The Diary was originally written in 2005 but was not published for a decade. It now appears with the heavy redactions inserted by several government agencies: sometimes entire pages are blacked out. Apart from a collection of a few poems,³ the  Diary is the first volume of detainee writing to have escaped “the wire,” as the perimeter of the detention facility is known. Though the story has escaped, its writer has not. Slahi is still detained in Guantánamo, thirteen years after his initial arrest, despite having never been charged. The initial suspicions about him proved insubstantial and the U.S. government has been unable to find sufficient evidence to charge him with any crime. He was cleared for release in 2010; appeals of that decision have held him in permanent limbo.

Slahi’s ability to compassionately illustrate the human cost of indefinite detention and the demonization of Islam on the rank-and-file of the “War on Terror” is nothing less than miraculous. His capacity for compassionate curiosity darts through the record of atrocity like a golden thread. “I would like to believe the majority of Americans want to see Justice done, and they are not interested in financing the detention of innocent people,” Slahi writes:

I know there is a small extremist minority that believes that everybody in this Cuban prison is evil, and that we are treated better than we deserve. But this opinion has no basis but ignorance. I am amazed that somebody can build such an incriminating opinion about people he or she doesn’t even know. (372)

Despite the best efforts of the full force of Washington’s legal, political, bureaucratic, and national security mechanisms, out of the prison has escaped a testament to the possibility of something recognizably human dwelling and surviving, even shining, in the prison human rights attorneys have called a “legal black hole” since 2002.⁴

One of the odd things about Guantánamo is how few images are publicly available. After thirteen years, there have only been a few press tours “behind the wire.” For the most part, articles about it rotate through the same handful of photographs of detainees: men dressed in orange jumpsuits and shackled in kneeling positions that suggest fear, subservience, and—I think this is key—possibly prayer. What distinguishes a “detainee” from a “prisoner” is, of course, due process: charges, a trial, and a conviction. But it is the detainees’ Islam that most marks them as “terrorists” in the public imagination. An image of hooded detainees, freshly confined in Guantánamo cages, shows men with shackled hands bent at an awkward angle, as if suspended between kneeling and prostration, as if they had been apprehended in the midst of Islamic daily prayers.

The images seem to suggest the inevitable success of a swaggering American dominance over both Islam and terror. That shaky bravado defined the early years of the War on Terror. Talk to anyone who was a high-ranking military, Pentagon, or White House official in the aftermath of 9/11, and you will be told about the intense fear that another attack was imminent, and about the pressure to ensure that attack didn’t happen. The most honest among them will talk, too, about the desire for vengeance that characterized the emotional climate of the decision makers in those first months and years. That climate of vengeance shaped behavior down to the lowest ranks. “The message from top officials was clear,” said Senator Carl Levin, who chaired the Senate’s subsequent investigation into detainee abuses; “it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees.”⁵ Which is exactly what happened.

Most of the facts about Slahi’s detention and interrogation have been publicly available since 2009, when the Senate Armed Services Committee report on the treatment of detainees was released. That 263-page document includes three pages just listing the acronyms used throughout. The report is thin on description, and its prose matches the militarized clinical tone of the military documents it quotes:

——————– The GTMO plan stated that, while in the interrogation room at Camp Echo, Slahi would sit in a basic chair and “be shackled to the floor and left in the room for up to four hours while sound is playing continually.” His time in the room was intended to “disorient him and establish fear of the unknown” and emphasize to Slahi that ” ‘the rules have changed’ and nobody knows he is there.” The practice of shackling him to the floor and subjecting him to loud music was to be repeated over several days, interrupted by actual interrogations. Slahi was to be permitted four hours of sleep every sixteen hours.⁶

Slahi describes what the report doesn’t: the feeling and atmosphere that accompanied these actions, such as the extremely painful practice known as “short shackling”:

“Stand up! Guards! If you don’t stand up, it’ll be ugly!” ———– said. And before the torture squad entered the room I stood up, with my back bent because —————————————— didn’t allow me to stand up straight. I had to suffer every-inch-of-my-body pain the rest of the day. . . .

