Reflections on the Temporality of Hunger and the Slow Death of Detention (original) (raw)

Reflections on the Temporality of Hunger and the Slow Death of Detention

Michelle C. Velasquez-Potts

Abstract

This essay examines the ongoing hunger strikes at Guantánamo Bay detention camp through a comparative analysis of the infamous 1981 Irish hunger strike, where ten Irish Republican prisoners would ultimately fast unto death. In particular, I analyze Steve McQueen’s 2008 film Hunger, which chronicles the protests that led to the eventual Republican death fast at the now demolished Maze prison in Northern Ireland. I argue that the film facilitates a unique temporal experience by which to engage the political and corporeal stakes of hunger striking, and an opportunity to consider the present state of embodied protest at Guantánamo Bay, where since 2002 prisoners have been force-fed as punishment for hunger striking. I conclude the essay with a discussion about the current state of force-feeding at Guantánamo Bay, where the punitive administration of the feeding tube, I argue, remains a technological means by which to repress political and relational life at the camps.

In 2002, hunger strikes began at Guantánamo Bay detention camp. The Center for Constitutional Rights reported that the first hunger strike began “in response to the mistreatment of the Qur’an by a military police officer (MP) in Camp X-Ray” (Olshansky and Gutierrez, 2005, 6, Velasquez-Potts, 2020, 212). Incidents leading up to the strike included officers stomping, kicking, and throwing Qur’ans belonging to detainees. After eight days, a senior officer apologized, assuring that the Qur’an would not be disrespected or touched again (Velasquez-Potts, 212). This was in the beginning of 2002, but by the end of February, another hunger strike began after an officer “removed a homemade turban from a prisoner during his prayer” (Olshansky and Gutierrez, 6). Those incarcerated at Guantánamo articulated the central demand behind the various hunger strikes as "respect for our religion, including an end to the

desecration of the Qur’an and religious discrimination" (Olshansky and Gutierrez, 2005, 10). Additionally, they also demanded fair trials and legal representation, adequate food and water, sunlight, medical treatment, familial contact, and “a neutral body to observe the situation and report publicly about the conditions at Guantanamo” (ibid.). Various news media reported that strikers were being hydrated intravenously and forcibly fed using nasogastric tubes. The camp commander at the time, General Michael Lehnert, asserted “nobody is going to die,” underscoring the power behind the collective refusal to eat (The Telegraph, 2002).

In response to General Lehneret’s comments, The Telegraph magazine declared “There will be no Bobby Sands-style martyrs at America’s controversial Camp XRay” (2002). Bobby Sands, a prominent member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), led the infamous 1981 Irish strike and after sixty-six days of refusing food and water was the first to die. Including Sands, ten Republican prisoners would ultimately fast unto their deaths over the course of the strike. The introduction of, and resistance to, force feeding at Guantánamo is a case study, then, in the current state of the politics of hunger striking. Indeed, hunger striking is often the only recourse incarcerated subjects have to protest the conditions of the prison but, also the sociopolitical circumstances surrounding incarceration and detention, such as the ethnoracialized violence of violating the Qu’ran. However, force-feeding fundamentally changes the political act of hunger striking. That force-feeding wasn’t used in the 1981 strike offers the opportunity to consider the particularities of its use post-9/11 as a technique of power that blurs the line between life and non-life, or what I refer to as “suspended animation” (see Velasquez-Potts, 2019, 2020). 1{ }^{1}

The historical continuum between 1981 and contemporary Guantánamo, then, is significant in that the Irish strike showcased the utilization of biological life to its ends in waging political struggle. The military’s use of force-feeding against hunger strikers extends the strikes in duration but diminishes their political force, putting the act of hunger striking into a state of suspended animation along with the body. The Telegraph’s reference to Sands’s death serves as a point of departure for

considering how death is no longer the limit to hunger striking in the wake of forcefeeding at Guantánamo Bay. Or as philosopher Lisa Guenther posits, “In the thirty years since the Irish hunger strikes, and over thirty years since the emergence of neoliberalism in Thatcher’s Britain and Regan’s America. What has happened in this time?” (Guenther 2013, emphasis mine). In this essay, I consider Guenther’s question and, in my attempt, to answer it I return to the 1981 hunger strike by way of a cursory reading of Steve McQueen’s 2008 film Hunger, which chronicles the protests that led to the eventual Republican death fast at the now demolished Maze prison in Northern Ireland. I argue that the film, in its extreme aestheticization of violence, facilitates a unique temporal experience by which to engage the political and embodied stakes of hunger striking, pushing the viewer to confront the degree of violence the body is both able to endure as well as exert.

