Guantanamo Boy
Authors: Anna Perera
ALBERT WHITMAN & COMPANY
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Perera, Anna.
Guantanamo boy / by Anna Perera.
p. cm.
Summary: Six months after the events of September 11, 2001, Khalid, a Muslim fifteen-year-old boy from England is kidnapped during a family trip to Pakistan and imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he is held for two years suffering interrogations, water-boarding, isolation, and more for reasons unknown to him.
ISBN 978-0-8075-3077-1 (hardcover)
1. Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp—Juvenile fiction.
[1. Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp—Fiction. 2. Prisoners—Fiction. 3. Prejudices—Fiction. 4. Torture—Fiction. 5. Cousins—Fiction.
6. Muslims—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.P42489Gu 2011
[Fic]—dc22
2010048016
Text copyright © 2009 by Anna Perera.
First published in Great Britain by Puffin Books.
Published in 2011 by Albert Whitman & Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Printed in the United States
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 LB 16 15 14 13 12 11
For more information about Albert Whitman & Company,
visit our web site at
www.albertwhitman.com
.
For JLK, with love
Guantanamo Boy
Advanced Praise for the US Edition
“Teen readers need and deserve stories that open windows to worlds they cannot and do not inhabit.
Guantanamo Boy
opens wide a window that casts a bright light on the ethics of interrogation. Like Cory Doctorow’s
Little Brother
, it should raise questions for which there are no easy answers.”—
Teri S. Lesesne, Professor of Library Science, Sam Houston State University, Huntsville, TX
“
Guantanamo Boy
is one of those rare reads that bridges a fictitious story to that of a real time, place and event making the story so vividly real in its telling. Khalid is a normal fifteen-year-old English boy, who loves soccer, computer games and has a crush on a girl at school. Soon after 9/11, on a trip to visit Pakistan to visit family Khalid finds himself kidnapped, tortured and eventually incarcerated at the Guantanamo Bay prison for terrorists. Terrorism and its consequences on the innocent are brought into such focus that you are shocked beyond belief with the sheer reading of this story. This is a must-read for young adult readers and a great crossover for adults. A book that will stay with you a very long while; a book you’ll want to tell others about, discuss and ruminate over.”—
Becky Anderson, Anderson’s Book Shops
“All I could think about while reading
Guantanamo Boy
was this could happen to one of my friends! I’m a sixteen-year-old sophomore and Khalid the main character is only fifteen, an innocent, when he is kidnapped and eventually thrown into prison at Guantanamo Bay. What kept going through my mind was the injustice, the pain, the loneliness, the anger, the tears, and the hopelessness. What a read—it really opened my eyes to the hysteria that terrorism causes in our world.”—
Hallie, age sixteen
“A chilling and horrifying story of an innocent fifteen-year-old London-born Pakistani boy who is captured by the US government, taken to Guantanamo prison and tortured until he collapses. The novel will raise important questions related to government profiling, human rights, and the use of ‘torture.’ This may well become one of the most important teen novels about social justice of the new century. It will be chewed up, debated, and hopefully digested.”—
Pat Scales, librarian, author, and member, National Coalition Against Censorship Council of Advisors
“Anna Perera has written a book for young people, but it is a real world book, with lessons for adults as well.”—
Clive Stafford Smith, Founder and Director, Reprieve
Praise for the UK Edition
“This powerful and humane book shows that hatred is never an answer, and proves the pointlessness of torture and the danger of thinking of anyone as ‘other.’’’—
Sunday Times “Children’s Book of the Week”
“One of her greatest achievements is to make the frightening monotony of the two years [Khalid] suffers so full of suspense.”
—The Observer
“An excellent novel . . . superb.”
—The Times
“Exteremely powerful, and the descriptions of torture are genuinely harrowing.”
—The Guardian
“Timely, gritty fiction.”
—Times Review
“Could it happen? It has happened. That’s why teenagers should read this book.”
—The Irish Times
“The argument is as well balanced as the moral outrage is palpable.”
