The Guantánamo Bay detention camp doesn’t seem like a great candidate for a comic book-style treatment. Using comics to tell stories about terrorism suspects who’ve been imprisoned for years and tortured?
Sarah Mirk, editor of the new book “Guantánamo Voices: True Accounts From the World’s Most Infamous Prison” (Abrams ComicArts, 208 pages, $24.99), an collection of illustrated interviews with 10 people with ties to Guantánamo, said comics have a unique power as a medium for such a dark and difficult subject.
“With comics, you’re actually seeing the drawing of a person’s face and seeing their clothes and seeing where they live,” Mirk said. That helps build empathy, especially for people “who have been thoroughly dehumanized,” she said.
Comics can also make a complicated story more accessible, said Mirk, a Portland-based digital engagement producer with the investigative reporting nonprofit Reveal.
“A lot of people will pick up a comic about something that they would never pick up a dense history book about,” Mirk said.
Mirk will discuss “Guantánamo Voices” with Omar El Akkad, a Portland author and journalist who’s also reported on Guantánamo, and two of the 12 artists, Kane Lynch and Hazel Newlevant, during a Powell’s Books virtual event at 6 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 8. The Zoom webinar is free; registration is required.
Newlevant illustrated two sections about Mirk that bookend “Guantánamo Voices,” including an introduction that explains how Mirk became interested in the prison in the first place. Mirk said her target readers are people who are where she once was: Those who know little about Guantánamo, usually through no fault of their own.
“This is an issue that the government has intentionally obscured and the government has controlled the narrative of since 2002,” when the Guantánamo Bay detention camp was established, she said. For instance, while journalists can visit the prison, as she did, they can’t talk to prisoners or take photographs. Comics can get around that censorship, with artists using their creativity to fill in the gaps, Mirk said.
The camp was established to house suspects in the so-called War on Terror following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Mirk reports in the book that of the 779 people who’ve been held there, one was convicted, one pleaded guilty in a plea deal, seven were charged with crimes by military commissions, and none have been tried for 9/11 crimes. Eighty percent of the prisoners were turned over to the U.S. in exchange for bounties ranging from $3,000 to $30,000.
Mirk deliberately took a collaborative approach to creating “Guantánamo Voices” because the prison is an international issue. “I wanted it to be a group of people working to share these stories, rather than just coming from me,” she said.
The distinct styles of the artists, all of whom had experience in nonfiction comics, help to demarcate the compelling stories of the 10 people – former prisoners, lawyers, military staff – who shared their experiences and perspectives.
Using comics to tell the stories also allowed for balancing “all the horrors of Guantánamo with enough resilience or lightness or insightfulness to make sure that people don’t shut down while they’re reading,” Mirk added. Lighter moments include a scene in which one prisoner describes how he named and conversed with a lizard that frequently wandered into the camp.
Deciding whose stories to tell was a long process that began with reading every book she could find about Guantánamo, Mirk said. In addition to the prisoners themselves, she was particularly interested in the people who served there – “what sorts of moral questions were they asking themselves?” – and the lawyers working on behalf of the prisoners, “for years and years with no real future.”
Mirk hopes the book helps “change the cultural understanding of Guantánamo and to change the narrative around the prison,” which she said is that while mistakes were made, the government had its reasons.
“That’s been the myth that most Americans have bought,” Mirk said. “I can see why it’s easier to think this prison exists for a reason, rather than (to say) we’ve made terrible, terrible mistakes and ruined lives and there’s no accountability at all.”
“It’s really important for us to face this history and to talk about it and to figure out what the future looks like from there. … The prison was made by people within our lifetime and it can also be changed by people.”
awang@oregonian.com; Twitter: @ORAmyW
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