If the prison both symbolically and materially manages and controls the life of the prisoner, then the threat of self-starvation directly challenges the institution’s grasp on life, biological and otherwise. Hunger powerfully registers this point in its visceral portrayal of Sand’s death fast, highlighting how corporeal self-harm takes the existing violence of the prison and redirects it onto the self but toward revolutionary aims. However, at Guantánamo Bay, force-feeding necessarily forecloses the possibility of such an embodied strategy prompting the question of what happens to political and relational life inside of captivity when one’s right to protest is delimited by the feeding tube? Here, the role corporeal sacrifice plays in resisting suspended animation continues to find a point of intersection between the Irish strike and Guantánamo Bay offering an opportunity to historicize contemporary hunger striking in light of technological advancements in military experimentation. Ultimately, the 1981 Irish strike and ongoing Guantánamo Bay strikes expose the two limits of the practice of hunger striking, one of which is death and the other being the optimization of life via the feeding tube. And so, to answer what has happened in this time, then, one must turn towards the US military’s administration of force-feeding. I conclude the essay with a discussion about the current state of

force-feeding and hunger striking at Guantánamo Bay, where after almost twenty years since the hunger strikes started the future of those detained remains uncertain.

Hunger

Temporally Hunger begins the midst of the “Dirty Protest,” which preceded the death fast by four years (Feldman, 1991). Prisoners refused to wear uniforms, clothing themselves only in their blankets, hence the nickname “Blanketman,” which the strikers would come to be called. The prisoners also refused to bathe, or use the bathroom outside of their cells, all of which was a tactic in direct response to Margaret Thatcher’s retraction of the prisoner’s “political status.” Status played an important role in not only the Irish context but also in the early years at Guantánamo, where part of the impetus behind the 2002 strikes was to gain the title of prisoners of war as opposed to “enemy combatants.” Similarly, the IRA prisoners demanded Special Category status, which for them was important in underscoring the political nature of their dissent, as opposed to the everyday crimes of robbery and threat with which they were otherwise associated. Thatcher went on to famously declare that “there is no such thing as political murder, political bombing, political violence. There is only criminal murder, criminal bombing, and criminal violence. We will not compromise on this. There will be no political status” (1981). This is the political and historical backdrop that the viewer is thrown into at the onset of Hunger.

McQueen’s unflinching portrayal of the Dirty Protest opens with newly incarcerated IRA prisoner, Davey Gillan (Brian Milligan), visibly disgusted with his unwashed cell mate Gerry Campbell (Liam McMahon) and the excrement smeared walls. After refusing to leave their cells to use the toilet, prisoners had begun to urinate and defecate in the corners of the cell, but during raids guards had taken to throwing prisoner’s blankets and mattresses on top of the excrement. In response the prisoners simply began to smear their feces all over the walls. They were quite literally living in their own excrement at this point. As Gillan acclimates to the filth of the cell, he caresses a fly in the next shot delicately pushing his hand out a hole in the cell’s window, letting the sunlight touch his skin. The use of natural light develops a

tension between beauty and the abjection of the prison cell, but such scenes also develop a paradox, one that is present throughout the film, which is that the violence directed at the Blanketman via the prison regime and the violence they directed at themselves demonstrates not only how much pain and suffering they could endure, but how that very discomfort was the means by which they might hope to take control within the prison.

Anthropologist Allen Feldman, in Formations of Violence (1991), his important ethnography chronicling the 1981 strike, theorized the Dirty Protest as such:

As they transgressed customary biological boundaries and adapted to the scatological ecology of their cells, the Blanketmen began to extract political lessons from their relative biological immunity and survival. The scatological began to cohere into a system of positive meaning that defined their relationship to the prison and to the outside world. The fecal body and cell began to function as an encoding mechanism from which a variety of political texts could be mined (182).

