Archive of detainee artwork

Editorial note: The 228 paintings and drawings that appear in the link below are published in Jacket2 as part of “FOIA Request #SC 15–102-S: The Detainee Library,” Jordan Scott and Stephen Voyce’s feature devoted to obtaining a list of contents held at the library at the US Guantánamo Bay detention camp on the coast of Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. The library archive is a record of those materials that are, as Scott and Voyce write in this feature, “what for many detainees is their only exposure to books and films over a fifteen-year period of incarceration, torture, and isolation. Most of these texts are written in English, while the library contains smaller selections of works in Arabic, Bahasa, French, and Urdu.” These 228 paintings and drawings were created by those imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay. — Julia Bloch

Click here to view the archive.

May 31, 2019

About this feature

“FOIA request #SC 15–102-S: The Detainee Library,” a collection of materials curated by Jordan Scott and Stephen Voyce, emerges from their engagements with the Freedom of Information Act, which since 1967 has given the public a method of requesting access to records from any US federal agency, including records held by the US Department of Defense relating to the military prison at Guantánamo Bay. Scott and Voyce used FOIA to petition for access to two archives: the catalog of materials held in the detainees’ library at Guantánamo Bay, and the records related to artworks produced by Guantánamo Bay prisoners. This Jacket2 feature includes the six hundred unclassified pages that lists books and films in English, Arabic, Bahasa, French, and Urdu, as well as approximately 228 paintings and drawings by inmates included in the Detainee Art Gallery, in addition to correspondence relating to the FOIA request and a preface collaboratively written by Scott and Voyce.

Preface

Jordan Scott

Stephen Voyce

Letter from the Department of Defense

Guantánamo Bay library catalog

Archive of detainee artwork

Cry me a makar

On translating Lorca into Shaetlan

Christie Williamson

“Only if you want to, and it might not work, but do you think you could translate some of the poems into Shetlandic?” I’d been writing poems fairly consistently in Shaetlan for two or three years by this point, but my primary creative outlet remained theatre. Still, it was too good an idea not to pursue. I knew Shaetlan and knew how to write a decent poem in it. The García Lorca poems whose English translations we’d been giving voice to were extraordinary so, why not? What could possibly go wrong?

“I’ve got a suggestion for you. Can I buy you a glass of wine?” The answer to that question is always yes. We were in rehearsal for Lorca’s Shadow, a devised theatre piece by Moving Parts Theatre Company, and this suggestion from Corinne Harris, the play’s director, was to change the course of my life.

December 5, 2024

The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

Becca Klaver

Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

November 19, 2024