MudLark: Music

Guantanamo

(MudLark)

Laura Sandage c2006

I read excerpts from the Guantanamo Stories Project on the website of the UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas. There are many moving and disturbing accounts of what has happened at Guantanamo Bay. I wanted to put them into a song, but everything I came up with was too graphic to sing. After mulling it over for a few weeks, I had a nightmare of an assembly line on which people were reduced to nothing but a mask-like face writhing in pain, which was then shredded into tiny pieces by the men in white coats and swept away as if it had never existed. The imagery of this dream gave me another way to write a song about Guantanamo and the shame I feel as a citizen of a country whose government treats people this way.

There is a face, it has no voice
It has no eyes, it has no choice.
There’s a face that leaves no trace
In Guantánamo.
The face of pain, an empty mask
And all of us afraid to ask,
What do they do to people who
Are in Guantánamo?

This is a place beyond the law
The guards alone know what they saw
No saving grace, no legal case
In Guantánamo.
Their secret tricks are all the same
A living hell without a name
Without a face, inside a place
We call Guantánamo.
Where is Guantánamo?

Is it far, far away in a land of tyranny
Oppressed by a dictator’s iron-clad fist? No!
No, it’s right nearby, so close to you and me
In a place very much like this

Guantánamo, not far to go
Who will be next to take the blow?
Don’t want to know, don’t want to go
To Guantánamo.
There’s a face, it has no voice
It has no eyes, it has no choice
There’s a face that leaves no trace
In Guantánamo.