For Feldman, the 1981 Irish hunger strike underscored the ways “the body as the terminal locus of power also defines the place for redirection and reversal of power. In revolt, the prisoner also bifurcates and objectifies the body as an instrument of violence” (1991,178)(1991,178). This is to say, hunger striking underscores the ways that the penal system functions within an asymmetric context, where power’s hold on the individual should be complete but is not (ibid., also see Bargu 2014, 2016). This last point, for me, reformulates the question of violence, highlighting that distinctions could, and indeed should, be made about different forms of violence and their application. Hunger, too, grapples with this question and doesn’t celebrate or romanticize the corporeal sacrifice necessitated by hunger striking, rather the film exposes the historical necessity of violence between prisoners and guards inside of the Maze.

The excess of force used by guards and prisoners alike at The Maze challenged the

regulatory functions of the prison. As political theorist Banu Bargu comments on this aspect of the film, equal attention is paid to both guards and prisoners and ultimately, Hunger “chooses to depict [the conflict] through individuals on opposing sides: both the prison guards and the prisoners emerge as non-identical to the roles that their structural positions in the asymmetry of power relations require them to play” (Bargu, 2014, 8). This dialectic between the guards and prisoners is represented almost entirely by way of the body’s physicality (i.e., the smearing of excrement, the prisoner’s body being beaten by the guards, the guards soaking their bloody knuckles in water after a beating). There is very little exposition throughout the film and its minimalism necessarily facilitates a purely visual encounter with violence. Without the context surrounding the larger political situation happening in Ireland throughout the 1970s and 80s, the struggle between guard and prisoner, Republican and Protestant, then, is one waged solely through force and the body, as opposed to traditional narrative (see Lloyd, 2011).

Ultimately, the political tactics of the Irish hunger strikers “established a correspondence between institutional performance and biological performance,” exposing the ways in which one’s own morbidity can serve as the basis for political struggle (Feldman, 1991, 174). Or, in the words of McQueen “when you’re in prison, you’re pushed to the absolute extreme. And you use your body as a weapon not only to protest, you use your body to die” (Wigon, 2011). After four years of the Dirty Protest, the IRA decided that another hunger strike would provide the most realistic means by which to gain political status. Sands would be the first IRA prisoner to hunger strike and as such, the final act of Hunger primarily centers on the figure of Sands (Michael Fassbender) and marks the end of what Bargu names “sovereign time,” that is, a time that is “abstract and detached, and characterized by compulsory repetition” (Bargu, 2014, 17). There is no evidence of hours or days passing in sovereign time, only the repetition of violence enacted by both guards and prisoners alike. Bobby Sands’s death fast however, ruptures sovereign time, or the “dominant temporality” of the prison regime (ibid.).

As the film nears its end, there is a pivotal scene between Sands and Father Dominic Moran (Liam Cunningham). In what appears to be the prisons visitors’ room, Sands and Father Moran sit at a table situated at the center of the frame as they engage in a fast-paced dialogue about the ethics of the strike about to take place. The dim lighting and the fact that each man’s face is slightly out of focus produce a sense of distanced intimacy. Rather than deploy shot-reverse-shot editing, where the camera switches between speakers to emphasize diverging views in conversation, McQueen films a seventeen-minute static shot with the camera centered on both Sands and Father Moran. The shift away from more classic conventions of representing conversation allows for the intensity to build as Sands and Moran engage in playful banter before debating whether a death fast is in fact anything more than suicide. What becomes clear from their exchange is that Father Moran understands the hunger strike as an act of suicide, whereas for Sands it is an act of martyrdom.

In Remnants of Auschwitz the philosopher Giorgio Agamben asserts that the martyr is one who bears witness to their faith and as such, an act of martyrdom is not about dying (Agamben, 2002). Similarly, in Hunger, Sands equates life, not death, with the struggle for a sovereign Ireland, free from British colonialism. His life is a real life, he asserts. His decision to strike, and potentially starve to death, is predicated upon responsibility and obligation, not morality or sentiment. The extended duration of this scene in which these men are locked within the frame enables the viewer to think and sit with both sides of the debate. Before the shot cuts and the camera shifts to Sands, a political binary has been established: the side that understands violence as a precursor to radical change, and the other that condemns destruction and believes in the power of negotiation and dialogue.

