A WINTER’S TALE¹
Reviewing Joshua Colangelo-Bryan’s Through the Gates of Hell. American Injustice at Guantanamo Bay (Humanitas Media, 2025), 224 pp.
I. Buddies
When you pick up a book written by a lawyer for Guantanamo detainees, knowing that it will contain an account of his work representing those clients, the last thing you expect to find is a love story. And yet, when a movie version of this book is made, the bromance between Joshua Colangelo-Bryan and Jaber Muhammed will surely be highlighted². It will not be wrong to do so. After all, in a time where the most toxic elements of masculinity are leveraged for political gain, in a moment of backlash against a half-century of lessons and social progress from feminism, this tale of deep and abiding friendship between a weightlifting lawyer and a frail, wisecracking Guantanamo detainee will meet many readers where they are, taking them down a road they need to travel. An exercise in masculinity detox—devoutly to be wished.
So, yes, readers should appreciate this book’s portrait of comradery between Josh and Jaber. There are many fine touches. The two sardonically adopt a self-aggrandizing line from an interrogator—“You can’t punk me, motherfucker, I’m from Brooklyn”—and turn it into a running joke (83-4). Paradoxically, Josh is less knowledgeable than Jaber about literary and popular culture: the lawyer confesses he once asked if Jaber’s favorite film, Jumaniji, was Middle Eastern. Many other humorous moments are shared, and nearly all initiated by Jaber; some may need to be cut to earn a PG rating.
A wicked sense of humor is often the sign of a sensitive soul. As Freud said of melancholia, an eye for the absurd may be “a mental constellation of revolt.” Josh finds out quickly how true this is for Jaber. During an early interview, while showing no visible affect and avoiding eye contact, the detainee recounts how a gang of guards beat him unconscious, scarred him for life, and sent him to the hospital—after the attack, his blood had to be washed out with a hose. Readers of Through the Gates of Hell will learn—in graphic detail—what it means to be profoundly depressive and dangerously suicidal while trapped in a torture chamber.
In a 2009 New Yorker essay inspired by similar stories, former USAID administrator Atul Gawande argues that long-term solitary confinement is torture. As he notes:
Human beings are social creatures. We are social not just in the trivial sense that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we each depend on others. We are social in a more elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires interaction with other people.
Gawande goes on to recall how:
A U.S. military study of almost a hundred and fifty naval aviators returned from imprisonment in Vietnam […] found social isolation to be as torturous and agonizing as any physical abuse they suffered.
Different people respond differently. What Through the Gates of Hell asks us to understand, however, is the level of psychological desperation that drove Jaber to attempt suicide over a dozen times. Jaber himself sums it up:
“The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I’ve been destroyed. I have no more hope. I can’t trust anyone. I cannot be patient anymore. I did the best I could and now I just want to rest.” (112)
Such testimony makes our own responsibility clear. We must come to terms with the double-bind of a carceral torture apparatus that will not alter or explain its procedures, yet also—whether through emergency medical procedures or force-feeding—refuses to let Jaber die. Insofar as it is a bromance, this book is above all a rescue story—about going behind enemy lines and bringing a friend home to freedom.
II. Dystopian Fiction
At Guantanamo Bay, the military refer to Josh and other lawyers for detainees as “Habeas,” because they all file habeas corpus petitions for their clients. Thus, when a lawyer comes for a meeting, their military escort announces on the intercom, “Habeas on the gate.”
The Latin phrase “habeas corpus” (you should have the body) dates back to 1166 and is one of the most ancient and fundamental concepts in English law; a habeas writ orders that a prisoner be brought to court and forces judicial review of the grounds for their imprisonment. In literature and film, dystopic worlds where no such rights exist have often been portrayed—with Franz Kafka as Exhibit A.
Law is the red thread running through all Kafka’s work, and to say that his habeas-free world animates GTMO is no metaphor. In one of his parables, a petitioner seeking to speak with a judge is stopped by a guard and asked to wait outside a doorway—forever. In another, a man who wanders lost through a city asks a police officer for directions and is told only, “Give it up!” In The Trial, a man named Josef K. is arrested but never charged; the protagonist of The Castle, again named K., is summoned to the castle but never makes it there. In Kafka’s “Penal Colony,” a machine called “the harrow” tattoos the law onto the bodies of prisoners, except the needles don’t stop until they pierce through the body, killing the prisoners. N. B. Eventually, the harrow’s inventor receives this treatment too.
In Guantanamo, isolation is the harrow, executed by administrative fiat. Requests from Lawyer J. for remedies and explanations for the torture of Prisoner J. are repeatedly and inexplicably denied. Audiences with commanding officers are not granted. Letters between Lawyer J. and Prisoner J. are either delayed or diverted, though both continue to write, since no other options are available. Rather than grant habeas petitions, the authorities enact a series of measures to obstruct or remove this ancient right entirely. Although Lawyer J. and his colleagues never relinquish their cases, continue to appeal decisions, attempt to minimize the damage, or, at minimum, delay their ultimate defeat, they’ve clearly read Kafka, so they know where this is headed.
All of which makes Plan B necessary.
III. Shakespearian Romance
After a series of stalemates or defeats before the courts and Congress, Josh and his colleagues decide to try their hand at the court of public opinion. Since no legal solution is forthcoming, a diplomatic resolution, they reason, is the only remedy possible.
