This past week in Scott’s class, we did some difficult thinking. We thought about the lives of the men being detained at Guantánamo Bay. Mostly, we thought about what—and how—they’re fed.

This was something I had previously spent some time thinking about. Much of that thinking had been about Joint Task Force Guantánamo’s Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) for the Medical Management of Detainees. In keeping with the title, the document is written almost entirely in the clinical language necessary to disguise torture as treatment.

Euphemisms are used throughout. The hunger strikers are “detainees with weight loss.” The hunger strikes are “voluntary fasts.” Torture (force-feeding) is “medical management.” And that medical management “is focused solely on preserving the life and health of the detainees.”

And yet somehow through all the procedure checklists, medical charts and evaluation sheets, we can begin to imagine the horrors that take place in the feeding rooms. Harder to imagine, though, are the individual lives subjected to those horrors.

But with Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Guantánamo Diary, we can begin to imagine one of those lives. This is something Scott writes about in “Forced Feeding,” an essay he wrote for Virginia Quarterly Review. We read the essay in class last week. And I’m glad we did. It’s an essay about “what one life can teach us,” written by one man who’s taught me a great deal.

Here’s a moment from the essay:

“I can’t tell how appropriate it is that a few weeks spent reading about torture calls to mind the way my stepfather died and how we fed him in the end. But the effect of the memory is sympathy. And thinking back to a death you know strikes me as a natural response to reading the details of torture, if only because torture exposes the likeness, the porousness, between death and life.”

“The effect of the memory is sympathy.” And sympathy, Scott writes, is “the only argument we need against torture.”

“Torture ought to fill us with terror. It makes corpses of the living. For years we refused to entertain that the US would do such things. There are some who still refuse to entertain that it happened in our name, so they continue to call it something else. 

But now, with these books, we know what happened. We know the scope of US torture and we know the effects of torture on one man’s body. The knowledge we have is not abstract. And while its illegality is clear and its practice obviously flouts what we consider American values, what these books now suggest is that the only argument we need against torture is sympathy—the faculty, as Coetzee puts it, “that allows us to share the being of another.” 

In the end we’re left with an argument for sympathy. And what a powerful argument that is.

Eric Fair provides us with another important perspective to consider. “Was I a Torturer in Iraq?,” an excerpt from his recent memoir Consequence, was featured on Literary Hub last week.