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Published on 7/25/08
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In Dieckmann’s short novel, Rashid is a 20-year-old half-Indian, half-German kid, bright-eyed and intelligent. On a trip to India to meet his grandmother, he befriends a young Afghan named Mirgul who, like most young Afghans we imagine, was politicized at a still younger age. Rashid joins him at an anti-U.S. rally in Peshawar, the Pakistani town on the edge of the volatile Khyber Pass region. While there, Rashid’s arrested, thrown onto one of America’s infamous rendition flights, and he finds himself imprisoned at Guantánamo.
The action comes to us in a fever haze through Rashid’s confusion at finding himself bound and naked among other new prisoners, many of them severely injured and screaming. One moment he’s on a train to Kathmandu and reading a Lonely Planet travel guide, the next he’s facedown in the Peshawar mud, raising his head just enough to make out the crease of a military uniform. In prison, Rashid is an alien twice over, surrounded by devout Muslims whose convictions he doesn’t share. Though the Koran is often presented to him as an alternative, he’s unable to find solace in it. “It’s a book of fairy tales for children and old or stupid people,” he thinks. “It has no place in a prison.”
Dieckmann plucks much of the prison’s machinations—the variegated tortures, indignities and pains suffered by Rashid—from actual accounts of America’s War on Terror, from both Gitmo and Abu Ghraib. Originally released in the author’s native Germany, where it’s been hailed as a modern classic, Guantanamo is a harrowing work of fiction. While the staging is taken from the newspapers, it’s in her imagining of Rashid’s internal life that we see the true power of her fiction. While non-fiction books on this topic proliferate, it’s Dieckmann’s novel that takes us deepest into the personal horror of the modern American gulag.
Guantanamo clocks in at a slight 150 pages. But it plays out like an extended nightmare as we watch Rashid’s psychological state fracture, and his imprisonment works him over with both a scalpel’s precision and a sledgehammer’s blunt brutality.—Jonathan Messinger
