ABJECTION AND SUBJECTIVITY IN MANSOOR ADAYFI’S DON'T FORGET US HERE: LOST AND FOUND AT GUANTÁNAMO AND ALBERT WOODFOX’S SOLITARY
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Date
2025-02-03
Authors
Nagham Hatem Mustafa Hodrob
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Publisher
جامعة النجاح الوطنية
Abstract
Drawing on Foucault's writings on prison, Judith Butler's concepts of precarity, precariousness and vulnerability as highlighted in her writings on Guantanamo’s "indefinite detainees," Kristeva's concept of the abject, Lacan’s doctrine of the gaze, and Agamben's concept of "bare life", in addition to the theoretical frameworks of Elaine Scarry, this thesis explores the dehumanization and the abjection of prisoners and the defensive mechanisms they adopt to resist the abject identities forced upon them by the American government in Mansoor Adayfi’s, a former Guantanamo detainees, memoir, Don't forget us here: lost and found at Guantánamo (2021), a memoir that documents Mansour's imprisonment in Guantánamo and the brutal strategies that the US government used to terrorize Guantanamo detainees. In addition to Adayfi’s memoir, this thesis examines Albert Woodfox’s Solitary in which he recounts his experience as a minority, Black American, within the American penal system, and the methods the prison system uses to control and silence those behind its walls. As the memoirs highlight, the American government uses interpellative abject terms that dehumanize and strip prisoners of their rights, or, in Agamben's words, reduce them to bare lives. In addition to this linguistic violence, the government uses torture so as to dispossess their subjectivity and agency. In such a context, the memoirs highlight the disruption of the ethical responsiveness of the guards towards prisoners which are assimilated as art of the imprisoning self that consolidates itself by humiliating and dehumanizing the other, that is, the prisoners. However, as Foucault puts it, power and oppression gives way to resistance. In other words, the prisoners, as these literary works emphasize, are conscious of the prison guards' humiliating treatment of them, resort to an array of defensive, corporeal strategies – hunger strike, writing, protests – so as to claim authority and subjectivity.