“If you want to go to the bathroom, ask politely to use the restroom, say ‘Please, may I?’ Otherwise, do it in your pants,” ———– said.

Before lunch ——————————dedicated the time to speaking ill about my family, and describing my wife with the worst adjective you can imagine. For the sake of my family, I dismiss their degrading quotations. . . .

That afternoon was dedicated to sexual molestation.– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – . . . .(224–225)

Slahi’s Diary makes torture, and the tortured language of state euphemism, into something comprehensible. When Slahi tells his story, intentionally obscurantist phrases like “extraordinary rendition” and “enhanced interrogation techniques” are given a reality that bears flesh. Early in his journey, Slahi describes being hooded, shackled, and tied to other detainees with a rope that cut into his arm. “Although I was physically hurt, I was solaced when I felt the warmth of another human being in front of me suffering the same. The solace increased when —————— was thrown over my back” (25). Whether it was chance, gift, or piety, Slahi was able to draw peace and consolation from a communal sense of compassion. Even as he is in the midst of great pain, what he finds noteworthy is his closeness to others. Through his forthright, yet understated, style, Slahi has written a speakable account of unspeakable torture. Even the scenes of the most violent beatings are rendered on the page with a matter-of-fact detachment that signals the immensity of the trauma left undescribed.

The long process from writing to declassification and, finally, to publication sheds some light on the administrative limbo that defines life in Guantánamo. After the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act passed and the worst of the vengeance-as-policy was over, Slahi was allowed paper and pen—and access to lawyers. During 2005, Slahi began to give his lawyers pieces of the manuscript that would become Guantánamo Diary. For the next seven years, his lawyers fought to have the manuscript declassified. Meanwhile, Slahi remained detained and segregated from the general population, but now allowed to garden, watch videos, occasionally Skype with his family, and wait for his habeas corpus petition to be heard. That took four years. In March 2010, a federal judge granted the petition and ordered him released. The Obama administration then filed an appeal to halt it. Despite recent pressure, there is still no hearing scheduled. In 2012, Slahi’s lawyers were finally successful in liberating his manuscript, though what they received was heavily blacked out with redactions. They passed the manuscript on to editor Larry Siems, author of The Torture Report, an edited volume drawn from the trove of documents won by the ACLU.⁷ The resulting book preserves the heavy black redactions left by multiple rounds of censorship. Beneath the blacked-out lines and paragraphs, Siems’s footnotes piece together something like a record of attestations drawn from Senate reports and transcripts of administrative hearings that provide context and sometimes the likely content of what has been censored.⁸

Slahi even renders visible what has largely been missing from the debates about torture and Guantánamo: the harm done to those asked to carry out sinister violence. “We make [the guards and interrogators] carry the moral weight for the rest of us,” editor Larry Siems told a lunch meeting at the Harvard Kennedy School in April 2015. At a time when the military is increasingly segregated from civilians in American society, Slahi’s ability to illustrate the human cost of a torture program on the low-ranking personnel who carry out orders from Washington is a powerful gift.¹¹ Through his descriptions of guards, interrogators, and the things they did to him, Slahi shows us who we really are. He does not condemn us; our own shocking sense of recognition does.

Not until President Obama admitted last summer that “we tortured some folks” had there been an official acknowledgment of torture. Slahi’s narrative shocks us not because it’s new, but because we, like Yarmuth, need to believe that we are indeed “better than that.” But Slahi knows exactly who we are, and what Americans do, because he has experienced us: “We’re gonna feed you up your ass,” one guard threatens (231). And yet: in Slahi’s Diary we find something beautiful, humane, and alive, exactly in the place it shouldn’t be. While reading the Diary, I began to wonder if Slahi has written a kind of gospel for our era of indefinite detention and secret prisons. Slahi’s narrative is plain and unflinching in revealing what American cruelty does to its victims. And yet, Slahi is improbably, inconceivably still alive, morally vibrant, observant, even curious.

