Don't Forget Us Here Quotes

“We knew not to see America through the filter of Guantánamo, even though most of the guards still saw us through the filter of 9/11.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“They didn't see the world we had created and how it had brought calm and peace to the camp. They didn't want to. They only saw terrorists who needed to be detained.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“Anytime I felt hopeless or lost, I went to one of those brothers and asked to look out their window. I said to the sea, 'Nice to see you again, my friend. People change, but you never do.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“From the beginning of Camp X-Ray, we had been creating, and those small acts were our escape. Some of us wrote on Styrofoam cups and plates. We used spoons or twisted the tiny stems off apples to write poems or draw flowers, hearts, the moon. We made flowers out of stickers we found on fruit. These were tiny expressions of our former selves breaking through, resisting the identities imprinted on us. These simple expressions were as necessary as food and water, and they were always punished.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“I was shipped out of Guantánamo in the same way I was shipped in: against my will, gagged, blindfolded, hooded, earmuffed, and shackled.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“I thought about all the moments we had experienced in this place that no one knew about. But I didn't want the world to just know about all the bad things that had happened to us. I wanted them to see who we were and how we had survived through friendship and brotherhood.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“No one wanted to be a block leader because as soon as interrogators found out about them, they disappeared to interrogations and then to solitary confinement. The professor was smart and told brothers to make someone else block leader and he would advise them.

So they asked me. I wasn't a leader. I wasn't an instigator. I was young and, like most men my age, I was still learning; I was clever, but not wise yet. I was just a simple tribal man who couldn't sit by and watch other men and boys get abused and mistreated.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“I helped negotiate the end to the hunger strike. I asked for better meals and time for rec. We got five extra minutes each week. I wasn't the general they thought I was--I wasn't even a leader--but I had found my role in this place: To feel the pain of others. To stick up for those who were beaten. And to try to make our lives better.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“Sitting around talking together without vacuums and fans or guards harassing us really changed our lives. We had been friends and brothers for years--since the very beginning. We had forged deep bonds fighting and resisting the camp admin and interrogators. But we had still experienced the worst of Guantánamo alone, in our cages or in interrogations. In these casual conversations, where we sat around drinking coffee, we processed what we had been through, and that somehow made us feel like we hadn't been alone. We remembered together our experiences: First being brought to Guantánamo, the first time we saw an iguana or banana rat. The fights we had. The bad guards--those who'd broken my ankle, those who'd taken Omar's prosthetic leg--and the good, like the one who'd given Khalid a slice of bread when he was on food punishment. The worst interrogators and the kind nurses who treated us humanely. We remembered the brothers we lost: Yassir, Mana'a, Ali, Waddah, al-Amri, Hajji Nassim (Inayatullah), and Awal Gul. And our remembering together made our losses and those solitary experiences real and a part of all our memories. It validated them and reminded us that, even though we were in solitary confinement or isolation or thousands of miles from the ones we loved, we had never been completely alone. It reminded us how we had grown older together and how we had become our own kind of family. A family with cats.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“The way he talked about music and movies and the American guards he called friends, I realized that he'd done so much more than just learn English. The way he walked, smiled... He was full of confidence and a style that was all his own.

