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Famous Mansoor Adayfi Quotes

“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.”

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Book:Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo
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“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.”

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Book:Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo
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“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.”

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Book:Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo
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“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.”

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Book:Don't Forget Us Here: Lost and Found at Guantanamo
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“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?”

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