Ariel Dorfman: These words gave me hope for humanity

Three decades ago, when I was living in exile and my country, Chile, was being devastated by a dictatorship, I met a woman who had been arrested by Pinochet's secret police and tortured in a cellar in Santiago. It was poetry, she told me, which allowed her to survive.

It is shameful and yet also wondrous that I immediately evoked the woman as soon as I read the poems from the prisoners at Guantanamo. Shameful because it is the United States, supposedly a democracy, that is treating its detainees in the same brutal manner that dictatorial Chile and countless other desolate governments across the planet have treated their own captives.

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Shameful because it is the United States, supposedly a beacon of freedom, that has tortured these "enemy combatants" and denied them basic human rights. Shameful because it is the United States, supposedly a model of justice, that has locked up these men indefinitely, refused to charge them or put them on trial, and abused their religion and convictions to pressure them into "confessing their terrorist links".

And wondrous, yes. The fact that men held in the most appalling, desperate conditions, recur like that woman from Chile did, to poetry as a response to the violence they are subjected to. Can anything give us more hope for our species?

These prisoners could not be sure, when their minds groped for words to sing their sad nights, that anyone other than their God would listen or would care. Some of the words are haunted with beauty. There are those who are almost fanatically militant and those who crave only the serenity of home, the absent mother, father, son. Some trust in God and some trust the dawn and some have no trust left at all. But every one seems to have understood that to express his anguish in writing was a wager against despair, a way of affirming his defiant humanity. And yet, something else is going on, something which joins them to that tortured woman and to so many other victims in relentless dungeons elsewhere who have, as a response to the abandonment, also used poetry to redeem wounded dignity.

The ultimate source of these poems from Guantanamo is the simple, almost primeval, arithmetic of breathing in and breathing out. The origin of life and the origin of language and the origin of poetry are all there, in each first breath, each breath as if it were our first, the anima, the spirit, what separates us from extinction, what keeps us alive as we inhale and exhale the universe.

Breathing in and breathing out. What these prisoners shared with their jailers, with the men who saw them only as the enemy. Poetry as a call to those who breathe the same air to also breathe the same verses, to bridge the gap between bodies and between cultures and between warring parties. That is the deeper, and perhaps more paradoxical, significance of the appearance of these poems in America, published in the very heartland of the nation that has so maltreated these men.

Think of the prisoners, breathing in and breathing out those words, close by an ocean they can hear but never see and never touch. Think of them, now represented to their faraway foes by words of fire and sorrow, asking us to listen, to acknowledge the buried flame of their existence. Think that we have a chance to help them complete the journey that started in a cage inside a concentration camp, merely by reading these poems. Think that perhaps someday, perhaps soon, if we care enough, if we are troubled enough, it will not be just the verses that are set free but the hands and lips and lungs that composed them.

Until that day arrives, their true home, rather than the infamous detention centre at Guantanamo Bay, will be the bitter poems they have written against loneliness and death.

The writer is an Argentine-Chilean novelist, playwright and human rights activist. This article is extracted from an afterword to be published next month with Poems from Guantanamo, University of Iowa Press