This is one of this month, May's, selections, from poetsagainstwar. You can visit them at http://poetsagainstthewar.org.

Jumah

You’ve attempted suicide twelve times and now you’re on another hunger strike. Strapped into a restraint chair, a feeding tube forced up your nose, down your throat, and into your stomach, you scream. Officials at Guantánamo pump you full of liquid nutrients and laxatives and keep you in the chair until you shit yourself. A soldier tells you he is sorry. You thank him. He doesn’t want your thanks. He says he wants you to know that we’re not all bad. Another soldier cries. These are examples, you write in a letter your lawyer smuggles out of Camp Delta, to show the reader that there are some soldiers who have humanity… The chair in which you’re lashed, Jumah, was made by someone who lives in a small town near where I live. I drive there. Is anything happening in Denison? I ask the woman behind the desk at the Budget Inn.

Not that I know of, she says, handing me a key.

It is unusually cold for early September in Iowa. I’m shivering in my thin Shut Down Guantánamo T-shirt.

I sleep in my clothes, wake at eight, check out of my room, and breakfast at the Trio Café across from Landscapes Unlimited, a cement lawn ornament store on Denison’s main drag — Lincoln Highway. Inside, the walls are decorated with paintings of animals dressed in hunting caps with guns. There are papers at the counter. On the front page of the Sioux City Journal is a photo of Iraqis burning an effigy of the Pope. I order an English muffin and coffee.

Everyone here knows each other — it’s obvious by the way they talk and joke. I pretend to read the paper, but really I’m eavesdropping. At one table, a woman talks about her mother: I tried her cell phone and she ain’t answering. She’s got half-timers — forgets half of what you tell her.

The other talk is of cutting hay, the price of houses, and of living in the country where you don’t have to see your neighbors.

The first person I say more than a few words to in Denison is dressed in a blue vest. I meet her at Thrifty White, a drug store in the city center. No, we don’t stock film, she apologizes. It expires before we can sell it and everyone shoots digital these days. She has shockingly blue eyes and her white hair is cut short. I ask if she’s lived here long. Forty-two years.

She tells me she moved here to bury her first husband. Then she met her second one. I ask if she knows Tom Hogan, the man who made the chair in which you’re presently being tortured, Jumah. He’s a super guy, Jan says. Someone told me he was a general in the military! Heard him on the radio this morning talking about the storm. Have you been out to his house and seen his chairs? I used to live next door to him. He should be down at the sheriff’s office now. I’m sure he’ll talk to you.

I exit the Thrifty White and stroll past the coming attractions window at the Reed Theater on Broadway. The Odd Will Get Even, the displayed movie poster reads. I continue on, stepping around a construction site and a wooden billboard announcing the birth of a new jail. At the police station, a man on the other side of a thick window buzzes me in. I climb the stairs and answer a thin woman’s what do you want? Minutes later, I’m shaking hands with Tom Hogan.

Jumah, the reason I’m telling you all this is the same reason I keep writing you letters that keep getting returned, some ripped open, others unread, all of the envelopes stamped refused: because my not writing would imply writing doesn’t matter, and I cannot stand such a thought. Even if what I write is simply a record of barbarism (as Walter Benjamin maintains there is no cultural document that is not at the same time a record of barbarism), it is still a record. Ultimately, though, I know the real issue is whether such records are read and responded to… Did you know, Jumah, that when asked for a nonviolent solution to WWII, Mahatma Gandhi proposed that those imprisoned in camps commit suicide to show the others outside what they claimed they couldn’t see, and that thereafter George Orwell stated such nonviolent forms of protest depend upon a sane society — a society in which people respond to what they see morally?

Gandhi is my hero. I’m a pacifist, but not always. Bear with me because it’s gruesome, but if I believe in my cause enough to pour gasoline over my enemy’s women and children and set them on fire — because that’s what war is — then I’ll do it, Tom Hogan tells me.