Hunger represents Sands as a figure who conceptualized his actions as revolutionary. Admittedly, Sands’s conviction to risk his life is, at first glance, beautiful. Throughout his conversation with the priest, Sands is framed as confident and composed. But as the scene fades out and cuts to the strike, where for sixty-six days Sands’s body will slowly consume itself, we must acknowledge the cruel corporeal

consequence of his death fast. The viewer’s, and perhaps even Sands’s, own political convictions begin to waver with every extreme close-up of the sores eating away at his back and spine, the sound of his vomiting, and the hallucinations of birds that become more frequent with every day of starvation. The camera takes multiple angles as the scene progresses eventually focusing from above on his face, mouth gaping open, blank eyes staring at nothing. The birds’ reappearance, perhaps a subtle reference to Sands’s love of the lark, takes on a symbolic valence, as they would come to be associated with Sands’s commitment to freedom. The light shines on his face from the window and a young Bobby appears before him. We witness Sands descend into madness. The final vision he sees is again of birds, blackbirds flying across a midnight sky. His final moments, however aesthetic, are not beautiful but, rather, terrifying (see Lloyd, 2011, Anderson 2010). 2{ }^{2} As he leaves his body, the film exposes the material corporeal of one’s actions.

Formally, what makes Hunger powerful is the juxtaposition between the silence of the first half of the film, the dialogue between Sands and Father Moran in the second, and finally, the return to silence in the hospital room where Sands ultimately fasts unto his death. Throughout it all however, is the incapacitation of the body. The film’s attention to the body is what, for me, provides an interesting way into the history of the Irish strike. The secular viewpoint posits that one is either an agent or victim. It is commonly thought that to suffer is to be passive, to be an object not a subject. The assumption is that one must seek to overcome pain, but Hunger argues that this is a false dichotomy. And in fact, to starve one’s self in an institution such as the prison underscores the complicated relationship between freedom and captivity (see Velasquez-Potts 2019). Cinematic representation of political violence isn’t necessary to understand the stakes of hunger striking, but it is useful for the ways in which film so immediately interpolates its viewers into the scene of violence forcing one to consider the temporality of captivity, the historical continuum of violence that repeats itself in such a way that biological life itself can no longer be considered the end goal of collective action. From McQueen’s use of backlighting to represent the abjection of the prison cells to the final bright lights of Sand’s death

there seems to be a shift, for the viewer, between “the dictum that life is the highest value toward the question of what kind of life is worth living” (Bargu, 2014, 9). This shift is a terrifying one, but undoubtedly, to waste away willingly signifies a radical gesture that works with, against, and through the violence of sovereign time, which seeks to impede freedom.

By the inception of the 1981 strike, Sands knew with certainty that it would take not only his death but also the death of other strikers in order for the British government to concede to their demands. As Bargu notes of the Turkish death fast of the early 2000s, the shift from life to death was “part of the escalation of the struggle” (Bargu, 2016, 239). Death, in this context, communicates “the righteousness of the revolutionary cause” and “utilizes self-discipline in the attainment of the purity of militancy and submission to the revolutionary cause” (ibid., 240). The Irish political prisoner embarked on the hunger strike in adherence to his commitment to the cause even while uncertain whether he would live to see the demands met. “Death in the Hunger Strike,” writes Feldman, “was conceived as both the literal termination of biological functions and the countdown, the long drawn-out sociobiological death that the endurance of starvation dramatically stretched into an iconic act of historical mediation. ‘Going to the edge’ . . . was reaching the cusp of history; it was the creation of a new sociotemporal continuum arising out of the biological time of the dying prisoner” (1991, 225). “Going to the edge” was not only a way to articulate death but also a way for the Republican striker to apprehend a kind of radical openness to a different world. Death is the revolutionary’s responsibility to a cause, but without the certainty of what lies in its wake.

Bobby Sands’s future is now our past and in the four decades since 1981, hunger striking has remained a steadfast, transnational means of protest inside of prisons and detention centers. Guantánamo Bay strikes exists along a continuum of embodied protests such as Northern Ireland, but also the Turkish death fasts, which mobilized tactics of self-harm beyond simply hunger striking to include selfimmolation and suicide bombing (see Anderson 2014; Bargu, 2016). The hunger

strikes at Guantánamo Bay detention camp that began in 2002 are a useful point of departure from the Irish and Turkish strikes respectively, enabling an opportunity to explore not only the terrain of hunger striking but also the technologies deployed in opposition to hunger-striking, such as the feeding tube. In the remainder of the essay, I consider the present state of hunger striking Guantánamo Bay and how although force-feeding forecloses the threat of biological death, indefinite detention itself functions as a slow death.

