LAUSR

TheMauritanian citizenMohamedouOuld Slahi was kidnapped and illegally detained for fourteen years, first in Jordan, then in Afghanistan, and finally at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, from 2002 until October of 2016. During the first years of his incarceration, Slahi learned English from his captors and torturers. Slahi wrote a prison diary, a form ofmemoir, in 2005 in English, the first of its kind. While initially seized by the U.S. military, it was subsequently declassified in 2012 by the U.S. government with extensive redactions. First excerpted in Slate magazine, the 466-page work, edited by Larry Siems, was published as Guantánamo Diary in January 2015, and it became an immediate international bestseller. A digitization of the handwritten manuscript is available online. A complete unredacted text, restored by Slahi himself from memory, appeared in print in 2017. The publisher’s website includes interviews and new stories, along with an animated documentary. A feature film version is slated to appear in late 2020. I first became aware of Slahi’s ordeal during a fellowship year at the Kroc Institute for Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana. Students in an international studies course read Guantánamo Diary and, along with faculty, organized a panel featuring, among others, Slahi’s editor, Siems, and Slahi himself live via satellite from Nouakchott. To a packed theater, Slahi delivered an extraordinary plea for understanding and forgiveness. I left the theater overwhelmed with grief at the horrific human rights violations he had experienced courtesy of my government, but equally astonished at his capacity for compassion and reconciliation. I contacted Siems and then reached out to Slahi via email, keen to bring his story to a wider African studies audience. The African Studies Review convened a special forum at the 2018 61 AnnualMeeting in Atlanta to revisit this important work from the perspective of interdisciplinary African studies. My first point of scholarly engagement intersected with Slahi’s experience of coerced removal and exile. At the time, I was completing a book with Nathan Riley Carpenter on the history and present of exile in Africa (Carpenter & Lawrance 2018). The second entrée