Redacted tears, aesthetics of alterity: Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s guantánamo diary

Abstract

Erin Trapp’s essay, “Redacted Tears, Aesthetics of Alterity: Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantanamo Diary” explores the (so far) only extensive narrative written in English by a detainee of the prison camp at Guantánamo Bay Cuba. Trapp examines Slahi’s diary as an example of what she calls an aesthetics of alterity. This kind of aesthetic stance, according to Trapp, is one in which the modern liberal subject, one largely defined by the cultural logic of late-late capitalism, meets its complete antithesis in the alterity of the detainee-a subject that is not a subject in any conventional sense of the term. This alterity manifests itself in Slahi’s diary through the numerous erasures and blackouts of the United States government censors. As Trapp argues, these erasures and absences are what speak to Slahi’s status as both a subject within the sphere of late-late capitalist logic and also as one who exists completely outside of that space. Trapp’s subtle reading of the redacted diary is an attempt to come to terms with a writing that is both a record of detainment and the record of an absence, a text that is both art and a political record of an ongoing struggle.