Detainees were not allowed to talk to each other, but we enjoyed looking at each other. The punishment for talking was hanging the detainee by his hands with the feet barely touching the ground.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the human desire for connection even in oppressive circumstances.
In this quote, Mohamedou Ould Slahi conveys the deep-seated need for interaction and connection among individuals, even when they are under severe restrictions. The harsh punishment for talking among detainees highlights the oppressive nature of their situation, yet the act of simply looking at each other suggests a shared humanity that persists despite confinement and suffering. It underscores the resilience of the human spirit and the importance of companionship in the face of adversity.
In practice
This quote could be used in a discussion about the importance of camaraderie in difficult times.
Everything a detainee says is classified. Detainees cannot talk to you. They cannot talk to anyone. They cannot challenge, in a meaningful way, their detention. All that is left is for people who survived Guantanamo Bay to speak for people who are left behind, and speak for those who are in so many Guantanamos, plural, in my part of the world.
I have never felt as violated in myself as I had since the DoD team started to torture me to get me admit to things I haven't done.
Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough, what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants.
I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I felt that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actor, kidding ourselves on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between those two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going.
Both life and death manifest in every moment of existence. Our human body appears and disappears moment by moment, without cease, and this ceaseless arising and passing away is what we experience as time and being. They are not separate. They are one thing, and in even a fraction of a second, we have the opportunity to choose, and to turn the course of our action either toward the attainment of truth or away from it. Each instant is utterly critical to the whole world.
Religion is of general and public concern, and on its support depend, in great measure, the peace and good order of government, the safety and happiness of the people.
If a jury have not the right to judge between the government and those who disobey its laws, and resist its oppressions, the government is absolute, and the people, legally speaking, are slaves.
Experience has taught me that the shallowest of communist platitudes contains more of a hierarchy of meaning than contemporary bourgeois profundity.
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