PESHAWAR: Among the old leather volumes in the library of Abdul Rahim Muslim Dost is a black plastic binder full of rumpled letters he wrote, sent from the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, reports Washington Post.
At the bottom of each form is a perfunctory salutation. The rest is taken up with the poems that helped Dost keep his sanity during nearly three years of confinement. “Bangle bracelets befit a pretty young woman,” begins one of the poems. “Handcuffs befit a brave young man.” The letters were one in a series of measures the Afghan-born author said he took to record the torrent of imagery and insights that flooded his brain nearly every day of his captivity.
At first, deprived of paper and pen, Dost memorised his best lines or scribbled them secretly on paper cups. Later, he was supplied with writing materials and made up for lost time by producing reams of poems and essays — only to have all but a few of the documents confiscated by the US government upon his release..
“Why did they give me a pen and paper if they were planning to do that?” Dost asked last week with evident anguish. “Each word was like a child to me — irreplaceable.””
Dost was back in his library on Friday. It was just two days after the US government had delivered him and 15 other former prisoners to Afghan authorities. As soon as he was freed, Dost headed east to Peshawar, his home since the 1980s. (more)
Many of us say that we write poetry because we have to, but this man truly DID have to write to survive. He remained sane thanks to his poetry. It may be too much to ask the troglodytes who run Gitmo to return the pieces of his soul that they have stolen from him, but we can hope they will. That's what makes us poets, I guess.
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