This is a guest post by K SATCHIDANANDAN

A poem by Ibrahim al-Rubaish, a Guantanamo Bay prisoner written in the tragic circumstances of illegal incarceration  has given rise to a baseless controversy in Kerala as it was included in a section titled ‘Literature and Contemporary Issues’ of the English  text book for the third semester undergraduates in the University of Calicut. The poem was recommended for inclusion by the Board of Studies chaired by Dr K. Rajagopalan, and rightly so as the section dealt with creative writing based on contemporary issues including the issue of human rights. The poem goes like this:

ODE TO THE SEA

Ibrahim al-Rubaish

O sea, give me news of my loved ones.
Were it not for the chains of the faithless, I would have dived into you,
And reached my beloved family, or perished in your arms.
Your beaches are sadness, captivity, pain, and injustice.
Your bitterness eats away at my patience.
Your calm is like death, your sweeping waves are strange.
The silence that rises up from you holds treachery in its fold.
Your stillness will kill the captain if it persists,
And the navigator will drown in your waves.
Gentle, deaf, mute, ignoring, angrily storming,
You carry graves.
If the wind enrages you, your injustice is obvious.
If the wind silences you, there is just the ebb and flow.
O sea, do our chains offend you?
It is only under compulsion that we daily come and go.
Do you know our sins?
Do you understand we were cast into this gloom?
O sea, you taunt us in our captivity.
You have colluded with our enemies and you cruelly guard us.
Don’t the rocks tell you of the crimes committed in their midst?
Doesn’t Cuba, the vanquished, translate its stories for you?
You have been beside us for three years, and what have you gained?
Boats of poetry on the sea; a buried flame in a burning heart.
The poet’s words are the font of our power;
His verse is the salve for our pained hearts.

The poem, extracted from the anthology Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak  edited by Marc Falkoff, a human rights lawyer fighting a case for the detainees of the United States at the notorious Guantanamo Bay naval base in Cuba, introduces the poet as a detainee and does not either confirm nor deny that he had links with Al-Qaeda: natural, because more than half  of the 775 prisoners have been declared  innocent by the U S Defence Department itself and in hundreds of cases even the circumstances of their initial detention have been questioned. The only thing we know for certain is that the detainees were denied even legal assistance for long, that  they never got a fair trial and they were subjected to the most inhuman tortures whose horrifying images are  now part of the publicly accessible archive.

The collection of twenty two poems by seventeen detainees was first published by the Amnesty International in 2006 and later reissued by the University of Iowa Press with an afterword by Ariel Dorfman to rousing  welcome by rights enthusiasts as well as poetry lovers. These poems were made available only because of the tireless efforts of pro bono attorneys who had to submit each line to Pentagon scrutiny. Many of them were written with tooth paste or on the foam in coffee cups handed over to the lawyers. Let me quote a few comments just to show how critics and writers have received the anthology: “At last Guantánamo has found its voice”, said Gore Vidal, while Robert Pinsky commented: “Poetry, art of the human voice, helps turn us toward what we should or must not ignore. Speaking as they can across barriers actual and   figurative, translated into our American tongue, these voices in confinement implicitly call us to our principles and to our humanity. They deserve, above all, not admiration or belief or sympathy—but attention. Attention to them is urgent for us.” Adrienne Rich had this to say: “Poems from Guantánamo brings to light figures of concrete, individual humanity, against the fabric of cruelty woven by the ‘war on terror.’ The poems and poets’ biographies reveal one dimension of this officially obscured narrative, from the perspective of the sufferers; the legal and literary essays provide the context which has produced-under atrocious circumstances-a poetics of human dignity.”

