'Literary Justice? Poems from Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp'

• “Literary justice? Poems from Guantánamo Bay Prison Camp” (in: Trials of Trauma: Comparative and Global Perspectives, Special Issue of Comparative Literature Studies, Michael G. Levine, Bella Brodzki, eds., 2011)

Summary

The essay proposes a reading of a text by Shoshana Felman in conjunction with poems written by prisoners at Guantánamo Bay Prison Camp. Felman distinguishes between “literary justice” and “legal justice”. The essay argues that at Guantánamo, the refusal of legal justice goes hand in hand with the impossibility of literary justice. The American government has censured tens of thousands of lines of poetry written in the prison camp because they present, in the eyes of the administration, a “heightened risk to national security”. The government has also “disappeared” the original languages of these poems: only the translations by “linguists with security clearance” of two dozen poems was authorized and published. The essays demonstrates how these measures of the American government confirm some of Jacques Derrida’s theses concerning the “irreducibility of the idiom” and the fundamental possibility of the idiom’s untranslatability as the structural condition of witnessing. The essay then proposes the interpretation of two of the poems.