GUANTÁNAMO IMAGES AND IMAGINARIES Mansoor Adayfi Detainee Art Mansoor Adayfi was just 19 years old when he was captured and taken to Guantánamo Bay. After spending over 14 years unjustly detained without charge or trial, he was finally released from Guantánamo in 2016. He was forcibly transferred to Belgrade (Serbia), as the US for- bid him from returning to his home country of Yemen. Still living there today, he writes, stud- ies, creates artwork and advocates for prisoner and detainee rights. While Adayfi considers writing to be his true artistic calling—he has published a memoir about his time at Guan- tánamo titled Don’t Forget Us Here (Hachette Books, 2021) and is currently working on sec- ond book about his life after release, or what he calls Guantánamo 2.0—he also draws and paints, both practices he first picked up and developed during his years trapped at Guan- tánamo. In addition to contributing an inter- view for section one of the anthology about his life after Guantánamo, he also spoke to ECCHR about detainee art, both his own and that of others, for the Guantánamo Images and Imaginaries online exhibition. For Adayfi, art is an integral part of the story of Guantánamo. When the detainees arrived to Cuba, he explains, they spanned over 50 different nationalities and spoke over 20 lan- guages. Over years of shared experiences, they came to create common culture, reflected in music, poetry, prayer, dancing, drawing, paint- ing and other forms of art. For those detained, he says, art played a transformational role in preserving memories and identity, communi- cating with loved ones, and finding moments of freedom even within the walls of Guan- tánamo. “There was a great hunger for art and writing,” he notes. “To think the things that people take for granted every single day, just holding a pen, for us it was a form of freedom.” At first many detainees were not even allowed pens or paper, gaining only 20 minutes of ac- cess to these materials during intermittent vis- its from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Some would use this time to write poems or draw images, later flushing them down toilets so they would not be misinter- preted by guards. Through years of organizing and extensive hunger striking, detainees de- manded better conditions at Guantánamo, in- cluding communication with their families, health care, and classes—among the latter, an art class. Having to travel through checkpoints and in- vasive searches to reach the class, detainees were able to gain limited access to art supplies in short 45-minute blocks of time, such that a single painting could take months. Completed works of art then faced an uncertain fate, as military censorship could order the works de- stroyed. As Adayfi explains, “The art at Guan- tanamo suffered like us; it was treated as one of us, detained, tortured, abused, sentenced to death … and sometimes released.” Thanks to lawyers and allies in academia and the art world, small samples of the art created in Guantánamo have been shown in exhibitions around the world. “Art helped become like a therapy,” says Adayfi. “When you paint you are not in jail, you are not in shackles, you are not being chained to the floor. You are inside your paint- ing.” Adayfi asks us to imagine spending years in solitary confinement, subject to torture and abuse, totally disconnected from the world, from family, from everything. “When peo- ple started painting,” he says, “they found a way to escape out of Guantánamo, to go back to their previous lives, to themselves. So, art helped to connect us with ourselves, and con- nect us with the world outside.” 154