—The Financial Times
“Rising star: Anna Perera. Her novel highlights the teenagers sent to the camp as it tugs readers into its vivid nightmare journey.”—
The Independent
“Guantanamo Boy’s ability to deal with difficult issues surrounding the camp makes it a compelling read for people of all ages and a remarkable achievement.” —
Politics.co.uk
“Compulsively readable . . . a powerful novel, sure to generate debate.” —
Courier Mail
“Exploring the war on terror through the eyes of a child, Perera handles this confronting subject matter with great sensitivity.” —
Daily Telegraph (Australia)
Guantanamo Boy Synopsis and Discussion Questions
Chapter Discussion Questions and Prompts
I would have preferred not to write this story, but it wouldn’t leave me alone.
The idea came to me after I attended a benefit for a charity called Reprieve, which fights for the rights of prisoners around the world. When Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s founder, said that children have been abducted, abused and held without charge in Guantanamo Bay, I was so shocked and appalled that I felt driven to write this book. The title came to me immediately.
Many people have asked how I managed to spend months poring over such a harrowing subject. All I can say is: I felt the story had to be written. To be honest, I asked myself the same question several times but at no point did I want to give up. I like Khalid and his family and friends, and I rooted for him, and for justice—though the justice system has been ripped apart and abandoned to the four winds. I struggled daily with the issues I had to examine, and at night I was kept awake imagining the consequences if I didn’t hit the right note—the right combination of pressure and sensitivity—in telling this story. Above all, I was determined to enable you, the reader, to find—through the pages of one boy’s fictional experience—some way to understand the stories behind the news.
Once the character of Khalid formed in my brain, I needed to get him to Guantanamo. This turned out to be easier than anticipated: Through my daily research of newspapers and Internet articles I saw that the paranoia, hypocrisy, and fear that led to the creation and maintenance of this prison also provided endless opportunities for Khalid to become an innocent victim of the “War on Terror.”
Two books that I turned to while writing mine were
Bad Men: Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons
by Clive Stafford Smith and
Enemy Combatant: My Imprisonment at Guantanamo, Bagram, and Kandahar
by Moazzam Begg. Both provided valuable facts and insights. The British film
The Road To Guantanamo
was useful in providing visual details, as were many news items. I purposely had no contact with anyone who had firsthand experience of the prison because I didn’t want to steal or be influenced by another’s ordeal.
Telling this story was an ordinary act of compassion. It is a plea for another vision in an increasingly war-torn world because, as we know, there really is no “them,” no “they”—there is only us—and more of us.
—Anna Perera
An eye for an eye and the whole world will soon be blind.
1—Mahatma Gandhi
Sometimes
, Khalid thinks as he drags himself home after another boring day at school,
I’d rather be anywhere but here
. The thought of having to explain to his dad what happened yesterday is making his guts turn over and he hopes and prays the letter from school complaining about his behavior in the science lab won’t be there waiting for him. But as soon as he unlocks the door to 9 Oswestry Road, the envelope catches the corner of the mat.
Great.
Khalid shakes his head at the sight of the school crest of Rochdale High on the back of the white envelope. Picking it up, he dumps his bag at his feet, throws his school blazer at the hook on the wall and, breathing in the smell of last night’s curry, hurries to the kitchen, where there’s more light.
For a moment, Khalid spaces out looking round the open-plan kitchenette. At the knives in the correct slots of the wooden knife holder. At the blue striped dishcloth, folded neatly on the metal drainer, and bar of pink soap in the see-through plastic dish between the shiny taps. Everything’s clean and bright, nice and neat, and nothing like the mess and terrible panic he feels at the thought of his dad reading this letter from his science teacher. He slumps down on a chair and listens to the hum of distant traffic. Checks the clock, ticking steadily on the wall, counting down the seconds until the front door clicks open. For the last three days Dad hasn’t left the Vegetarian First restaurant in Manchester, where he’s been working for ten years as a lunch chef, until around six o’clock and it’s only three forty-five now. It could be hours before he gets home.