I sit across from him in his office above the county jail, hunched in my thick, zipped-up, hooded sweatshirt, as he winds a rubber band around his hand, then rubs it back and forth across the desk that has on it a six-inch model pig next to a piece of bullet-shattered glass. Named after what slaughterhouse workers call aggressive pigs, ‘The Biting Sow Award’ is Hogan’s way of rewarding those who admit their petty professional mistakes. He places the pig with its one ear cocked, obscenely turned up snout, and ridiculous grin, on officers’ desks whenever they confess to bending a police car fender, say, or forgetting a bullet proof vest at a crime scene. The sow came back to bite Hogan, though, when he got a speeding ticket in a neighboring county this February.

Hogan is talking about what he calls ‘plausible deniability.’ He tells me he hopes that if he lived next door to Auschwitz he wouldn’t ignore the suffering. I say I’ve come to ask him the same questions I am asking myself about the roles we play in other peoples’ suffering because I can’t sit in my room fearing that people are being tortured and not do something. I’m not sure I believe in a just war, I say. I don’t think I could set fire to anybody. I believe in protest. But I’m not sure it works anymore. Anyway, everyone should be allowed at least this human right, especially those detained at Guantánamo.

The problem is, Hogan argues, protest does work. Look at Gandhi. If he was alive, I bet he’d wish he hadn’t done what he did. He’d want the British back there. And if Martin Luther King had lived, he would have thought, ‘What did I do?!’ when he saw the Watts Riots —

I disagree, I say. I think ‘those people,’ — I mark the quotations in the air with my fingers — are happy to have their independence!

Ha, Hogan snorts. Then what about the Iraqis?

Do they have independence? I ask. Or an occupied country?

I think prisoners should be allowed to protest. But as soon as they’re in danger, we should intervene. If those chairs did help save lives, I’m proud, Hogan smiles.

It all began when a colleague broke his own arm trying to restrain someone. Anytime you restrain someone there’s a risk, Hogan explains.

He lists examples. When he gets to the hog tie, he acts it out for me. It’s where you cuff the arms and then tuck the legs behind them like this. The hog tie can asphyxiate. So we made the chair.

We? I ask.

My wife and I. Then hospitals wanted it. I said okay. I could see the need. Then the military wanted it —

I interrupt to ask whether he’ll continue to sell the chair to the military given twenty-five of his chairs have ended up at Guantánamo. He doesn’t answer. Instead he says, Commandant Hood at called me the other day and said, ‘I bet you never got a call from Cuba before.’ Then he told me, ‘I just want to let you know we’re not torturing anybody down here.’ That made me feel better. I slept better that night.

Let me put it another way. If you knew absolutely that the chair was being used to torture, would you stop selling it? I ask him.

I’d like to believe I am good. We all have good and bad in us. You never know. I’m a capitalist. But I deplore torture. I think any time you demean or humiliate someone that’s torture and we should uphold the Geneva Conventions every single one. As soon as you say you can waterboard, it’s a slippery slope. But you see I’m not sure how my chair’s being used.

I look out the window to my left. The day has turned overcast.

In Denison’s basement jail Hogan shows me the chair. An exact replica of the one you’re in now, Jumah, it sits against the block wall looking like a weight-lifting bench someone’s folded in half. We walk over to it and Hogan reads me the warning rubber-banded to the chair handle, underlining each word with his finger. Then he says, A mentally ill person told me it should have padding and be painted blue, so we changed it. She said, ‘I didn’t think you would listen to me because I’m mentally ill,’ but I said, ‘I think you’re the person we should be listening to.’

A guard leads a young woman in an orange uniform into a cell directly to the left of where Hogan and I are standing. I watch as the prisoner unfolds a black blanket and wraps it around her shoulders. Have you heard of an autistic woman who designed a restraint chair like yours to calm herself? I ask Hogan.

No, I haven’t, he says. Then he turns to the guard. Do you remember the prisoner who used to ask to be put in the chair? We would tell him, ‘No, you have to be violent to be put in the chair,’ and he’d say, ‘I’ll get violent then!’ He would beg for it?

