An important record of prisoner mistreatment as a national reckoning over Guantánamo continues to loom.
A farmer’s son from rural Yemen recounts his harrowing 14-year imprisonment at Guantánamo Bay.
Adayfi’s first-person narrative, co-written by Aiello, focuses on the internal ordeal of a young man (18 at the beginning of his imprisonment) who was sold by Afghan warlords to the Americans as a jihadi after 9/11. Sent on a “special job” to Afghanistan by a sheik at the Dar al-Hadith Islamic institute in Sana’a, where Adayfi studied in the spring of 2001, he was seized, shackled, blindfolded, tortured, and flown to Guantánamo Bay, where the U.S. government had recently created the notorious Camp X-Ray for alleged terrorists. Much of this straightforward, grief-stricken chronicle is an alternately solemn and gruesome account of the horrendous daily treatment of the prisoners, which included genital searches, interrogations, beatings, sensory deprivation, and desecration of their Qurans. That last indignity sometimes led to resistance in the form of hunger strikes, and Adayfi continually emphasizes the lack of respect, especially for the prisoners’ faith. Branded one of the worst troublemakers, the author was assumed to be a middle-aged Egyptian al-Qaida operative named Adel. Consequently, he suffered a decade of solitary confinement. Like many others, he was never assigned a lawyer or properly accused, and he was subject to endless, repetitive interrogation: “Another team replaces the FBI, and then another replaces them. DIA, MI, CIA, NYPD—you don’t know what any of the names mean or who they are, but you ask over and over, ‘Where am I and why am I here?’ They respond with all the same questions.” With Barack Obama’s promise to close the facility, hope emerged and conditions improved (briefly). Adayfi learned English and finally received legal representation, and he was cleared by a review board for relocation to Serbia. “If I didn’t accept their offer…I could spend the rest of my life in Guantánamo,” writes the author near the end of this powerful book.
An important record of prisoner mistreatment as a national reckoning over Guantánamo continues to loom.Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-306-92386-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: June 9, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.
An Egyptian Canadian journalist writes searchingly of this time of war.
“Rules, conventions, morals, reality itself: all exist so long as their existence is convenient to the preservation of power.” So writes El Akkad, who goes on to state that one of the demands of modern power is that those subject to it must imagine that some group of people somewhere are not fully human. El Akkad’s pointed example is Gaza, the current destruction of which, he writes, is causing millions of people around the world to examine the supposedly rules-governed, democratic West and declare, “I want nothing to do with this.” El Akkad, author of the novel American War (2017), discerns hypocrisy and racism in the West’s defense of Ukraine and what he views as indifference toward the Palestinian people. No stranger to war zones himself—El Akkad was a correspondent in Afghanistan and Iraq—he writes with grim matter-of-factness about murdered children, famine, and the deliberate targeting of civilians. With no love for Zionism lost, he offers an equally harsh critique of Hamas, yet another one of the “entities obsessed with violence as an ethos, brutal in their treatment of minority groups who in their view should not exist, and self-decreed to be the true protectors of an entire religion.” Taking a global view, El Akkad, who lives in the U.S., finds almost every government and society wanting, and not least those, he says, that turn away and pretend not to know, behavior that we’ve seen before and that, in the spirit of his title, will one day be explained away until, in the end, it comes down to “a quiet unheard reckoning in the winter of life between the one who said nothing, did nothing, and their own soul.”
A philosophically rich critique of state violence and mass apathy.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593804148
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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