I am conscious of my potential critics here, who will be rightfully suspicious of the cheap typologizing of any tortured person as a Christ figure, or who would find fault with a hegemonic, Christocentric erasure of religious difference. But I take my cues from the form and content of Slahi’s narrative. I recognize the essential literary structure of the Christian gospel in the Diary‘s two-step stumble: the shocking reflection of who we really are, and the simultaneous and yet. Slahi’s “serious prayers,” offered by the dim light of a toilet drain, inspire my own. I recognize a kind of faith I dearly desire as a Christian in the depth and litheness of Slahi’s Islam. It’s the faith I want to teach. So I teach this book. It strikes me as good news.

Whether something is literally or canonically a gospel is a less urgent question to me than the question of its effect on readers. One striking cultural phenomenon marking the response to Guantánamo Diary is the seemingly reflexive urge to read it aloud, preferably with groups of people. Shortly after the book’s January 2015 release, PEN America hosted a reading in a snowbound downtown Manhattan theater in which a cast of New York actors, activists, artists, and writers read out passages. At Northwestern University, political science professor Ian Hurd organized an all-day reading of the book. The event lasted nine hours.¹² In a joint project of The Guardian and UK publisher Canongate Books, the book’s website (Guantanamo diary.com) features over a dozen audio tracks of actors’ readings of the book, among them Benedict Cumberbatch, Jude Law, and even Nadya Tolokonnikova of punk band Pussy Riot, who was herself imprisoned in Russia for a year.

When I have hosted reflection groups on the book, including one at Harvard Divinity School, I have been surprised by the somewhat uncomfortable silence that precedes a volunteer’s reading of a passage. It is as if the torture has a contagious quality that threatens to steal our own voices as well. To bring Slahi’s words into one’s own body and breath requires a surprising, unusual courage; the voices that emerge are often tinged with a solemnity unmistakable to me as liturgical.

Solemnity is appropriate. I remind people that psychologists of torture have long known that it takes so very little to mangle a human being into doing anything to make pain and madness stop. The combination of isolation and sensory deprivation is, by itself, enough to make some people begin hallucinating within hours. Slahi began hearing the voices of his family. His hallucinations even worried the interrogators.¹³ When book group participants come into the room knowing that the topic is torture, some seem stiff, as if they’re bracing themselves. Then they discover that Slahi is empathetic, articulate, and often funny. Collectively breathing Slahi’s own voice into the room seems to restore his American readers’ sense of civic dignity and human obligation. Rather than spending a few minutes on guilty gestures of sympathy, the act of voicing Slahi’s words invites us to remember we are capable of creating a nation that is in fact “better than this.”

The good news of Guantánamo is, of course, Mohamedou Slahi himself: that he has so far survived; that he has been able to withstand the grinding absurdity of his arbitrary detention with his curiosity, mind, and faith largely intact. His gift to us in the Diary is, ultimately, an opportunity for national repentance. Free him and the others held without charge; close the secret prisons. His editor believes Slahi’s Diary ought to be enough to convince us to do so. “I believe there will be a homecoming,” Siems writes in his introduction (xlix).

Slahi is able to offer the story of his suffering in a way that reveals to the world who Americans really are, and yet he invites us to imagine being otherwise. His vision for the world that could be, appended as an “author’s note” at the end of the book, is full of calm grace and improbable, yet compelling, hope:

In a recent conversation with one of his lawyers, Mohamedou said that he holds no grudge against any of the people he mentions in this book, that he appeals to them to read it and correct it if they think it contains any errors, and that he dreams to one day sit with all of them around a cup of tea, after having learned so much from one another. (373)

Slahi’s testament ends the way good news often does: with a vision of a reconciled world and an invitation to act. As I long for that cup of tea, and all that it would mean, I catch myself praying.

Marisa Egerstrom is a third-year master of divinity student at Harvard Divinity School and a candidate for priesthood in the Episcopal Church. She is concurrently finishing her dissertation in American sudies on the development of the American torture program.