The Suspended Animation of Force-Feeding

As the hunger strikes continued at Guantánamo Bay, new procedures for forcefeeding were introduced in 2006, which included “strapping detainees to a chair, forcing a tube down their throats, feeding them large quantities of liquid nutrients and water, and leaving them in the chair for as long as two hours to keep them from purging the food, according to detainee accounts and military officials” (White, 2006). The height of the hunger strikes was in 2013 where there were up to 106 men striking. Although the camp spokesperson refused to release the identities of the men striking, the Miami Herald (2013) reported that the “Justice Department did notify the attorneys of captives who became so malnourished that they required military medical forced-feedings.” Despite the deliberate obfuscation surrounding the hunger strikes on the part of military officials, news media outlets such as the Miami Herald and Aljazeera continued to gather what information they could through the Freedom of Information Act and released reports of the number of men striking and how many were being forcibly fed. Both Miami Herald and Aljazeera compiled their respective data into virtual hunger striking timelines.

The 2013 strikes were sparked once again by mistreatment of the Qur’an and ongoing detention (Aljazeera, 2013). At its height 44 men were forcibly fed (Miami Herald, 2013). Carol Rosenberg, a long-time journalist covering the hunger strikes at Guantánamo, reported for the Miami Herald that during the 2013 strikes the Pentagon had "140 Navy doctors, nurses and corpsmen…carrying out the feedings. Guards strap a captive into a restraint chair twice daily, then a medical professional

snakes a nasogastric tube up the captive’s nose, down the back of his throat and into his stomach to pump a nutritional supplement inside" (Rosenburg 2013). In a widely circulated New York Times op-ed Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel described his experience being force-fed at the detention hospital. His testimonial is worth quoting at length:

I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone…I am still being force-fed. Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down. I never know when they will come… It was so painful that I begged them to stop feeding me. The nurse refused to stop feeding me. As they were finishing, some of the “food” spilled on my clothes. I asked them to change my clothes, but the guard refused to allow me to hold on to this last shred of my dignity (Moqbel, 2013).

Despite numerous similar testimonials by other prisoners, medical officials at the camps maintain that force-feeding is “not that painful…not that excruciating” and that such accounts are “ridiculous” (Rosenberg 2013). I argue however, that the procedural shifts at the camp and prisoner testimonials, such as Moqbel’s, underscore how the medical clinic at Guantánamo Bay has become a site of suspended animation. Suspended animation, as I’ve noted elsewhere, is itself a medical term for the temporary cessation of the body’s vital functions, characterizes modes of brutality, such as forced-feeding, practiced by the state that are lifesustaining (see Velasquez-Potts, 2020). Suspended animation, as an enactment of medico-political power, highlights how the state’s mobilization of biological life is a means by which to counter political life and opposition at the camp.

The prison hospital is the site par excellence of the ideological battle between biological life and political life. Moqbel, in his testimony, clearly states that he doesn’t wish to die but until he is released it is a risk, he is willing to take. For some military officials, however this is an incomprehensible position. A military medic interviewed by Rosenberg in 2013 expressed confusion over the view that forcefeeding is painful and unethical: “I never felt like I would be that person who would be persecuted for keeping a detainee alive.” In Hunger we see a similar defiance play out with the prison medics as well. Towards the very end of the film as Sands nears his death there is a poignant moment where Sands is soaking in a tub, at this point he is in and out of consciousness, a sympathetic doctor sits by his side. The same doctor shown in previous scenes encouraging Sands to eat, or explaining to Sands’s parents as gently as possible what exactly the body experiences as it slowly shuts down from starvation. This main doctor is soon relieved from his shift and replaced by a new doctor, one the viewer quickly discerns is anything but compassionate. As he stands over Sands, hands gripping the tub, we see tattooed on his knuckles “U.D.A,” the acronym for Ulster Defense Association, a loyalist paramilitary group in Northern Ireland that sought to combat Irish republicanism. Sands forces himself up out of the tub and attempts to look defiantly at the loyalist medic, but is too weak and quickly collapses to the floor as the medic watches in disgust. This moment, for me, encapsulates not only Sands’s steadfast political commitment, but serves as a reminder to the viewer of the very real antagonisms between Thatcher’s Britain and the Irish Republican’s commitment to a sovereign Ireland.

