Arnon Grunberg

Stain

Tisch

‘Diyab has a suspicious look in his eyes. His years in prison have given his face a hard look. His T-shirt hangs loosely over his thin frame. Diyab is only 43, but his beard and his curly hair are already gray. He needs crutches because there are days when he has no sensation in the right side of his body. He believes this has something to do with worms that are eating their way through his stomach, or possibly the blows he received regularly before they forcibly inserted a tube into his nose, which was used to feed him when he refused to eat.
Over the course of eight years, he repeatedly went on hunger strikes in Guantanamo, because the Americans refused to tell what he was being charged with. Diyad was alleged to be part of an al-Qaida cell in Afghanistan, but he was never indicted. He still refused to eat after he was officially declared innocent in 2009, because he could no longer endure the years of waiting to be set free.
"I thought about it," says Diyad. "Forget what I said. Instead, get me an appointment with Dilma, the president of Brazil. I want to ask her to accept a few of my brothers."
The other former prisoners had warned us that Diyad was the most complicated man in their group, a loner who hatched strange ideas at night, while lying awake in his bed. What is going through his head, they wondered? Is he establishing rules because others always dictated them in years gone by? Is it about control, or dignity, or does his behavior stem from a feeling that the world owes him something?’

Marian Blasberg writes in Der Spiegel about former Guantánamo detainees in Montevideo, Uruguay – very much worth reading.

Read the article here.

‘Omar, who moved back into the house a few days ago because the union had stopped paying for the hotel, says that he has never kissed a woman, and that the yearning to do so eats away at him. He believes that a woman would help him to forget what happened to him. "But where should I look?" he asks. "Who needs a man like me?"
Mohammed is in his room, where he spends most of his time in bed with his laptop. He isn't keen on meeting with visitors from Germany.
In 2010, when Germany was negotiating the acceptance of three detainees with the United States, Mohammed was one of the candidates. The German government representatives met with him so many times that Mohammed believed they were serious. He even practiced his German with a dictionary his attorney had given him. He says a few German words -- "Tisch" (table) and "Stuhl" (chair). "I still haven't forgotten them," he adds.
At some point during those weeks in which Mohammed was waiting to finally be released, the communication with Germany was discontinued. It was only later that he learned that then Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière had decided to reduce the number of detainees from three to two, so that it wouldn't seem as if the Americans were taking advantage of him. "That disappointment was worse than anything else," says Mohammed.’

To help him forget, to help us forgot. Part of our lives we are trying to forget or we are looking for help to forget, some more than others.

The inability and unwillingness to find a solution for the remaining Guantánamo prisoners is a stain, and the stain is only getting bigger.

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