Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo

(Hardback)

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At the age of 18, Mansoor Adayfi left his home in Yemen for a cultural mission to Afghanistan. He never returned. Kidnapped by warlords and then sold to the US after 9/11, he was disappeared to Gauntanamo Bay, where he spent the next 15 years as Detainee #441.

In the vein of Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone, Don't Forget Us Here tells two coming-of-age stories in parallel: a makeshift island outpost becoming the world's most notorious prison and an innocent young man emerging from its darkness. Arriving as a stubborn teenager, Mansoor survived the camp's infamous interrogation program and became a feared and hardened resistance fighter leading prison riots and hunger strikes. With time though, he grew into the man prisoners nicknamed "Smiley Troublemaker": a student, writer, historian, and dedicated pop culture fan. With unexpected warmth and empathy, he unwinds a narrative of fighting for hope and survival in unimaginable circumstances, illuminating the limitlessness of the human spirit.

And through his own story as well as those who were there with him--detainees and guards--Mansoor also tells Gauntanamo's story, offering an unprecedented window into one of the most secretive places on earth. Putting a human face on the Gauntanamo we know from the news, as well as showing the side we never see--the art, the community, the joyful reclamation of stolen humanity--this book reconstructs the camp's history in human terms, bearing witness to the lives lost and destroyed there.

Twenty years later, Gauntanamo remains open. At a moment of due reckoning, Mansoor helps us understand what actually happened there--both the horror and the beauty--offering a vital chronicle of an experience we cannot afford to forget.

Reviews

"In this landmark work, Mansoor Adayfi gives us a guided tour through the nightmarish landscape of Guantnamo. He tells a tale of both casual cruelty and organized sadism that should make every American politician redden with shame. But this memoir offers much more than just a gruesome portrait of a bureaucracy gone berserk, for it describes the fierce resistance and ultimate redemption of an innocent Yemeni man consigned to a hellish prison. Let us hope that Don't Forget Us Here will spark a long overdue reckoning with the horrors of Guantnamo and its many victims."--Ron Chernow, former president of PEN America and bestselling author of Grant and Hamilton

"Amazing book! & will be an eye-opener for many."

--Margaret Atwood (from twitter)
"Don't Forget Us Here may be one of the most shocking books you'll ever read, but not for the reasons you might expect. What's most shocking about this extraordinary book is Adayfi's enormous capacity to resist his captors with uncommon creativity, dignity, and even humor."--Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem: Being Young and Arab in America
"[Adayfi is] a charming, exuberant soul, and his humor and flights of fancy come through in even the book's most hard-to-read moments."--The Intercept
"A remarkable feat of storytelling...[an] exceptionally moving memoir."--Shelf Awareness
"Both a record of what was done to detainees and a triumphant boast about how they survived. We should read it to bear witness to what was done in our name -- and to gain inspiration for what we need to do to ensure that this injustice never happens again."--Los Angeles Review of Books
"Searing... a starkly human dispatch from the messy and often unheard receiving end of the war on terror."--The New York Times
"This unvarnished memoir will grip readers and anger them; a decisive contribution to the continuing reappraisal of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan."--Library Journal
"A riveting, illuminating account of Guantnamo from a Muslim perspective."--Jonathan Hansen, author of Guantnamo: An American History
"A window of stunning humanity into a place meant to be kept forever secret."

--Melissa Fleming, UN Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications and author of A Hope More Powerful than the Sea

"An incredible story! I am grateful to this joyously heartbreaking book for reminding me of what it means to be not just human, but humane."
--Azar Nafisi, bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran
"It took courage to live his life; it took more courage yet to write his story. It takes courage to read it, too, but that is amply rewarded by the author's generosity of spirit, which informs every word of his memoir. Only a few books change history; this might be one of them. Let us hope so."--Andrew Solomon, National Book Award-winning author of The Noonday Demon
"Mansoor's plight is unfathomable, but his strength most certainly is enviable. His powerful, unforgettable story is a must read in every way."--Booklist
"A blistering, eloquent indictment of Guantnamo. Mansoor Adayfi vividly describes the abuses committed there and he writes powerfully about the decade and half he spent there."--Peter Bergen, bestselling author of The Rise and Fall of Osama bin Laden and The Longest War
"A profoundly moving and immensely important tribute to the intelligence, resilience, and humanity with which its author, Mansoor Adayfi, survived fourteen years as a detainee in the notorious Guantanamo prison camp."--Francine Prose, bestselling author of Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932
"After years of hearing and reading only the 'official' version of his story, as told by his captors, at last Mansoor himself speaks. Speaking at all after such experiences, which included 14 years of the most serious human rights violations and daily humiliations designed to break the human spirit, is a victory. Speaking as Mansoor does here, of the struggle of Guantnamo's prisoners to assert their humanity, turns the official story about these men on its head, and shows Guantnamo for what it is: a terrible shame and a pointless failure."--Mohamedou Ould Slahi, bestselling author of Guantnamo Diary
"Powerful...An important record of prisoner mistreatment as a national reckoning over Guantnamo continues to loom."--Kirkus (starred review)
"Searing...This poignant testament strikes a devastating chord."--Publishers Weekly
"This is a wholly enthralling, relentlessly enraging, and unexpectedly funny book about one man caught in the absurdist world of the War on Terror. With his mordant wit and astonishing perseverance, Mansoor is impossible not to root for. This is a contemporary Unbroken with vital lessons for the American military-intelligence complex, exposing how an ostensibly moral nation becomes a state sponsor of torture."--Dave Eggers, Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

Author Bio

Mansoor Adayfi is a writer and former Guantanamo Bay Prison Camp detainee, held for over 14 years without charges as an enemy combatant. Adayfi was released to Serbia in 2016, where he struggles to make a new life for himself and to shed the designation of a suspected terrorist. Today, Mansoor Adayfi is a writer and advocate with work published in the New York Times, including a column the Modern Love column "Taking Marriage Class at Guantanamo" and the op-ed "In Our Prison by the Sea." He wrote the introduction, "Ode to the Sea: Art from Guantanamo Bay," for the 2017-2018 exhibition of prisoners' artwork at the John Jay College of Justice in New York City, and contributed to the scholarly volume, Witnessing Torture, published by Palgrave.

In 2018, Adayfi participated in the creation of the award-winning radio documentary The Art of Now for BBC radio about art from Guantanamo and the CBC podcast Love Me, which aired on NPR's Snap Judgment. Regularly interviewed by international news media about his experiences at Guantanamo and life after, he was also featured in Out of Gitmo, a mini-documentary and part of PBS's Frontline series. Work from his memoir was recently featured at a public reading at the Edinburgh Book Festival along with work by Guantanamo Diary author Mohamedou Ould Slahi. His graphic narrative, Caged Lives, was by The Nib and will be included in the anthology Guantanamo Voices. In 2019, he won the Richard J. Margolis Award for nonfiction writers of social justice journalism.

Antonio Aiello is a writer, editor, and storyteller working in print, digital, and broadcast formats. He worked closely with Mansoor to help develop the manuscripts written at Guantanamo into Don't Forget Us Here. Together, they are working to develop a TV show inspired by the book as Fellows in the Sundance Institute's prestigious Episodic Lab.