This is not to say that medics at Guantánamo Bay, such as the one quoted above, are not genuine in their belief that administering the feeding tube is their ethical obligation. Rather, my point is that force-feeding as that which literally negates the expression of political life in the act of hunger striking at the camps is better apprehended as an insidious form of medical violence mobilized by the military through the rhetoric of the sanctity of biological life. Descriptions such as Moqbel’s have led to strong critiques of the ethics of force-feeding. Physicians and nurses remain concerned about the medical ethicality of administering the feeding tube. In

1975, the World Medical Association issued the Declaration of Tokyo, guidelines for physicians concerning torture and inhumane treatment and practices with regard to detention. The declaration states: “Where a prisoner refuses nourishment and is considered by the physician as capable of forming an unimpaired and rational judgment concerning the consequences of such a voluntary refusal of nourishment, he or she shall not be fed artificially.” Physicians are screened beforehand to ensure that they do not hold any ethical objections to force-feeding. Physicians are also ethically obligated to provide medical information regarding the often irreversible effects of self-starvation as well as to discern whether the prisoner’s decision to strike is his own and not one of coercion or madness (Miles, 2006, 107-110). While a certain amount of agency is recognized in the decision to hunger strike, the use of force-feeding denies its existence.

Forcible treatment against the prisoner’s consent is not only medically unethical but is also clearly opposed by the World Medical Association of Malta (WMA). The WMA’s 2006 guidelines on hunger striking specifies that force-feeding is very rarely acceptable: “Even if intended to benefit, feeding accompanied by threats, coercion, force or use of physical restraints is a form of inhumane and degrading treatment. Equally unacceptable is the forced feeding of some detainees in order to intimidate or coerce other hunger strikers to stop fasting.” A physician acts ethically when respecting the wishes of the hunger striker. The guidelines make clear that physicians have a responsibility to be loyal to their patients above all else. Given these clearly enunciated guidelines, my interest is less in how particular physicians have neglected the guidelines of the WMA; more pertinent are the ways in which the state prioritizes the preservation of life to underwrite its obligation to force-feed.

The medical ethics surrounding whether or not physicians should force-feed is illustrated well by journalist Luke Mitchell. Writing for Harper’s Magazine, Mitchell recounts interviewing Dr. William Winkenwerder Jr., Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs. In Winkenwerder’s logic, if there is any possibility of a hunger striker lapsing into a coma or being near death, then it’s the physician’s

right to make a judgment call as to whether the patient is forcibly fed or allowed to die. This is also made clear in the WMA guidelines, with the stipulation that any advanced refusals of treatment made by the prisoner are to be respected. But, Winkenwerder maintains, “if we’re there to protect and sustain someone’s life, why would we actually go to the point of putting that person’s life at risk before we act?” (Mitchell, 2006) This logic is clearly incompatible with the state’s supposed support of the prisoner’s right to strike. As Mitchell puts it, “Allowing people to hunger strike and preventing them from dying as a result [are] mutually contradictory aims” (ibid.). As A. Naomi Paik argues, it is this very paradox that makes an ethics of care an impossibility at Guantánamo (Paik, 2016, 202-03). However, what it does do, quite literally, “makes live” (Foucault 1999).

Foucault’s theory of biopower is useful here in conceptualizing how a life-enhancing technology such as the feeding tube should be situated within contemporary understandings of torture and punishment. Foucault first referred to his positive account of power as biopower at the end of History of Sexuality, Volume I. Foucault contrasted biopower with the ancient right of the sovereign to “take life or let live” (Foucault, 1990, 136). Prior to modernity, power’s relation to life was one of taking or of letting be. Put differently, the sovereign exercised power only through the right to kill, that is, to repress life. However, beginning in the seventeenth century, the relationship between power and life evolved into something positive and productive. This is not to say that the sovereign was no longer able to take life. Rather, the sovereign deployed power strategically toward the optimization of life. On this shift, Foucault states, “The ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by the power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (ibid., 138).

