The "empathy gap"?

As news of the Guantanamo Hunger Strike continues to come to the forefront of media outlets, including the New York Times publication of Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel's op-ed of his experiences in the camp, a major victory for the counter-terrorist state took place in Boston. Last September, Amnesty International published an article, titled "Why Close Guantanamo? A Dead Man's Poem Speaks" by Zeke Johnson on the death of Adnan Latif on September 8, 2012, which has been determined to be suicide (but as Marc Falkoff writes before the autopsy was done, was a result of "detention"). As Andy Worthington states in an article first published on the Close Guantanamo website, Latif was released for return to Yemen, but the actual release was prohibited by Obama's moratorium on releasing Yemenis in Guantanamo following the (failed) 2009 Christmas Day bomb plot. Latif's "Hunger Strike Poem," published in the 2007 collection Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak functions to phrase those pertinent questions about the role of the "world" that have similarly been raised in the juxtaposition of the victims of the Boston Marathon Bombing and the victims of US drone attacks, and relatedly about the characterization of certain violence as "terrorism." Latif writes,

They are artists of torture,
They are artists of pain and fatigue,
They are artists of insults
and humiliation.
Where is the world to save us
from torture?
Where is the world to save us
from the fire and sadness?
Where is the world to save
the hunger strikers?

The questions raised by contemplating the role of the "world" as observer have come down, in some accounts, to an "empathy gap," a term which writer Teju Cole has used to describe the "heavy silence" surrounding the use of drones to assassinate people outside of the country, and in general the incapacity of the American public to care about the victims of its violence.

But there are problems with the "empathy gap," and in general with using empathetic identification as a guideline for moral action or responsibility, and Latif's poem addresses some of these problems, which I would like to deliberate over here in both a preliminary and a restropective way. The primary problem with what I call "empathic identification" is the way that it constructs the subject as a victim of imperial aggression without taking into account the fundamental ambivalence of this subject as victim and as an agent who exposes aggression. In an essay published in Postmodern Culture in 2011, "The Enemy Combatant as Poet: The Politics of Writing in Poems from Guantanamo," I argued that the status of guilt assumed by the "enemy combatant" is related to this exposure of the aggression of his enemies and that even liberal commentators do not get past reading the poems as testimonies of the violence and of their suffering. And while this testimonial function is important to effecting an actual change in either conditions or in the existence of the prison on the basis of Human Rights violations, the poem, like other poems in the collection, also challenge at a more fundamental level the complicity of the discourse of Human Rights with US and Western interests. The poems point out that this complicity, and not a lack of empathy, informs the blindness of Western, in particular, US observers.

In Latif's poem, as in other poems, the language of universal human rights is pursued through the figure of the “world” as an impartial judge or law outside the prison: a world “that will wait for us,” to which “photographs of my corpse at the grave” will be sent, “before” which men will bear a “burden” and, finally, as an implied addressee, if “justice and compassion remain in this world.” As Latif writes, “Where is the world to save us from torture? / Where is the world to save us from the fire and sadness? / Where is the world to save the hunger strikers?” In these formulations, the world becomes a figure for human rights, the neutral observer who is there to witness suffering. But as we know, and as critiques of Human Rights Discourse have long established, such neutrality is a pretension. Despite this, there is little sense about how to move past these constructs and frame the terms of moral responsibility in another way. The poems, however, which challenge the triangular relationship between "Us," "Them," and the "World," present a poetic speaker that takes place within a history of forms that is irreducible to the enunciation of a universal human subject. The ambiguity of this poetic speaker resists discernible efforts to provide a “close-up” of the terrorist turned victim, and in this way, the poems operate critically in a milieu otherwise rife with naïve assumptions about the self-evidence of testimony in expressive work.

In important ways, reading this poetic speaker yields a take on aggression that might help us to perceive some of the alternative expressive aspects of "terrorist" violence. It's this--and not empathy--however, which the American public does not want to hear, since then it would also have to confront the violent contours of its own guilt--not the aggression of imperialism as a national phenomenon, but the aggression that figures in the experience of complicity (as a registration of both empathy and the "empathy gap"). Such ideas, I would suggest, could help us to think about the ambivalence of aggression and victimhood, or of civilization and barbarism, in constructions of morality in imagining alternative experiences of political and ethical subjecthood.

distilling

I lost my backspace key, which makes writing bizarrely difficult... so I thought I might try to plug away here for a while, caught in the space-time question of how to form an argument.

