Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First Century Theater

Global Perspectives

F. Becker, P. Hernández, B. Werth, F. Becker, P. Hernández, B. Werth

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137027108
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

There is extraordinary diversity, depth, and complexity in the encounter between theatre, performance, and human rights. Through an examination of a rich repertoire of plays and performance practices from and about countries across six continents, the contributors open the way toward understanding the character and significance of this encounter.

SECTION II

THE “WAR ON TERROR” AND THE GLOBAL ECONOMIC ORDER

CHAPTER 5

PLACE AND MISPLACED RIGHTS IN GUANTÁNAMO: HONOR BOUND TO DEFEND FREEDOM

Lindsey Mantoan

Contemporary documentary theatre represents a struggle to shape and remember the most transitory history—the complex ways in which men and women think about the events that shape the landscapes of their lives.

—Carol Martin¹

“The purpose of holding the prisoners at Guantánamo Bay was and is to put them beyond the rule of law, beyond the protection of any courts.”² These words, part of a speech Britain’s Lord Justice Johan Steyn delivered in 2003 exhorting the British judiciary to condemn publicly the detention center at Guantánamo, indicate that the suspension of habeas corpus constitutes one of the fundamental problems with the facility and the policies the United States uses to authorize it.³ In 2004 London’s Tricycle Theatre Company included this quotation in its documentary play Guantánamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom. The explicitly political play, critiques the unlawful policies of the “war on terror” and in particular the US government’s practice of detaining “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo Bay and Britain’s complicity in these detentions. The detention center at Guantánamo stands as one of the most striking examples of US abandonment of its own rule of law as a consequence of committing the country to an indefinite and extralegal war on terror. This impoverished war establishes what Giorgio Agamben would call a “state of exception” where sovereign authority exceeds the rule of law for a period of unspecified duration under the guise of protection. The US government’s commitment to hide from public view the most vital policies of this new state, defined by the creation of new vocabulary that is not bounded by any clear endpoint, leaves us in “a permanent state of emergency.”⁴

Early drafts of this essay appeared in my master’s thesis, “Telling Stories: Documentary Theatre as Trauma Historiogrpahy,” and in a paper I presented at the American Society for Theatre Research’s 2009 Conference. I am indebted to Charlotte Canning, Ann Cvetkovich, Kathryn and Barbara Mantoan, and Jisha Menon for their insights on this work.

Although the debate about Guantánamo has shifted over time, from accusations about racial profiling as the primary method for detaining Arab men, to reports detailing torture, to the current dispute about what to do with the prisoners who have been granted release but have no state willing to take them in, the existence of a US military detention center located outside US civil jurisdiction and off US soil, profoundly changes the image and ideology of the United States. As Agamben explains, the “transformation of a provisional and exceptional measure into a technique of government threatens to radically alter—in fact has already palpably altered—the structure and meaning of the traditional distinction between constitutional forms.”⁵ The significance of Guantánamo implicates not only multiple democratic administrations but also the effectiveness of international law and perhaps even the future of constitutional democracy as a sustainable form of government. When prosecutors for the upcoming USS Cole and 9/11 trials continue to allege that the US Constitution does not apply to the detention facility at Guantánamo, they attempt to propagate a notion that some people’s lives don’t count and aren’t worthy of protection or humanitarian treatment. The existence of Guantánamo depends on the assertion that some individuals can be denied basic human rights—habeas corpus, the protections established by the Geneva Conventions—under the state of exception. The premise of universal human rights, however, is that they are undeniable, precede government recognition, and hold regardless of an individual’s associations, citizenship, or actions.

Although the play was written eight years ago, the problem of indefinite detentions continues. In April 2012, years after a federal US judge granted their release, two Chinese Muslim detainees were transferred out of the facility and relocated to El Salvador. These 2 transfers mark the first movement out of the prison in over 15 months, leaving 169 prisoners in the facility, 81 of whom have been granted release through the US judiciary.⁶ Negotiations to repatriate or relocate detainees classified as ready for release regularly fail, and a number of those detainees who have been granted freedom refuse to return to their country of origin for fear that they will be murdered immediately. Efforts by the Obama administration to resettle some detainees in the United States were met with political uproar and were quickly abandoned. Although the Obama administration announced in 2009 the creation of a new facility in Thomson, Illinois, and its intention to relocate detainees to US soil, Congress blocked funds for both construction on the Thomson Correctional Center and the transfer of any detainee out of Guantánamo.⁷ In December, 2011, Obama signed into law H.R. 1540, the “National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012,” a bill that, in addition to allocating funds for defense and the military, requires the United States to hold in military custody any non-US citizen captured by the US armed forces and renews the ban on funds to relocate Guantánamo detainees. Although in his press release regarding the bill Obama asserted that he continues to oppose this restriction, the restriction nonetheless continues, and so the prisoners at Guantánamo continue to be in indefinite detention in military custody.⁸