Force-feeding poses a conceptual challenge to the biopolitical regime, where “make live and let die” takes on a specific valence in the case of hunger strikes in prison. “Making live” and “letting die,” here, do not necessarily hold as separate categories, as forcing the body to live has become a form of control. The maintenance of life by way of force-feeding occupies a paradoxical position by being both life-affirming

and life-denying as simultaneously an application of torture in the name of sustaining biological life. Force-feeding, I argue, is a technology of suspended animation, a medicalized attempt at stripping the prisoner of their defiance. The state’s regulation of life and death through the specific technology of the feeding transforms assistance in nutrition into force-feeding (see Velasquez-Potts, 2019, 591).

The hunger strikes peaked in July 2013, but by September the number of men participating had dropped significantly. Between the end of 2013 and the time of this writing in 2020 there isn’t much information available about how many men continue refusing food and how many are still being forcibly fed. This brings us back to Bargu’s point about the sovereign temporality represented in Hunger, a temporality comprised of the everyday being “organized, regulated, and dominated by the power of the state” (2014,17)(2014,17). Guenther in her writing on California’s Pelican Bay State Prison hunger strike refers to such a temporality as “biopolitical temporality,” which she defines as, “a time in which nothing happens to interrupt the relentless expansion of capital, a time without event” (Guenther 2013). However, this isn’t to say that the men held captive at Guantánamo Bay haven’t continued to refuse state power, refuse suspended animation.

For example, 2014 marked the beginning of a three-year legal battle to unseal thirtytwo videotapes of Guantánamo Bay prisoner Abu Wa’el (Jihad) Dhiab being forcibly extracted from his cell and force-fed in a restraint chair. The case came to a close in 2017, when a three-judge panel of the Circuit Court of Washington, DC, ruled that the videotapes would remain under seal and not made public. And so, there are certainly ruptures to sovereign or biopolitical time, but undoubtedly that forcefeeding has been the camp’s response to hunger striking for almost two decades now necessarily transforms the protesting prisoner into a patient, which might imply a different political temporality (Guenther 2013). What forms of political life have been foreclosed at Guantánamo Bay throughout these years? And how might returning to previous hunger strikes, such as the 1981 Irish strike, illuminate how evolving technologies of punishment such as force-feeding modify the relationship

between life and death. What remains apparent however, is that the corporeal modes of refusal mobilized to counter sovereign time continue to unfold in prisons and detention camps around the world. With these embodied refusals, and technologies such as the feeding tube used to counter them, the military continues to manage and regulate the politics of life and death.

Slow Death

This conclusion is speculative. The detention camp at Guantánamo Bay Naval Station has been operative for eighteen years now, where since 2002 captives have been forcibly fed as punishment for hunger striking. The oldest captive is in his 70 s, but the grand majority are middle aged now. In a recent New York Times article Carol Rosenberg reports that with the ageing of those incarcerated, and the Trump administration’s plan to keep the detention camp open for at least another 25 years, hospice care is now on the horizon (Rosenberg, 2019). Many of the men are prediabetic and will soon perhaps require dialysis. Others might eventually need hip and knee replacements and wheelchair assistance. Some already necessitate breathing machines as sleep apnea has recently become a concern for many of the men. There are talks of building a small prison with communal hospice care to address middle aged concerns such as high blood pressure, cholesterol, joint pain, and diabetes. Architectural changes would need to be made to the prison cells as more and more of the men will soon be in wheelchairs requiring that cells be bigger with ramps and grab bars. The Pentagon, Rosenberg reports, is now in the early planning stages for “terrorism suspects” to grow old and die at Guantánamo Bay’s detention camp (ibid.).

Just as military officials at the detention camp have maintained that force-feeding captives is in the interest of preserving life, they now maintain that hospice care is also in the interest of facilitating a good death for the men who may never be released. With the feeding tube already used to sustain life and the possibility of hospice to facilitate death, the detention hospital at Guantánamo Bay will have come full circle. On this, Guantánamo psychiatrist, Dr. Stephen N. Xenakis states: "It is

paradoxical…But we don’t let people just die in this country. It violates all of our ethics and medical ethics" (Rosenberg, 2019). The irony here is that hunger striking underscores one’s own morbidity as the ultimate risk and commitment to one’s cause. At Guantánamo this possibility has necessarily been foreclosed since the first hunger strikes in 2002. Yet now, a new kind of death, the pretense of a good death, looms over Guantánamo’s horizon (see Neumann, 2016). The US military doesn’t just let people die, tells us Dr. Xenakis. Indeed, the state continues to expose just how much it has invested in the regulation of death, deciding its breadth and scope.

