. These emotionally tense lines from the suspenseful, nonchronological first chapter feature two types of torture (blindfolding and sexual humiliation) and foreshadow events in the second part of the book, which focuses on the first two years of the author’s detention at Guantanamo.

“Now I was sitting in front of bunch of dead regular U.S. citizens. My first impression, when I saw them chewing without a break, was, What’s wrong with these guys, do they have to eat so much? Most of the guards were tall, and overweight. Some of them were friendly and some very hostile.”

Throughout the book, Slahi offers his impressions of Americans, such as the way they eat, their approach to health and exercise, and their political and religious views. This quotation features Slahi’s first impression in the context of his detention. He repeatedly notes how Americans worship their bodies, in his view, by describing how they overeat or overexercise. This emphasis on materialism is, perhaps, part of the reason they didn’t understand Slahi’s prayers in detention beyond racial animus.

“Whenever I realized that a guard was mean I pretended that I understood no English. I remember one cowboy coming to me with an ugly frown on his face: ‘You speak English?’ he asked. ‘No English,’ I replied. ‘We don’t like you to speak English. We want you to die slowly,’ he said.”

At the beginning of his detention at Guantanamo, Slahi spoke several languages, but his English was basic. Other detainees spoke no English at all. On one hand, the latter made communication difficult. For instance, Slahi describes an incident in which a detainee begged in his native language—to no avail—for medicine to alleviate his pain.