The argument I am working on takes place in an essay on the Guantanamo poets. I had wanted to write about how the reviews of the poems cast aesthetic judgments about the poems in lieu of engaging with the more pressing questions raised by and in the poems. The reviews confine consideration of the detainees within the sovereign and moralizing narratives which figure and polarize the human and inhuman. Such questions, I thought, had to do with the identity of the poets, with how considering enemy combatants as poets presses us to think about the elusive definitions of the enemy combatant and the implications of this status. The poetic speakers in these poems present the problem of the subject of universal history, re-relating guilt and innocence in order to represent the responsibility of the enemy combatant in a new way, and thus to understand the significance of enemy combatant outside of the theory of sovereignty.

1. poetry after 9/11 details a new barbarism through language of human rights (prison / resistance/ liberation literaturethe world)
2. poets are innocent but poems are bad: disabling politics of poems (the reviews reinscribe the moralizing enlightenment narratives of human/inhuman)
3. subject must bear guilt to be political--status of the inhuman subject of universal history (how the inhuman challenges the narrative of morality that is central to understanding human rights)
4. the consequences of reading enemy combatant as poet allow more sustained position between (in the murk of) barbarism and culture through the refiguring of the inhuman (the challenges of identification, conditions of anonymity) than does theorization of enemy combatant according to logic of sovereignty
5. the poems demonstrate the return of suffering to its resistant core, refusing the language of human rights that they seem to adopt (and refusing moral position [to say we are good]) and revisit ideas (somewhat idealistic?) about the shared guilt of culture (as an alternative to the enlightenment and moral narratives of evil/good, barbarism/culture, guilt/innocence)

gray zone

In the middle of working on the essay, "Double Speak: Poems from Guantanamo," it was somewhat weird to listen to the NPR/ABC hosted debate on whether or not the detainees should be treated as "enemy combatants" rather than "criminals." The debate, for the program "Intelligence Squared," was a joke, in more ways than one, perhaps. Because of whatever the format of the airing was (as an "Oxford style debate in the U.S.") stage laughter was cued in at various moments during the program, especially to highlight moments in intractable difference. A joke because the political difference between the debaters seems to amount to very little, in the end. And so little was brought to the table. A question for the audience about the definition of "enemy combatant" for example, yielded no clear answer from either side. Perhaps this murky realm of "political debate," the staging of a supposedly clear difference between two sides, is also exemplary of the results of the trial of Ahmed Ghailani, the first civilian trial of a Guantanamo detainee. Ghailani, who was convicted on only one count of the 285 brought against him in a 4-week trial that ended on November 17, 2010, was found guilty of conspiring in the 1998 African embassy bombings. The results of the trial seem to indicate that, in contrast to what those engaged in debate about whether or not so-called terrorists should be convicted in civilian or military courts had thought, hoped or feared, the civilian court put terrorism, not counter-terrorism on trial.

In the forty page transcript of this debate, there is one attempt to get near the import of the difference between civilian and military trial, and while I had thought that this might also include some wisdom as to what the demarcation of enemy combatant means, this was never approached, not by a long shot. Instead, the terrain of the debate was marked by attempts to prove that we are at war, and followed by the logic that since we are at war, and since the enemy is ununiformed, then the battleground is everywhere, and since the battleground is everywhere, then enemy combatants are also everywhere. This caused formed Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen to respond by saying this is "not about guilt." But his statement is more telling than any of the things that he or others might find it to be about. He means that once everyone is an enemy combatant, guilt no longer needs to be proved. All that is required is "reasonable belief" that individuals are members of al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The threat posed by treating these cases emerges at this point, since entering into civilian courts would threaten the security provided in the creation of the culture of the enemy combatant.

picture: Sidewalk, Los Angeles. Becky Bowden

the state of poetry

The announcement that President Bush is considering an early closure to the prison in Guantanamo Bay has been accompanied by news of the release and forthcoming publication of 22 prisoners' poems. The collection, Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak (University of Iowa Press, August 2007), has roused a fair deal of commentary on translation, bad poetry, and the particular threat posed by the "code" of poetry. Among the commentaries is one by former poet laureate, Robert Pinsky, which is the subject of a Mike Nizza's blog in The New York Times on June 20 http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/06/20/ex-poet-laureate-on-guantanamo-poetry/. Pinsky, in an interview on PRI's The World, cast doubt (and judgment) on the artistic merit of the poems: "“I havent found a Mandelshtam in here,” he said, referring to the great Russian poet who died in a Stalinist labor camp." Nizza's piece echoes the general concern that the media has with the "goodness" of the poems--this was for example the first question asked by the PRI interviewer (hear interview http://www.theworld.org/?q=node/10275); Pinsky, although he refers to the urgency of the poems, nonetheless seems unable to escape the idea of greatness. There is also a news blurb in today's Washington Post:

Do They Write In Iambic Pentameter?