Time moves forward and with it the US military attempts to erase the brutalities of the war on terror’s Enhanced Interrogation Program with new life-preserving technologies and rhetorics meant to offer reprieve to the very wearing out of the captive’s body that they made possible. Lauren Berlant defines the phrase “slow death” as the “physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of its experience and historical existence” (Berlant, 2011, 95). Berlant makes clear that her interest is in the applicability of slow death to spaces of ordinariness that animate late capitalism. At first glance Guantánamo eschews the ordinary and is much more in line with the unfolding of a traumatic event. Yet, slow death articulates how indefinite detention is precisely that which slowly wears out its population. Slow death, and my use of suspended animation to describe the medical-political power operations of indefinite confinement are so terrifying precisely because they transform exceptional spaces into ordinary ones. And so, the ageing body in detention, like the ageing body outside of confinement, becomes disabled and with it a new kind of incapacitation emerges-an incapacitation that is both the physiological response to getting older, and what the space of detention facilitates and encourages. Whether hospice care at Guantánamo Bay is an even more pronounced display of state sovereignty, or yet another iteration of “make live” or “let die” is necessarily unclear, necessarily speculative.

In my attempt to address Guenther’s important question, what has happened in this time? I turned toward an artistic interpretation of the events of 1981. Of course, there are other scholarly and historical accounts by which to engage this important moment in Irish history, but Hunger, for me, in its almost claustrophobic depiction of the suffering body facilitates neither a pure nor unmediated account of the death fast, rather it exposes the viewer to the intense corporeal risk inherent to the practice of hunger striking in such a way that perhaps only an aesthetic account can. With the sustained use of force-feeding at Guantánamo I believe it important to return to varied representations and accounts of hunger striking and to continue documenting and theorizing what the practice has become in light of international usage of forcefeeding across geopolitical sites such as US domestic prisons and detention centers (see Galatas, 2019; Holpuch, 2019). Further, it is imperative to return to testimonials such as Moqbel’s and countless others at Guantánamo who remain committed to articulating their embodied struggles as hunger striking even in the wake of forcefeeding at the camps. Undoubtedly, force-feeding at Guantánamo Bay remains a technological means by which to repress the political dimension of life in detention and yet, hunger striking continues, even if mediated by the feeding tube. Does this signify a break with sovereign or biopolitical time? Perhaps this question is unanswerable at this time and so, for now we mobilize and listen to those who continue to refuse, continue to forge new embodied modes of defiance in the face of ever-evolving carceral technologies and practices.

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[1]

1. 1{ }^{1} Arguably the sole reason force-feeding was prohibited from being used in 1981 was because in 1974, Michael Gaughan, an IRA prisoner on hunger strike, died from a punctured lung following a botched tube feeding. See (Miller 2016).
   2{ }^{2} David Lloyd comments that Hunger captures Sands in an “almost transcendental light” (2011, 156). Sands’s final moments, are extremely aestheticized and as such, Lloyd argues, “endorses the ethical view of the priest who debates Sand’s decision …The charge that this sacrilegious act of suicide is borne out precisely in the erasure of its collective aspect” (156). True, Hunger at times offers a less balanced portrayal of how the incapacitating conditions inside the prison were experienced collectively, rather than solely by Sands. Such representation risks not only mythologizing individuals, but erases the organization that went into the strike, both inside and outside of Maze. Patrick Anderson brings up a similar critique to Lloyd with regards to the iconicity that can follow individuals after a famous hunger strike. Anderson’s case study is the Turkish death fast of the early 2000s and he notes the particularity of this strike as it was able to avoid romanticizing individuals. He suggests that the coalition and not the individual was “the primary unit of political action and signification” (2010, 113-14) Rather than mythologize individuals the ways that Bobby Sands, Mahatma Gandhi, and Caser Chavez have been, this strike instead focused on political subjectivity of those incarcerated, enabling the “multiple solidarities epitomized by the Turkish strikers produced and reflected subjects deeply connected to their political community despite the potential for what is essentially a highly individualized consequence of striking: death” (ibid.). ↩︎