The poem was already taught to the students of the previous batch and no one had raised any objection at that point of time. But this time one Vinod, the self-proclaimed ‘State Convener’ of the ill-known ‘Committee for the Protection of Education’ (don’t be surprised: we have many self-appointed committees for the ‘protection’ of temples, of Hinduism, of women, of morals  etc) had a revelation that this poem by a ‘terrorist’ will turn every one of its students into a terrorist and persuade them to enlist themselves in Al Qaeda! And the ABVP lost no time in warning of an agitation until the poem was withdrawn. The University which is notoriously slow  in responding to the demands of the students and the staff ,was scared ( why, even the Delhi University was scared stiff before the ABVP demand to withdraw A. K. Ramanujan’s scholarly essay, ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’ from its text book and the insightful essay that celebrates the plurality of India’s epic tradition was promptly taken  off the book )enough to appoint a commission that recommended the immediate withdrawal of the poem from the syllabus this year and the textbook next year. The commission- Dr. M. M. Basheer, a literary critic and the Dean of Languages in the University – said it did not find anything objectionable in the poem and it was a good poem too, but teaching it would be immoral (the word used was adharmikam, against the dharma- whose dharma is a debatable point) as it would tantamount to encouraging a terrorist outfit.  (It is worth recalling that the same commission had recommended the removal of certain parts from another text book some years back, a novel , Adhikaram  , by the great writer and stylist, V. K. N: he had found those parts obscene: O, strange are the ways of dharma, stranger than those of karma !) I am not sure what exactly prompted this decision: it cannot be a genuine academic decision as it subverts the very essence of academic freedom and denies the chance even for a healthy debate among the staff and the students about the ethics and aesthetics of the poem. It also reveals a total ignorance of the valuable literary archive of proscribed writing and prison writing across the world from Hitler’s Germany, Franco’s Spain, Mussoilini’s Italy and Stalin’s USSR to Pol Pot’s Kampuchea, Khomeini’s Iran and India during the Emergency, a lot of which has been part of material for academic study and research. The decision also raises many broader questions like: is it necessary to know the poet’s biography to appreciate a poem? (How do we then enjoy anonymous poems as also ancient epics by Vyasa or Homer about whom we know next to nothing?) Is even a terrorist a terrorist when he pens a poem? Is a poem to be identified with a political tract or a piece of propaganda? ( How  do we then teach Ezra Pound who was known a fascist ally or even Gunter Grass who has admitted to collusion with Nazis, not to speak of revolutionaries in India and abroad who wrote anti-status quo poetry ? Who guards the borders between terrorism and revolution?) The only power being critiqued in the poem is US that has detained the poet: is a poem that criticizes US from a human rights point of view- or any other for that matter- to be excluded from text books even in India ?

Marc Falkoff, the editor of the anthology, who was approached by a journalist in Kerala for his comments about the turn of events, had this to say:

“So, why should the poem be taught? Because it is, to my mind, an important (albeit minor) document that provides some much-needed context for human rights fiasco that is Guantanamo… As it happens, Rubaish’s poem, like many of the poems in the collection, speaks directly to the plight of a person who is detained in a legal black hole, without access to the courts. The point of the poem (and I hope that you consider printing it in your paper alongside your article, so people can judge for themselves), is to call attention to the lawlessness of the place. It’s not about jihad or any such thing … There is, of course, a long tradition in many cultures of publishing jailhouse fiction and poetry. Some of the writers have committed crimes, others are political prisoners, and still others are wrongly accused. Some write political tracts that are inspiring, some that are controversial. It seems to me sad that we cannot trust the public at large to make their own judgments about the artistic and political merit of a jailhouse poem. And it is even sadder to think that a university would shy away from teaching and talking about a poem (and the context in which it was written) simply because the poet has been branded (with more or less evidence — I myself can’t say) as a terrorist. Indeed, it seems to me that talking about the poem in a university class is even more important under such circumstances. One could imagine a very illuminating discussion about the merits of putting together a volume like Poems from Guantanamo in the first place, for instance, or about what it means to try to assign some kind of aesthetic value to a political document … or should I say some political value to an aesthetic document? I’d be very interested to hear your university professors and students tackle such tough questions. But alas, it sounds like such a conversation will not be allowed to take place.”

Yes, even the editor of the volume has reacted, but what about the secular writers and intellectuals  and columnists of  Kerala who are so concerned about human rights violations elsewhere? I am sorry I could not hear more than a handful of voices in the media though the virtual platforms have shown some concern  and some Malayalam translations of the poem have been  doing the rounds. Today, to my consolation, I hear that Dr M. V. Narayanan, a known scholar of the Department of English, Calicut University, has tendered his resignation citing the issue. But the University, that last bastion of intellectual freedom in India, does not seem to bother.

(K Satchidanandan is a renowned poet, public intellectual, literary critic, and translator from Kerala.]