The following might be the first bit of uncontroversial news out of Guantanamo Bay. Prisoners at the U.S. military prison there can now add “poets” to their (questionable) resumes, the Wall Street Journal reports. "Poems From Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak," an anthology, will be published in August by the University of Iowa Press. It would probably be unfair to call them tortured artists.

The transparent assumption behind the goodness reveals itself in the ghost meter reference to "iamic pentameter." The Wall Street Journal (see the article also for two of the poems: "Humiliated in the Shackles" by Sami al Haj and "Is it True?" by Osama Abu Kabir), which ran the article on their front page on June 20, 2007, included a quote by Cmdr. J.D. Gordon, a Defense Department spokesman: "While a few detainees at Guantanamo Bay have made efforts to author what they claim to be poetry, given the nature of their writings they have seemingly not done so for the sake of art. They have attempted to use this medium as merely another tool in their battle of ideas against Western democracies." What is so incredible about the above bytes is the aesthetic grounds upon which the argument for moral goodness also lies--or perhaps better, the aesthetic grounds upon which moral goodness is waged. Given the conditions of censorship and translation, it remains remarkable that such a valuation of goodness could even be made, particularly by Pinsky--who notes but passes over the fact that the poems are prohibited from being published in the original and the translations had to be done by those with secret-level security clearances, rather than literary translators.

Leonard Doyle's article in The Independent

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2686838.ece reports that "As far as the US military is concerned: "poetry ... presents a special risk, and DoD [Department of Defence] standards are not to approve the release of any poetry in its original form or language." The fear, officers say, is that allegorical imagery in poetry may be used to convey coded messages to militants outside." I thought about this line a bit last night--the idea of the coded message, the double meaning which poetry is seemingly especially well-equipped for; it was this that I thought might begin to get at my feeling of the paucity of poetry that "does" something today, to reference Yeats, in passing, and other greats who posed questions about the silence of poetry--something I think about when I think about the 400 plus poets that Brecht dismissed as "useless" in 1927. This is another story, but I wanted to keep it in mind.

The collection of poems was organized by defense lawyer Marc Falkoff after he received 2 poems in letters from inmates. These poems, like many others, remain classified; only 22 will be published in the collection. He refutes the idea that there is a "real" risk involved in the censorship of the poems and states: "If the inmates were writing words like 'the Eagle flies at dawn,' the censors might have a case, but they are not. I fully accept their right to stop any coded messages to militants outside. But what the military fears is not so much the possibility of secret messages being communicated, but the power of words to make people outside realise that these are human beings who have not had their day in court." This thread--the "risk" of the code is picked up on by "liberal catnip" in her June 20th blog http://liberalcatnip.blogspot.com/2007/06/poetry-of-mass-destruction.html?referer=sphere_related_content. On the other side, though, there is just hatred, I think, like allahpundit in hotair, and like this blog http://www.debbieschlussel.com/archives/2007/06/hot_off_the_pre.html?referer=sphere_related_contentby Debbie Schlussel (Best Conservative Blog 2005 finalist), which mocks the sentimality generically associated with poetry.

I don't know why I find the conceptions that people have about poetry in this discussion so compelling--and I'm not sure either why I feel that in some way the politics of this situation is more delicate than it might first seem. Perhaps one of the reasons is that the question of poetry provokes the need for more sensitive reading practices--and indeed, this seems to be exactly the thing that is so easily targeted by both the far right and defenders of the idea of democracy. The distinctions between these positions seem much less clear once the aesthetic pronouncement of "bad" poetry has been made. On the other hand, there is Ariel Dorfman's message of hope http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/article2686788.ece, which asserts the universality, primeval, and originary practice of poetry. And that is, on the other hand, something to think about as well.

image: pin with Brecht slogan, Ruth Hecht (owner, father inscribed words from never-found poem)