Erin L. Thompson

‘Why are you crying, habibi?’ Mansoor Adayfi asked the elephant. He had got into the habit of talking to animals at Guantánamo Bay. Held in solitary confinement for years, he talked to the feral cats who prowled around his cage. ‘I think that’s the glass eye shining,’ I said. We were looking at taxidermy displays in Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa. We had come to Brussels for the opening of an exhibition he’d curated at the European Parliament, of artwork made by Guantánamo detainees. Born in a village in Yemen, Mansoor was nineteen years old when he arrived at Guantánamo. He spent nearly fifteen years there without ever even being charged with a crime. Released in 2016, he was sent to Serbia rather than being allowed to return home. After years of trying, Mansoor had only just succeeded in getting a passport. He was wearing an orange puffa jacket that had been given to him during a recent trip to Ireland: it had ‘Close Guantánamo’ embroidered on the back and ‘GTMO 441’, his prisoner number, on one arm.

Ignoring the many ‘no pets’ signs, a man on the trail to the world’s largest Confederate monument was leaping from rock to rock with a ball python wrapped around his neck. I began to think I hadn’t really understood Stone Mountain at all. 

Last winter, I visited a stolen goddess at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The label said she was carved in the mid-tenth century in the ‘style of Koh Ker’, an isolated site in northern Cambodia that was briefly the capital of the Khmer Empire. Its distinctive sculptures began to appear on the international art market in the late 1970s, during the Cambodian genocide.