Take my blood.
Take my shroud and
The remnants of my body.
Take photographs of my corpse at the grave, lonely.
Send them to the world,
To the judges and
To the people of conscience,
Send them to the principled men and the fair-minded.
And let them bear the guilty burden, before the world,
Of this innocent soul.
Let them bear the burden, before their children and
before the history,
Of this wasted, sinless soul,
Of this soul which has suffered at the hands of the “protectors of peace”.
(Jumah al Dossari)
Jumah al Dossari, a thirty-three-year-old Bahraini national, is the father of a Young daugther. He has been held at Guantánamo Bay for more tan five years. In addition to being detained without charge or trial, Dossari has been subjected to a range of physical and psychological abuses, some of which are detailed in Inside the Wire, an account of the Guantánamo prison by former military intelligence soldier Erik Saar. He has been held in solitary confinement since the end of 2003 and, according to the U.S. military, has tried to kill himself twelve times while in the prison. On one occasion, he was found by his lawyer, hangingby his neck and bleeding from a gash to his arm.
Yo soy el tiempo
“I can wait longer than you, because I am Time”. So writes Salvador González Escalona, the recently deceased Cuban artist, in one of his murals in Callejón de Hamel, in Havana. And it is from here that the new project Occupy w.c. starts, whose performance is based on the idea that the Time Escalona talks about is Poetry.
Poetry now takes on a new form thanks to two other Cuban artists, Alexander Beatón Galano, Pedro Gutiérrez Torres and José Ramón Sánchez Leyva, who have accepted our invitation to talk about their creative world. Poetry that talks about Cuba. Today.
Beatón Galano (1968) develops a discourse focused on identity in the contemporary world. In his works, identity is nothing more than the context of inevitable relationships, a concept-space in perpetual analysis and redefinition.
José Ramón Sánchez (1972) is a rational and at the same time instinctive poet. His poetics is guided by the sound of words that carry with them an intrinsic meaning. He writes historical, social, and political verse.
Both born in Guantanamo, they confront the political and social reality of a place strongly affected by the presence of the American military base. But their thought becomes space for broader reflections, for ideas that, despite the contradictions of everyday life, look to the future with a strong awareness of the need to constantly redefine the paradigms of communication and coexistence. (Marcello Simeone)