02 Oct / Guantánamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison by Sarah Mirk [in Booklist]
*STARRED REVIEW
For this project 10 years in the making, journalist/writer Sarah Mirk gathered a diverse dozen comic artists; fellow journalist/writer Omar El Akkad (American War, 2017), who provides the searing introduction; and historian/journalist Andy Worthington (The Guantánamo Files, 2007), who contributes fact-checked accuracy. Together, this creative village exposes the surreal inhumanity and documents the humane attempts at justice-seeking for the so-called “detainees” in the “detention facility” known as Guantánamo.
Mirk transforms her “original interviews,” combined with additional interviews from Columbia University’s Rule of Law project, into a disturbing eyewitness account of unprecedented violations, abuses, flagrant disregard of both the U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment (“the right to a speedy and public trial”) and the Geneva Conventions’ Article 103, which limits pre-trial confinement. Confronting U.S. officials and employees, tormented prisoners held without charge, attorneys, and activists, interviews are turned by Mirk’s collaborating artists into affecting, often gruesome panels (the palette cleverly pre-determined to “evoke the surreal contrast” between Guantánamo’s beauty and the horrors within).
Beyond the interview chapters, supplementary content – map, facts, timeline, survivor Abu Zubaydah’s original sketches of torture, Guantánamo gift shop (!) photos, exhaustive sources – further unmasks the abominations, amplified by the fact that Guantánamo remains an active facility. “We created an entire new legal system for brown men,” prisoners’ attorney Alka Pradhan starkly contends. “If these were white men from France or Germany, there is no way Guantánamo would exist.”
Review: “Graphic Novels,” Booklist, September 1, 2020
Readers: Adult
Published: 2020