Alexandra S. Moore and Elizabeth Swanson (eds.), The Guantánamo Artwork and Testimony of Moath al-Alwi: Deaf Walls Speak (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?
Alexandra Moore and Elizabeth Swanson (AM & ES): We have shared a long editorial commitment to investigating the many cultural forms that human rights expressions can take and to bringing voices of survivors of human rights violations to the public. Our interest in the artwork of Moath al-Alwi, still detained in Guantánamo despite never having been charged with a crime and having been cleared for release, was compounded by the opportunity to access not only information about his artmaking process, but also Moath’s own writing. Thus began a process that resulted not only in a collection of scholarly essays about the work but also in a remarkable testimony from Moath about his experiences surviving and making art in Guantánamo.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
AM & ES: First and foremost, this volume addresses the role of artmaking in the Guantánamo Bay detention center and presents the testimony of Moath al-Alwi to his experiences as a detainee and artist inside the walls. One of sixteen men still there who have been cleared for release, he was brought to Guantánamo in January 2002 and has never been charged with a crime. The book tells stories of artmaking at Guantánamo and of how artwork has made its way beyond the walls and into public exhibitions—along with the consequences. The artwork exists as a form of creative expression and ingenuity as well as of survival. It includes the voice of fellow detainee Mansoor Adayfi, who provides another testimonial to life and art at Guantánamo, reflecting on the work of his “brother” Moath.
The Introduction and scholarly essays take up a range of approaches to Moath’s life and work, situating his model ships in the contexts of Islamic art history, global fine art traditions, visual rhetoric of Guantánamo, political expression, and carceral art, with explorations of the conditions of production, including indefinite detention, torture, force-feeding, and solitary confinement, and lack of access to materials beyond the “waste” produced in the detention camp itself.
The introduction discusses the art exhibit, Ode to the Sea, at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in 2017-18, which first brought detainee artwork and Moath’s ships to a larger public audience. Curator Erin L Thompson contributes a chapter in which she discusses the controversies around the exhibition and the varied reactions of 9/11 victims’ families and survivors. Also in the introduction, we consider how Moath’s artwork—its materials, subject matter, and conditions of production and (now) confinement—itself functions as what we call “evidentiary aesthetics” to witness life inside the detention center.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
AM & ES: In addition to our individual work on human rights and cultural forms, together we have edited several volumes on the subject, starting with theoretical and pedagogical tenets of human rights and literature as a discipline. From there, we have increasingly focused on survivors’ voices and experiences, starting with our volume Witnessing Torture: Perspectives of Torture Survivors and Human Rights Workers (Palgrave, 2018) (which has garnered 900K downloads!) and including The Guantánamo Artwork and Testimony of Moath al-Alwi: Deaf Walls Speak, which we consider one of our most important works precisely because it helps to restore voice to Moath, who otherwise remains silenced and oppressed within the detention camp. Our new book’s focus on artistic production extends work we both have done on Guantánamo literature, especially Guantánamo Diary, by Mohamedou Ould Slahi, and Alexandra’s more recent work on cultural representations of the global war on terror. That recent work includes a dossier on “Cultural Renditions of Guantánamo and the War on Terror” in Humanity.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
AM & ES: We hope that readers interested in the most pressing human rights issues of our time will want to encounter testimony from Moath and from the academics who have engaged with his work. We hope that readers interested in artmaking, craft, global traditions of model ship building, Islamic art, assemblage, and carceral art will find inspiration in these pages. We hope that the many voices in this volume will increase attention to the case of Moath and the twenty-nine other men who remain detained there.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
AM & ES: Elizabeth is exploring the genre of memoir in a volume on her own family history of gender, migration, and trauma, and Alexandra is working on a larger project on cultural representations of Guantánamo in the global war on terror.
J: What is unusual about the approach this book takes to its subject?
AM & ES: In editing this book, we were conscious of not wanting to write about Guantánamo detainees and their experiences, but instead to write and to think with them. We recognize Moath al-Alwi as a collaborative voice in the conversation with academics, a fellow former detainee, and an artist.
Excerpts from the book
From Chapter 1, The Guantánamo Artwork of Moath al-Alwi: Art as Expression, Witness, Evidence, by Alexandra S. Moore and Elizabeth Swanson
[This book] presents an insider’s view of artmaking in the Guantánamo Bay naval detention center as self-expression and protest, and to stage a fundamental human rights claim that has been denied by law and politics: the right to be recognized as human. This is a book about works of art made under conditions of extremity by Moath Hamza Ahmed al-Alwi, a person deprived of the totality of his civil and human rights as part of the War on Terror. It is also about the person, the artist who made the works, both as he represents that class of persons whose rights have been denied at Guantánamo and as, strictly and perhaps more significantly, himself. Across a range of disciplines and in conversation with Moath’s testimony, our contributors argue that artwork at Guantánamo constitutes important forms of material and aesthetic witnessing to human rights abuses perpetrated and denied by the U.S. government: the art objects themselves bear witness to the violation of the artist and other Guantánamo prisoners’ human rights. Indeed, the artwork we examine represents one of the very few forms of self-expression by Guantánamo detainees available in the public sphere—albeit within ever-shifting constraints. Equally important, this is a book of witness to Moath, a Yemeni citizen who arrived on one of the first transports to Guantánamo when it began holding so-called War on Terror detainees in 2002, and who remains there today, without ever having been charged with a crime, and although he was cleared for release on 27 December 2021.
In her foundational Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, Nicole Fleetwood defines carceral aesthetics as “the production of art under the conditions of unfreedom; it involves the creative use of penal space, time, and matter … [where i]mmobility, invisibility, stigmatization, lack of access, and premature death govern the lives of the imprisoned and their expressive capacities” (2020, 25). In this volume, guided by Moath’s testimony in chapter two, [contributors] examine his carceral aesthetics in specific artworks, most notably in the model ships he constructs from the prison camp detritus. Building on Fleetwood’s work, we attend closely to the specific conditions of his imprisonment that inform his artwork to consider its evidentiary aesthetics: how his artwork at once exposes human rights abuses at Guantánamo (“evidence”) and provides a means with which to construct a viable subject position, to reclaim his own humanity, within the very system that seeks to deny him. If the value of evidence depends in part on its source, then Moath’s artwork not only reflects and is, indeed, made from the conditions of his imprisonment but also helps to construct him as a viable witness. In the absence of charges or a trial through which to answer them, art—visual, written, and material—is the vehicle for Moath’s self-representation.
From Chapter 2, Artmaking at Guantánamo: A Ship Expresses Rescue, by Moath al-Alwi
The first thing I noticed when I entered the cell in 2010 were its deaf walls, with no window for air or sunlight. No way to know if you are under or above ground, or to distinguish between day and night, as if you were in a grave and everything alive got disconnected. I paused in the middle of the cell, confused, thinking about what I could do to get life moving inside the dungeon. I thought of home, the old life: agriculture, greenery, plowing, and all the tools that recall our ancient heritage—the axe, the sickle, the water wheel, and the old mill. Old, beautiful things, especially arts and crafts, attract me to meditate and to think without feeling—an essential skill in this place.
I have to make these deaf walls speak.
…
This was the beginning of a journey that was full of thorns. At Guantánamo, my beginning was not that of an artist who establishes his artwork with brushes and paint and a natural vision. It was bitter and difficult, and the main reason I started was because I could make others hear my voice and my pain in this place, this exile in which you feel that you are imprisoned on another planet or at the bottom of the ocean. In complete darkness, where no one can see or hear you. Loneliness. Estrangement. Sickness. Pain. All in a place where conscience is absent, where everything is outside the law in the country of law and freedom!