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The definitive, unauthorized insider account of Guantánamo—funny, furious, and terrifyingly relevant
In October 2001, days before bombs began dropping on Afghanistan, Mansoor Adayfi was kidnapped by militia and sold to the CIA as a middle-aged general. He was eighteen years old and what he knew about the US he’d learned from TV shows and movies. He’d never seen a skyscraper and couldn’t imagine airplanes flying into one. None of that mattered. He was tortured until he confessed to being who they wanted him to be and then shipped to Guantánamo as one of its first prisoners.
“When the Red Cross arrived and told us to write letters home to our families, we all knew they would never be sent. But I wrote one, just not to my family. I wrote it to my interrogators. After that, I kept writing. I wrote to President Bush. To Martin Luther King Jr. To the defense contractors who make pepper spray, to space aliens, to the Pope. Writing was the one thing they couldn’t take away from me—my love of language, my sense of humor, my insistence on reaching beyond my cage to the world that I prayed hadn’t forgotten us. Almost every letter came back stamped, NOT APPROVED.”
Of the 779 men imprisoned at Guantánamo, only ten were ever charged with a crime. Only one was convicted. What you hold in your hands is the record of what happened to the rest of them.
MANSOOR ADAYFI is a writer, artist, and former Guantánamo detainee held for fourteen years without charges. Among Adayfi’s work are The New York Times Modern Love column “Taking Marriage Classes at Guantánamo”; the introduction for the exhibit John Jay College Art from Guantánamo exhibit; the award-winning radio documentary The Art of Now for BBC radio about art from Guantánamo; and the CPC podcast Love Me. Adayfi is a frequent speaker and guest talking about his detention at Guantánamo, social justice, and prisoner rights.
ANTONIO AIELLO is a writer, storyteller, and narrative consultant for writers and arts and entertainment companies that has included Disney, McCann Worldgroup, MCC Theater, and Dream Search C & C. As former Editorial and Content Director for PEN America, Aiello developed written and multimedia content at the intersection of free expression advocacy and the literary arts to give voice to issues of social justice and writers in peril around the world. This included producing mini documentaries, founding and editing Glossolalia, a magazine of international literary translations, developing graphic narratives, and directing the PEN America multimedia archive in collaboration with Princeton University. Aiello specializes in literary nonfiction collaborations with TV and film adaptations.
Prologue
Chapter One: A Long Way to Go
Chapter Two: The Fight
Chapter Three: The Golden Age
Chapter Four: New Beginning
Chapter Five: Re-placement
Epilogue