Guantánamo has to be dealt with. In the material sense, the US government must decide what to do with the prisoners still languishing in their metal cells. In the broader sense, Americans have an ethical responsibility to confront Guantánamo as a situation that has inflicted grievous injury to real people and as an institution that has altered the fabric of the country’s constitution. But it is not easy to address Guantánamo on these terms. For one, much about the detention center remains unknown; journalists and media outlets are systematically denied access to basic information about the facility; the rules that reporters must sign every time they enter the facility forbid them from speaking with detainees regardless of a prisoner’s status; and the military, the Pentagon, and the Defense Department censor photographs and reports.⁹ But more difficult and arguably more profound than this, Americans must deal with Guantánamo on a collective emotional level, considering it as a tragic event in the country’s history, in order to be able to forcefully advocate for due process and other basic human rights that the detainees have been denied so far.

As a documentary play, Guantánamo offers a compelling methodology for examining the detention center both as a policy that has blighted the rule of law and as a personal experience in the state of exception that is the war on terror. Written by journalist Victoria Brittain and novelist Gillian Slovo, the piece belongs to the Tricycle Theatre’s Tribunal Plays, theater about controversial historical events in which every character represents a real person and every word comes verbatim from interviews, letters, and public records. Since its first performance by Tricycle actors in London in 2004, various theater companies, non-profit human rights organizations, and communities of concerned citizens have produced Guantánamo as full-scale productions or staged readings in many major US cities and around the world.¹⁰ Tricycle gave a special performance to congressional staffers on Capitol Hill during the US tour of their production.¹¹ Through critiquing both their own government and the US government, the playwrights of Guantánamo offer rich material for evaluating how performance can engage with international and extranational events such as the war on terror in order to complicate the representations offered through mainstream media and inspire action and advocacy.

Guantánamo remains a remote space, shrouded in mystery, revealed only sporadically and partially by the hazy reports of journalists, which makes the institution easy to ignore or forget; Guantánamo demonstrates that however distant and unimaginable it may be for many of us, the experience of Guantánamo remains very real for those who survived detention there. The play presents haunting, personal accounts of five British residents held at Guantánamo after they were captured, interrogated, and extradited while the US government ignored their universal human rights. These narratives demonstrate the trauma of losing home, family, and the sense of self. By presenting these lives on stage, in detail, embodied by actors and witnessed by audiences trying to imagine being stripped of their humanity, performances of Guantánamo offer the live encounter as a method for recognizing fundamental human rights.

The play does have a few shortcomings, including its singular focus on innocent people sent to Guantánamo at the exclusion of any debate about the capture and detention of actual terrorists, and its failure to address torture. Nevertheless, through its form; its juxtaposition of place, citizenship, and rights; and its critique of the othering produced by indefinite detentions, Guantánamo stands as a powerful example of the influence performance can have on our understanding of human rights.

PLACE AND MISPLACED RIGHTS

Guantánamo foregrounds place as a vital weapon in and against the war on terror. The characters in the play critique the connections between place, citizenship, and rights in sophisticated ways that demonstrate that universal rights do not depend on a person’s nationality or geographical location. Further, performances of the play, like all live performances, draw attention to the importance of place; by bringing together a group of people in a particular location to participate in a live event, Guantánamo reminds audiences that places create community and proximity enables new connections to be forged. Productions of the play contrast the vitality of the performance space with the vast emptiness of Guantánamo.

Guantánamo relates in painful detail the nightmare five British men lived through immediately before, during, and after their detention. Gambian Secret Service captured Wahab and Bisher Al-Rawi, two brothers who had planned to set up a mobile peanut oil processing plant in Gambia, and subjected them to British, US, and Gambian interrogation. They released Wahab within a month, but transferred Bisher first to Bagram Air Base and later to Guantánamo. Moazzam Begg had been in Afghanistan installing water pipes in villages and trying to start a school when the US air raids began and he moved his family to Pakistan. He was arrested shortly thereafter and taken to Kandahar, then Bagram, then Guantánamo. Jamal Al-Harith was captured in Pakistan where he had been on Tabligh, which he has described as a trip to learn more about a religion and the people who practice it. Ruhel Ahmed’s story in the play begins with him already detained at Guantánamo, writing letters to his family requesting contact lenses and solution so that he can see properly. If his family sends these items, he never receives them.

Some of these men are British subjects, and some are immigrants already displaced from their native country by violence and political upheaval. These men, then, already challenge the facile connections among citizenship...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Foreword: Postnational Theater Studies
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Imagining Human Rights in Twenty-First-Century Theater
• Section I: Transitional Justice and Civil Society
• Section II: The “War on Terror” and the Global Economic Order
• Section III: Transnational Publics
• Bibliography
• Notes on Contributors
• Index