If you’re talking about the same person I’m thinking of, I think it was a mental problem, the guard nods. He’d sit there and he’d fight it a little. Then he’d say, ‘Okay, I feel better now.’

The restraint chair breaks your hunger strike, Jumah. You aren’t near death. They don’t force feed you to save you, even though Hogan says he designed the chair to help save lives. I study the photograph taken of you before you were detained. Dressed in a blue sweater, you hold a pencil to your mouth as you talk on the phone. I study your ruffled brown hair and averted eyes and imagine smoking cigarettes with you in a garden and talking about books. I’m not sure why I feel close to you, close enough to imagine a correspondence. Perhaps, initially, it was seeing this photo in which you seem so like me — because this snapshot portrays the recognizable need you, too, have to communicate. I have read your prison narrative.

I have read, As I hold my pen, my hand is shaking; I have read of your being urinated on, Jumah, of your being made to walk barefoot on barbed wire, forced to breathe chemical odors, stripped of clothes and left naked with no pillow, no mattress, only the cold metal of a cage. I have read of petrol injected into your penis and of the time your lawyer came and you excused yourself, made a noose, and jumped from the sink in the restroom. No one, Jumah, should be shackled to the ground beneath a naked, menstruating female guard. No one. How, in the face of this, can I write to you? And of what can I write? Of the color of the sweater I am wearing — pale-green?

Topsy

In 1903, we used electricity to put you to death after you killed three men in three years. At first it was thought you — a ten foot tall, twenty foot long, domesticated Indian elephant — would publicly hang, but an animal rights organization protested. Hanging, they insisted, was cruel and inhumane. Electrocution had recently replaced the gallows in New York State (after a dentist proposed the idea that death by electrocution was neither cruel nor painful), so it was decided that you, too, should ‘humanely’ fry. First you were fed carrots poisoned with cyanide. Then you were dressed in copper shoes, covered with electrodes, and led to a special platform on Coney Island where you’d lived and performed for a number of years.

In ten seconds you were dead. One thousand five hundred people gathered to watch and Thomas Edison caught it all on film.

The most obviously devastating footage in Mr. Death — a documentary about Fred Leuchter, electric chair specialist and Holocaust denier — is its appropriation of Edison’s short film of your electrocution. In it, you prance. There is a sense in your mammothness of your superiority. Then rope-like fasteners are strung to your unsuspecting body. (On the chairs Leuchter both oversees and rebuilds, such fasteners are referred to as non-incremental restraint systems and are fashioned out of nylon.) Ultimately, you jerk and collapse, hide smoking.

Leuchten, in German, means to be lit or shining. Leuchter is a chandelier. Leuchter, the man, traveled to Auschwitz for his honeymoon and chipped away at gas chambers while his wife waited for him in the car. I don’t know that we ever slept in the same bed there, Leuchter’s wife comments in Mr. Death.

Their relationship didn’t last. Leuchter doesn’t speak of this in Mr. Death, but talks instead about the electric chair and how messy it is. People, he says, urinate and defecate in the chair. As urine is a conductor, his job, he argues, is to make sure the persons doing the electrocuting don’t also get electrocuted.

Mr. Death plays on my computer, but I’m not watching. I am on my back on the floor of my Colonial Terrace apartment in Iowa City, studying the ceiling. Leuchter’s monotone babbling is frightening: How do I sleep at night? I sleep very well at night knowing these persons are going to have a humane execution…

What is humane, Topsy? Is it shooting prisoners full of electricity so they can suffer less when it comes to their state-determined deaths? I think of your life — of the domesticating done to you, and I see you being led to the special platform where they electrocuted you all the more clearly. They tricked you. You thought you were performing and you pranced. I rewind Mr. Death to your electrocution. You are luminous. The film is silent, shot as if in a state of moral and emotional anesthesia.

It plays on