Josh’s account of lobbying in Bahrain and his campaign to get Jaber’s story U.S. press coverage are highlights and counterweights in his story of American injustice at Guantanamo Bay. These sections of the book also make clear which literary genre, overall, it most closely resembles—a genre that reveals this story’s strengths as well as the limits to that strength. Ultimately, Through the Gates of Hell is a lawyer’s experiment in Shakespearian romance—and, like The Winter’s Tale, a problem play. Its sudden happy ending is a thing of magic and beauty, but ultimately irreconcilable with the depth and darkness of the book’s psychological realism.
Though the Plan B campaign will eventually be successful, we are made aware in no uncertain terms of the obstacles it faces. As Josh comments, on the U.S. side, “It was an uphill fight. Elected officials were decidedly unconcerned about getting voted out of office or losing campaign contributions due to being ‘tough’ on terrorism. […] Nobody saw political upside in coming out for due process” (162).
By the summer of 2006, nonetheless, Colangelo-Bryan has had such success in getting U.S. coverage of Jaber’s story that, when three Guantanamo Bay detainees do die by suicide, the press sees him as something of an expert on the subject. He appears on CNN and Good Morning America, ABC News, This American Life, and the Sunday New York Times interview him as well, and a long piece on the Guantanamo habeas lawyers comes out in New York magazine. On the campaign’s second front, Josh admits, by that point, “Truth be told, I had gotten a little obsessive about placing stories in Bahrain. A seemingly insatiable desire for Guantanamo news had developed there, so any absence of coverage could be cured by my providing additional material. If two days went by without a story, I began to feel like I was falling down on the job” (156). Of course, given Jaber’s situation and psychology, the cost of falling down might at any moment be irredeemable.
Though we don’t see all his cards, for Josh to simultaneously carry off both the US and Bahraini campaigns surely required great psychological acumen as well as tireless canvassing in all corners. Josh is also clear minded about having skin in the game. He makes a case for his passion, one that ought to persuade others:
Because Guantanamo, like [my work in] Kosovo before it, was not just a professional endeavor. It was something that worked its way into all parts of my life. It had provided clear purpose. It resolved any questions about what I was doing with my life. It gave me a hugely compelling external focus for just about all my energies and anxieties. I mean, it wasn’t selfish to do the work, but it definitely wasn’t selfless. No, it made my life better. (198)
Of course, the work makes the lives of his clients better too—by saving them. In addition to Jaber, Josh’s firm represents five other Bahraini detainees held at GTMO, and in the end, all six are sent home. In their first phone conversation after his release, Jaber tells Josh, “A new Jaber started on the airplane. A new everything. I forget everything. I forgave everybody—Muslim, Christian, anyone who was bad. Anyone who helped me, even guards, I won’t forget forever” (193).
Like Josh, trained as we are in Western ways, our first thought might well be, And PTSD? Isn’t burying trauma the worst thing you can do?
Josh’s own reactions, too, seem off. Here he describes his response to the news that his last client has been sent back to Bahrain.
Sitting at my desk with the email still open, I was uncertain what to do or even quite how I felt, almost as if I was in a state of shock. I waited to feel joy, but it felt more surreal than joyous.
You have to appreciate this. You’ll never get another moment like this if you work forty more years, I told myself. But while my mind understood the enormity of the moment, I didn’t feel the enormity. Maybe it was too much to take in. (196)
Isolation destroys social identity. Yet obsessive quests, once achieved, also leave voids behind—there is isolation in obsession too. So, what remains as a countervailing force? In the story of Josh and Jaber, the only just and lasting cure for incarceration is family. When Josh visits Jaber in Saudi Arabia,
Jaber knocked on his mom’s door. She came out wearing a hijab but nothing covering her face. She gave me a big smile and hug. Jaber, translating, said she considered me “a son,” so it was not a problem for us to talk even without her being fully covered. I thanked her for the honor and said my mom felt the same about Jaber. (206)
Jaber marries soon after he gets home; even before Josh comes to visit, the couple have already had a daughter. In the years between Guantanamo and the book’s publication, Josh also got married, and he too now has children to look after.
Don’t get me wrong. As a student of utopian thought, intentional communities, and dystopic fiction, I do not believe that bourgeois family life is the last, best hope for humanity. Yet families and kinship—whether traditional or chosen—are the elementary particles that ground every human society, and the elemental violence of U.S. prisons destroys humanity from within.
In the final scene of Shakespeare’s Winter Tale, a statue of Queen Hermione—who has been missing and assumed dead for sixteen years—comes to life, and the queen returns home. Though the Gates of Hell’s happy ending is similarly brilliant, satisfying, and just. But in neither case can we unsee the past. Hermione’s son is dead, and he’s not coming back; Jaber’s father died while he was in Guantanamo, and the military used his family tragedy as torture. The problem with miracles is that they’re scarce and inherently limited to individual cases. Unlike executive or congressional action, a criminal case—even if it may be cited as precedent—ultimately adjudicates individual crimes, even when those crimes are committed by a state against an individual. Justice delivered by miracle is unlikely to help others. The spell won’t last after the lights come up.
So, we do need to ask: Even if you have, like Jaber Muhammed, the A-team delivering your Plan B, what about all those who don’t? If we follow Through the Gates of Hell carefully, we will find a response to this question as well. The court of public opinion matters, because the public has power.
In other words, the end of romance is where our own political work begins.
Notes
¹ In the interest of transparency, I’ll note that I know the author of this book. I met him through my sister Peggy, who like Josh, is a human rights lawyer. Like Josh, she worked in Kosovo; she and he also began their careers at the same large corporate law firm, and both eventually decided to turn their pro bono passions into a lifelong career.
² And yes, it will be made, and yes, I’m talking to you John Cusack, Paul Rosenberg, and/or Alvaro Rodriguez: Option this book immediately!
JIM HICKS is former Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review.
