Greek to Me
By training, I'm a classical art historian. I expand fragments. If I show my students a broken ancient Greek vase, I use my words to mend it. I pour in more words to fill it with the memory of the wine it once carried, yet more to conjure up the men who once drank from it, and still more to offer my students our best guesses at what they might have been talking about as they drank.
This mode of dealing with art was known to the ancient Greeks. They called it ekphrasis: the rhetorical exercise of describing a work of art in great detail. For them, ekphrasis was a creative act. The speaker often explained things not shown by the artist, such as what happened just before or just after the illustrated moment. The maiden in this painting is smiling because she has just received a declaration of love, they would say.
But faced with this art from Guanta'namo, ekphrasis seemed somehow inappropriate. These artists are still alive, even if entombed. Their artworks are as they intended them, not the fragmentary remains of some past world that needs a framework of interpretation. And whatever interpretation these might need, how in the world was I to provide it? Who was I to pour my words over them?
And yet I knew that they needed help or why would that lawyer have come to me? The detainees certainly couldn't curate their own exhibit in New York because they would be barred from entering the United States even after being released from Guanta'namo. So I told myself that I would have to help them realize their desire for an exhibit without inserting my own judgments. I told myself that I would instead be their amanuensis.
From the Latin: a manu, servant of the hand, the term once referring to someone who aided in an artistic project by taking dictation. Consider, for instance, John Milton's daughters, Mary and Deborah, who took down his seventeenth century epic poem Paradise Lost after he had gone blind. They were his amanuenses. He composed the verses in his head at night. Then, in the morning, as a contemporary of his wrote, he "sat leaning backward obliquely in an easy chair, with his leg flung over the elbow of it" while they wrote down what he recited. If they dawdled coming to him, he would complain that he needed to be milked.
I would similarly let the artists speak for themselves through me, or so I thought. I wrote out a list of questions for their lawyers to ask them, including "What do you like about making art?" and "What would you like people to think about when they are looking at your art?" Then I waited for those lawyers to pose them during their Guanta'namo visits in the midst of conferences about legal matters.
The answers were strikingly uniform and seemingly unrevealing. They wanted people to see their art, they said, and through it know that they are actual human beings. Really? I didn't get it. Of course, they're human beings. What else could they be?
At first, I wasn't too concerned that their answers didn't really make much sense to me. That's part of the role of an amanuensis. Milton's daughters were ten and six when he began Paradise Lost. It would take them all nearly a decade to finish it. In those years, their father also taught them to read books aloud to him in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, of which they couldn't understand a word.
I was used to being an amanuensis myself. When I was a year and a half old and my mother was still pregnant with my sister, my father had an accident and broke his neck. The fractured edge of a vertebra sliced into his spinal cord, leaving his arms and legs paralyzed. As soon as we were old enough -- and I can't remember a time when we weren't considered old enough -- my sister and I would spend hours a day being his "hands." We opened mail, paid bills, slid computer disks in and out of the desktop that he operated by stabbing at the keys with a long pointer held in his mouth. Through us, two daydreamy little girls, he did all the work of a stereotypical man of the house -- fixing broken appliances, hanging Christmas lights, grilling steak.
To be an amanuensis is, by the way, anything but a passive act. After all, there wouldn't be enough time in the world if you had to tell your own hands what to do in every situation: reach for the coffee cup, close that finger around its handle, bring it to your mouth. In the same way, an amanuensis must anticipate needs, prepare tools, and know when something's missing.
And this sense that something was missing -- honed from my years with my father -- was growing in me as I looked at the artwork and thought about those responses. It was the midsummer of 2017 and the exhibit was set to open in the fall. The file cabinets in my office were filled with paintings, overflowing into piles on the floor that came up to my shins. After the struggle to pry those artworks out of Guanta'namo, I didn't know how to say that one piece should be seen by the world and another should stay a prisoner in some dark drawer.
Freedom of the Seas
So I asked again -- this time by emailing Mansoor Adayfi, a former detainee working on a memoir about his time at Guanta'namo. He explained that the cells of detainees were right by the sea. They could smell and hear the surf, but because tarps blocked their view, they could never see it. Only once, when a hurricane was coming, had the guards removed those tarps from the fences that separated them from the water. A few days later, when they went back up, the artist-inmates began to draw pictures of the sea as a substitute for what they had glimpsed during that brief moment of visual freedom.
Suddenly, those endless visions of water -- that is, of freedom -- made sense to me. And I understood something else as well. Guanta'namo is a system designed to paint the men it holds as monsters, animals, sub-humans who don't deserve basic rights like fair trials. That was the reason those prisoners were speaking, but not speaking, in their art. Why would they say anything that risked a further fall from whatever precarious hold on humanity they still had?
They hoped someday to be released, which was unlikely to happen if the authorities became convinced that they bore any anger towards the United States. And even release would not mean freedom of speech, since they would be sent to countries that had agreed to host them. Dependent on the good graces of these governments, they would continue to live constrained lives in constrained circumstances, needing never to offend these new sets of authorities either.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
