“There are places on this earth where color has absconded.” One man’s protest against force-feeding at the Guantanamo detention camp.
I wrote this poem after seeing a photo of my friend Andrés Thomas Conteris voluntarily submitting to nasogastric feeding in front of the White House in Washington DC on October 18th 2013. Andrés had been on hunger strike for over two months at this point, protesting against the force-feeding of prisoners who were also on hunger strike in the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. Around him, supporters dressed in the orange of Guantanamo uniforms bore the names of some of those prisoners.
While Andrés is himself a native of Wisconsin, his mother’s family is from Uruguay, where his aunt and uncle were tortured in the 1970s and 1980s by the US-backed dictatorship that was initiated by President Jorge Pacheco in 1968.
In the tradition of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Andrés chose to put his body on the line in an act of nonviolent resistance against a blatant abuse of human and civil rights. He was risking his health on behalf of people he did not know, and with whom few others were willing to take a stand – except a handful of human rights lawyers and activists.
When I saw it online, this image shocked me. I could not continue with my day. My friend was in obvious pain, and he was terribly emaciated. What moved me was the shock of truly taking in the suffering of another person, followed by the urgent desire to do something – anything – to alleviate that pain. So I wrote this poem.
my friend went on hunger strike
he sits outside a white house
beside a syringe of white liquid
held high against a white sky
he is fifty pounds lighter
than the last time we met
I’m thinking of going on hunger strike, he bellowed
over the clatter of beats and glasses
after 61 days in the desert
his head crooked like an infant
or a very old man
a white-clad doctor
pipes white food
into his nostril
there are hands on his thinness
and eyes on his face
but his are closed
to color
it feels like endless agony, he says
it feels like drowning
orange friends
wearing unwhite names
wield signs that speak of barbed wire &
another orange man
head buried in black
kneeling on colorless dirt
against a colorless wall
106 stopped eating
56 fed by force
10 years without charge or trial
speech in solitary
assembly dismembered
all that remains
is what it takes to refuse
daybreak and seed and rain
white was the manna
God dropped from the sky
wafers and honey on the tongue
yet kept overnight it stank
grew frantic with maggots
there are places on this earth where
color has absconded
and sky holds its breath
there are places where food is
a syringe of white liquid
and in it
you drown
My friend went on hunger strike | openDemocracy.