Reviewed by Juliet Wittman
Sunday, May 4, 2008

FIVE YEARS OF MY LIFE An Innocent Man in GuantanamoBy Murat Kurnaz with Helmut Kuhn Translated from the German by Jefferson Chase. Palgrave. 255 pp., $24.95

Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen and resident of Germany, had been traveling in Pakistan in December 2001 when he was detained on his way to the airport and handed over to the U.S. military. He was 19 years old. After a couple of agonizing months in Kandahar, he was sent, shackled and hooded, to Guantanamo and imprisoned there for almost five years, despite the fact that both U.S. and German intelligence had concluded as early as 2002 that there was no evidence linking him to terrorism.

Kurnaz's account of his imprisonment is almost unbearably painful to read, precisely because his tone is so measured and low-key. He endured beatings, waterboarding, electric shock, isolation and the disruption of all sense of time and space. He was asked the same meaningless questions again and again. There were also petty, gratuitous cruelties: In Kandahar, prisoners were fed military Meals Ready to Eat (MREs) but with part of the food removed so that they were perpetually hungry. On one occasion, Kurnaz's MRE contained pork, which he, as a Muslim, could not eat. When a fellow prisoner, a boy of about 16, offered to share his own meager ration of chicken, soldiers rushed in to hit him.

There was little apparent concern in Kandahar over whether prisoners lived or died. One night Kurnaz saw a man being kicked and beaten to death by seven guards. Kurnaz himself was hoisted by a chain from the ceiling and left there for about five days, during which he observed another man hanging like himself and concluded, after some time, that this man was dead: "His body was mostly swollen and blue, although in some places it was pale and white. I could see a lot of blood in his face, dark streams of it."

The circumstances in Guantanamo were not much better. At one point, Kurnaz was joined in his cage by Abdul, a young man whose legs had been amputated in Bagram because of frostbite, and whose stumps still oozed blood and pus. Despite his constant pain, Abdul was treated as brutally as the other prisoners; when he clutched the fence in an attempt to hoist himself onto the bucket that served as a latrine, a guard hit his hands with a club.

Perhaps the worst part of the tortures Kurnaz describes is that there was no respite from them, no time to recuperate between beatings and interrogations, no uninterrupted sleep. For years he saw neither stars nor sunlight.

It is tempting to think of Kurnaz's story as exaggerated, but almost everything he describes jibes with the reports of other detainees and of human rights groups. This is a book politicians should read, and it should inspire anguished soul-searching among the rest of us.

John Rechy's story begins when, as a youngster, he encountered a notorious and strikingly beautiful woman at his sister's wedding. He learned that she was a kept woman. This glimpse of someone who lived without apology outside social norms inspired him for the rest of his life.

Rechy first gained prominence in 1963 with a novel called City of Night, a heartfelt and poeticized account of life in the shadow world of pimps and gay hustlers. Coming in an era when rebels and outsiders -- particularly as personified by beautiful and sexually ambiguous young men -- were popular icons, the novel received a great deal of attention and acclaim. To some extent, Rechy is working the same soil here, and using the same heightened prose. Unfocused at first, his memoir flashes into life when he begins describing his own years as a street hustler, always accepting the touch of other men but never reciprocating -- in short, having become the kind of impermeable icon he imagines the kept woman to have been. The writing in this book sometimes feels a little dated, but Rechy tells a good and occasionally insightful story.

Juliet Wittman teaches writing at the University of Colorado.