Don't Forget Us Here
Hardback
Lost and Found at Guantanamo
At the age of 18, Mansoor Adayfi left his home in Yemen for a cultural mission to Afghanistan. He never returned. Kidnapped by warlords and then sold to the US after 9/11, he was disappeared to Gauntanamo Bay, where he spent the next 15 years as Detainee #441.
In the vein of Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone, Don't Forget Us Here tells two coming-of-age stories in parallel: a makeshift island outpost becoming the world's most notorious prison and an innocent young man emerging from its darkness. Arriving as a stubborn teenager, Mansoor survived the camp's infamous interrogation program and became a feared and hardened resistance fighter leading prison riots and hunger strikes. With time though, he grew into the man prisoners nicknamed "Smiley Troublemaker": a student, writer, historian, and dedicated pop culture fan. With unexpected warmth and empathy, he unwinds a narrative of fighting for hope and survival in unimaginable circumstances, illuminating the limitlessness of the human spirit.And through his own story as well as those who were there with him--detainees and guards--Mansoor also tells Gauntanamo's story, offering an unprecedented window into one of the most secretive places on earth. Putting a human face on the Gauntanamo we know from the news, as well as showing the side we never see--the art, the community, the joyful reclamation of stolen humanity--this book reconstructs the camp's history in human terms, bearing witness to the lives lost and destroyed there.Twenty years later, Gauntanamo remains open. At a moment of due reckoning, Mansoor helps us understand what actually happened there--both the horror and the beauty--offering a vital chronicle of an experience we cannot afford to forget.Buy now!
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- ISBN: 9780306923869
- Author: Mansoor Adayfi
- Pub date: 11.01.22
- RRP: $70.00
- Format: Hardback
Author
Mansoor Adayfi
Mansoor Adayfi is a writer and former Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp detainee, held for over 14 years without charges as an enemy combatant. Adayfi was released to Serbia in 2016, where he struggles to make a new life for himself and to shed the designation of a suspected terrorist. Today, Mansoor Adayfi is a writer and advocate with work published in the New York Times, including a column the Modern Love column "Taking Marriage Class at Guantanamo" and the op-ed "In Our Prison by the Sea." He wrote the introduction, "Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantanamo Bay," for the 2017-2018 exhibition of prisoners' artwork at the John Jay College of Justice in New York City, and contributed to the scholarly volume, Witnessing Torture, published by Palgrave.
In 2018, Adayfi participated in the creation of the award-winning radio documentary The Art of Now for BBC radio about art from Guantanamo and the CBC podcast Love Me, which aired on NPR's Snap Judgment. Regularly interviewed by international news media about his experiences at Guantanamo and life after, he was also featured in Out of Gitmo, a mini-documentary and part of PBS's Frontline series. Work from his memoir was recently featured at a public reading at the Edinburgh Book Festival along with work by Guantanamo Diary author Mohamedou Ould Slahi. His graphic narrative, Caged Lives, was by The Nib and will be included in the anthology Guantanamo Voices. In 2019, he won the Richard J. Margolis Award for nonfiction writers of social justice journalism.Antonio Aiello is a writer, editor, and storyteller working in print, digital, and broadcast formats. He worked closely with Mansoor to help develop the manuscripts written at Guantanamo into Don't Forget Us Here. Together, they are working to develop a TV show inspired by the book as Fellows in the Sundance Institute's prestigious Episodic Lab.