Learning English had created a bridge to another world that was full of life and love and even hope for Dan, one where guards could see him and talk to him not as a detainee or a suspected terrorist, but as the King. I think the King was who Dan would have been outside of Guantánamo--he was himself. Speaking English had empowered him to do that here.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“Guantánamo was like a small piece of fabric woven together with threads from all over the world. We came from different backgrounds, but together we made something unique, a rare opportunity to encounter so many different experiences and perspectives. Living with others for the first time, I wanted to learn more than how to endure the physical pain of hunger strikes, strategies to fend off an IRF team, and tactics to survive hours of stress positions.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“We took nothing and made something, and what is more human than that?”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“More important than the things they gave us was the freedom we had over our lives and our contact with the world. It might sound simple, but just being able to have a pen and paper in my cell changed my life.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“Working on these books helped me make sense of this place and what had happened to us. It was my way of processing and even reclaiming the power to tell the world who I was in my own words, not the interrogators'. They could control my life, but I wouldn't allow them to define it.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“One thing we had learned about the Americans was that they were really good at overthinking everything. Instead of believing that we were telling the truth all those years, they believed we were trained in special counter-interrogation techniques. Instead of thinking about how the Code Yellow woke up the entire camp, the believed we had somehow built a radio network. Imagine the logic.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“Most brothers wanted to create art that told the stories of their survival in this place. This defined us as artists: we found beauty where there was none and communicated our experiences to others.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“We sang and danced all night as if it were a real marriage. We began with Yemeni dancing, moved to Afghani, back to Pakistani, back to Saudi dancing... we learned the dances of all our brothers' homes and then we ended with our own new dance that brought them all together. We called it the Guantánamo dance.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“We lived in a golden age, but it was still a hell. Even in that hell, we created small, beautiful moments that made us feel alive again.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“[I]n my dreams, I could live the life they took from me, the life I hoped might still be out there. If such sweetness could take me away from the hell I lived in, how much sweeter would it be in real life? I dreamed about the day I would find out.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“So, you Americans kidnap people from all over the world and then tell them, "you chose to be there"? I said. 'I was in Afghanistan. Yes, this is my fault. That doesn't give you the right to hold me forever without any rights or justice. To just forget about me. What about those men who were kidnapped from different countries and brought here? What do you tell them? What if some government kidnapped your son and held him without charges and no rights? What would you say to that?' I looked around at our block. 'Is this what American greatness is about?”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“What they didn't understand was that the hunger strike wasn't about art or contraband or even living conditions—it was about life. Our lives.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“He danced straight into our lovely library, the one we'd spent six months building. As he danced, he kicked it as hard as he could. First the doors, then the drawers. The guards joined him like a pack of hyenas. The library didn't stand a chance. They didn't stop until it had been beaten to death and packed into trash bags.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“We'd created a small, simple life from scraps. We had connected with each other, with guards, and with the world beyond our cells through the simple act of opening ourselves up and expressing ourselves. If that was so threatening, nothing would change their minds. But it didn't matter what they say in us. We had regained ourselves, something they couldn't take away from ourselves ever again. And we were determined to fight for it.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“The song of our daily lives changed that day so that the wind could sing to us. Without the green tarps, we looked out our window and saw the sea, the vast and beautiful sea, dark and angry, and the sea saw us, too, and raged at what it saw: hundreds of men in metal cages.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“I didn't want to die, but I also didn't want to spend the rest of my life in this place for something I didn't do. There were no easy choices, but I chose my path. We all did.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“Can an eighteen-year-old Yemeni, with a Yemeni accent, who speaks a specific tribal dialect and doesn't speak English, really be an English-speaking middle-aged Egyptian general who's also the leader of an experienced Arab army? They tried for years to hammer a square into a circle, but they couldn't. Here was my own puzzle: How could this have been so complicated?”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“This world scared me. Would I be able to adjust to life on the outside when I was released? Would I find a wife? Would Guantánamo follow me wherever I went?”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“I'm not asking for secrets,' I told the detainees who thought I was working for the CIA. 'I'm not working for anyone. I'm working for me, for you, and for everyone to write the history of what happened to us here. We're going to leave here one day, and when we leave, I don't know if we'll ever see each other again to talk about these stories. If we don't capture them now, others might try to do it later without us. Why should other people write our history? We must write our history! So let us write it ourselves.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“The US government will never say what I'm going to say,' he said. 'But I feel like you deserve to hear this.' He was quiet a minute. 'I'm sorry you were detained like this for so many years. It was a mistake, a pretty clear mistake, that you should never have been here.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

“These brothers had helped me through my hardest times here, but no one could help me with my situation now. It was hard leaving, but harder knowing that they would stay behind. I loved them all and wished we all could leave together.”
― Mansoor Adayfi, Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo