I have always had an interest in the whole Guantanamo setting and how it came to be and who was sent there and why. I also never really knew what exactly the human rights violations were that I would hear about through the news the so felt I needed to learn more and from the actual "prisoners" themselves and their perspectives as well as the stories of those in charge of keeping order. I would recommend this book to readers of any age (perhaps secondary school start) for a true insight as well as being utterly unique in its artwork and graphic design as a way to tell multiple stories.

Guantanamo Voices ed. by Sarah Mirk⁣⁣
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“We think of war, first and foremost, as an outbreak of mass physical violence,⁣ a theater in which we tear one another to shreds with bullets and bombs. And this⁣ is of course the defining layer of wartime, but beneath it, supporting the physical⁣ violence, are other layers, each one a different kind of violence—a linguistic⁣ violence, a bureaucratic violence, a violence of apathy, and, always the concluding⁣ chapter, a violence of forgetting.”⁣⁣
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That was a paragraph from Omar El Akkad’s Introduction in this important comic anthology of stories coming from Guantanamo. The bright colours and nice illustrations didn’t downplay the already atrocious narratives, if anything they made it ever more accessible. Initially compiled in the form of a blog, the ten stories here are adapted from Mirk’s interviews with the people involved and many other factual sources over the past decade.⁣⁣
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I really appreciated the various voices included in this anthology. Not only the stories from the prisoners (not going to say a lot on that part, it’s already heartbreaking as it is), but also the stories from the empathetic guards, lawyers, and those who still have conscience. Their reflections showed us how evil the system can be even if you’re trying so hard to “change it from within,” the underlying racism to justify putting people in cages, and how torture altered the realities of the prisoners. Toward the end of the book I mostly felt angry as it illustrated how those in power could’ve shut down the prison if they wanted to... but of course they didn’t, even Castro was fed up 🙃 I was fuming reading one of the guards (soldiers?) interview when he justified his “detaining” the prisoners as being in line with “American values,” such a fascist line. Oh and it’s also amazing how each story are illustrated by different artists, so it actually gave the impression that you’re talking to ten different people.⁣⁣
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As of January 2019, there are still 40 people in Guantanamo imprisoned without any signs of being indicted or released. It’s important not to forget that as Omar El Akkad has stated above.⁣⁣

Sarah Mirk’s Guantanamo Voices is a gripping graphic novel about one of most notorious detainment camps in recent history. It follows the experiences of nine people who either worked or were imprisoned in the camp, and their tales are quite terrifying. Mirk’s storytelling is honest, real, and does not shy away from the horrors that occurred in the camp. What I appreciated about this graphic novel is that Mirk does a fantastic job at presenting facts without inviting any personal judgment – the neutral presentation will definitely reach out to more readers, especially in this polarized time. I also loved the art although, I must admit, that some parts were illegible because of the small or blurred font. I will definitely be adding this graphic novel to my classroom.

Thank you NetGalley and Abrams ComicArts for this eARC. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

What I could read of this was very good. The scans was so lo res and blurry though that I eventually gave up about 80 pages in. It hurt my eyes to try and read the text.

I dowloaded it on the netGalley App and when it updated I never realised that I lost access to it. I was unable to read and review this book. If I got a chance to read it I could put a proper review in.

Guantanamo Voices is a compelling and deeply riveting graphic novel about the detainment camp which is one of the dark blemishes in American history.

The graphic novel is phenomenal with excellent art panels and it tells the story of the camp and the history behind it. I only knew about Guantanamo roughly and this novel opened my eyes to the experiences of the people who are actually there and it has been a real eye opener.

The author has interviewed several people who reside there like former prisoners,doctors,social workers,lawyers etc and we get a picture depicting the horrors of the place and how it has affected the lives of many people. This book packs a punch in less than 250 pages. It is not very preachy and approaches the issue in an objective manner, Each chapter is a different story with a different illustrator. However, I found that the art throughout the book was cohesive. I will not be forgetting these stories anytime soon.

I feel that everybody who wants to be a well informed person read this book and have it on their bookshelf. This graphic novel is not to be missed.

The unsettling thing about a graphic novel is that it can take a difficult subject matter and make it easier to absorb. After reading this book, my eyes have been opened and it feels uncomfortable and deeply concerning. I will be honest, I knew very little about Guantanamo Bay before I read this book. Each chapter is an account from a different perspective - perhaps a lawyer, the chief prosecutor or a veteran. Each account adds to the whole; how a prison came to be established on Guantanamo Bay. Of course it is complicated. However, it was troubling to read that prisoners have been kept for years without being charged. Many of these men were known to have been falsely accused from the outset but the authorities turned a blind eye. There is an irony of course; the majority of these men came from an honour / shame culture - but the history of this prison and how these men were treated, will be a deep source of shame for years to come.
Five stars from me!

An amazing read! A graphic novel that describes the situations and the conditions the prisoners and even the people like lawyers, political workers and officers face and become a witness to, the book is a heartbreaking testament to their lives encompassing all emotions in and out of the prison as they continue to dwell rather rot in that horrendous place despite being acquitted of their crimes; how they (detainees) are far removed from reality, the outside world, even their own family and how the lawyers and attorneys despite knowing everything are in no possible position to question the government which unlawfully mistreats the so-called detainees inhumanly, brutally.
A really devastating read engulfing the nuances of savage brutality.

This day marks the 19th anniversary of the Twin Tower tragedy. However, what followed was a sheer abuse of power. In January 2002, the U.S. government began the transfer of suspected terrorists to a naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. As on January 2019, 40 prisoners remain in Guantanamo. They haven’t been charged yet.

‘Guantanamo Voices’ is a graphic collection of true accounts edited by Sarah Mirk which highlights the lack of basic fundamental rights ‘detainees’ at Guantanamo suffer from. Divided in eleven chapters, the first and the last chapter are Sarah’s experiences while the other nine are interviews of people associated with Guantanamo in one way or the other. 12 artists have worked to bring uniqueness and authenticity to every story illustrated in the collection.

The facts highlighted in the beginning of the book sets the face about what are about to read next. Did you know that 80% of the Guantanamo prisoners were turned over to the U.S. for bounties or that the American forces had the right to imprison anyone on the battlefield without a hearing? Forget a hearing, the names of prisoners were not released for the maximum period of time so that prisoners could not apply for Habeus Corpus! With horror stories on one side, we also have accounts of those who have fought for human rights — the lawyers, the social workers and we have stories of those who made it out. What is their life after making it out, with no citizenship of the country which accepts them or no rights. What are the lives of these innocent people who have detained just on suspicion without even a hearing. It reminds one of the Polish detention camps Stalin used near the end…

While all accounts were equally eye-opening at hard-hitting, what left a deep mark on me as a reader was Thomas Wilner’s account who narrated the story of Fred Korematsu, an American Japanese who refused to flee the city after the Pearl Harbour attack in 1941 and fought for his civil rights despite the tension. The Government did apologise for the atrocities after 40 long years, we wonder how long will it take for them to acknowledge the atrocities done on this account.

An attempt has been made to cover diverse viewpoints in the collection which helps an ill-informed reader like me form my own perspective about the gravity of the situation. A must-read for anyone interested in current affairs or human rights, I hope this book receives the wide audience it deserves.

A powerful graphic novel illustrated and written in a way that clearly conveys the horrific experiences of this prison without being overly violent. The voices and emotions of both prisoners and guards are clear and distinctive. Art is skilled and evocative without being garish.

I would like to thank Abrams Comic Arts for providing the digital galley thru Netgalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

cw: torture, nudity, war, violence

I knew that when I finished reading this book, I would not be able to forget this. Guantanamo Voices is a haunting, informative graphic novel which tells real-life stories of people who lived and worked in the prison.

I would not have known the Guantanamo Prison if it weren’t for this novel. Even when this is a difficult read because of its heavy themes, I was grateful that I was able to read this. I was informed of the things that others would rather keep buried. Just because we cannot see or heard about a thing, we tend to ignore it. Plotwise, each chapter narrated different stories of prisoners and people who worked in the prison. They were very detailed and brutally honest. Different artists illustrated each story. I think they did a great job capturing the emotions and atmosphere that were needed to effectively convey the messages.

This novel made me feel lots of things, but the two emotions that I felt the most are anger and sadness. I am angry at how blind and unfair the justice system is, and how this prison was established because of fear, racism, and Islamophobia. My heart goes out to those who suffer torture and spend years of their lives locked behind the bars even when they are not charged with any crimes. I cannot imagine the pain they felt, how this injustice already robbed their future. All these things hit close to home. With the current pandemic and the political situations where I am living, it felt like history is repeating itself. The unjust justice system feeds on the fear and paranoia the citizens feel. The military abusing their powers instead of protecting their citizens. These are still happening, and it’s getting worse.

I cannot stress enough how important this book is. I think everyone, especially American citizens, should read this. We should inform ourselves about these issues. We should not turn a blind eye but should help in raising these stories that need to be told.

5/5 stars!

Arc wasn’t really accessible and was hard to read so I can’t review well, but what I could see and take in it looked to be an important and well needed book, but I can’t honestly review this as couldn’t access

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for a free copy for an honest opinion

This is, everyone agrees, a very important book. What I read of it was informative and well-illustrated, and I'll definitely pick up a copy to read when it drops. Unfortunately, the eARC provided by Abrams was horrifically blurry to the point that I could not read it, so I am unable to provide adequate feedback. I'm not sure how other eARC reviewers are leaving their reviews given that the text was simply not readable. I'm giving it 1 star solely because I literally could not finish it, which is a serious shame-- it looks really, really good.

As a British 25 year old, I’m ashamed to admit that I’m not very educated on a lot of history, particularly outside of the UK (thanks to the UK education system focusing on the world wars rather than anything current) and so while I had heard of Guantanamo Bay I thought it was a high security prison, not somewhere keeping people for almost 20 years awaiting a trial. I’m absolutely shocked and disgusted that this is allowed, along with past presidents allowing the torture that occurred towards these people. The fact that there are still 40 people in custody now is horrifying.

This graphic novel is a hard but extremely important read regardless of where in the world you live. I truly hope that those people are finally freed soon and able to live the remainder of their lives in as happy and as safe an environment as possible and the camp/prison is shut down. However, from a quick google it looks like the current president is planning to use the place for high-level prisoners in the near future!

I truly believe everyone should read this at least once!

(Side note; I am extremely grateful for being sent an e-arc of this book. However I found it to be very hard to read physically as it was blurry and zooming in or bigger screens made it worse. Also at times the font style or colour made it very hard to read a caption and even after looking on multiple screens I still couldn’t read some words. I hope that with the final copy this will not be the case.)

Thank you to NetGalley and Abrams ComicArts for providing me an advanced reader copy of this title in exchange for an honest review.

As expected, this is a difficult book to read. It contains multiple perspectives and stories from people who worked at Guantanamo, people who were indefinitely imprisoned there, and those who offered them legal counsel. Every piece of information was fact-checked extensively to ensure credibility, and the artists referenced photographs whenever possible. I was aware of some elements of what happened, and continues to happen, to those imprisoned at Guantanamo but I had no idea of the extensity of legal maneuvers required to creative these "detainment centers". Once reading these accounts it is impossible to remain ignorant of the depravity the United States government purposefully allowed in the name of a war that was designed to never end.

Most people my age have no personal memories of 9/11. Yet the racist and Islamophobic anger that perpetuates the violence displayed here is still taught to many in my generation on the basis of honoring the victims of 9/11. They have been presented a purposely skewed view of reality that ignores the terror our own institutions have inflicted on communities in the Middle East. They do not feel the outrage they should when described state-sanction torture methods, because propaganda justifying these acts of unforgivable brutality have been drilled into their minds for almost as long as they've lived. Books such as this one are so important not just because they tell the facts of what has occurred at Guantanamo, but because they return the humanity of these people who have been imprisoned and falsely portrayed as monsters over the course of a generation. Their humanity and trauma should not have to be laid bare for others to feel empathy and anger for them, but ideally, those are the emotions this book will cause anyone who encounters it.

I hope this book is circulated widely and utilized in education curriculums. It took ten years to make its publication a reality and unflinchingly display truths that have been deliberately hidden from or misconstrued to the public over the course of the last eighteen. I do not take the opportunity to read it and listen to the voices of Guantanamo survivors lightly. Tragically, forty people still remind imprisoned there today, even though some were ready to be released before the results of our last election. Evidence indicates that their danger to the world was likely entirely exaggerated, so I hope to soon see them welcomed back into it.

Guantanamo Voices is a compilation of stories illustrating the atrocities at Guanatanamo Prison. People are imprisoned, tortured, and detained without proven reasons for years. Finally, when many of them get released they are sent to a foreign country, a place that they have never been before where they have to set up their life from scratch. But almost always these individuals come out of the prison, paranoid, disillusioned, and psychologically wrecked, making them unfit to blend in easily.

This is an unsettling, anger-inducing book. One where you can't believe what you are reading. It's about entire governments, right up to the President, colluding with the military to keep these people imprisoned merely on the basis of their religion. Their reasoning? If you are a Muslim, you are related to Osama and Al-Qaeda. The racism and Islamophobia that's inherent in the system and people's thinking is unthinkable.

The stories are a mix of experiences of both officials who worked in the prison as well as some of the prisoners. At once poignant and emotionally stirring, Guantanamo Voices is a plea for true justice. Although set in the US, the pain and sadness that the prisoners feel is universal.

It took Sarah Mirk ten years to bring this book to fruition due to various hurdles. It's amazing that she finally got it done, and done brilliantly with some wonderful artwork from various artists.

An absolute must-read.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC!

“Guantanamo Voices”, by Sarah Mirk, is one of those books that I have a hard time writing my thoughts about because I am still full of feelings after having finished it. Feelings of anger, of frustration, of confusion. This is an important graphic novel, that sheds light on a topic that most people probably feel know more about than they actually do.

“Guantanamo Voices”, is a graphic novel about what happened in Guantanamo Bay since the prison opened up to present time from the perspective of nine people whose lives were connected to the prison, either by having been imprisoned there or worked in connection to the prison. The author’s trip and experience visiting Guantanamo Bay while researching this graphic novel is also documented in two chapters.. Each of the eleven chapters is illustrated by a different illustrator, so there isn’t one specific style throughout. Personally I care a lot about the art and illustrations in graphic novels, but this one was a case where I was so outraged by what I was reading that I couldn’t really focus on the aesthetics.

This is a very informative graphic novel and I believe anyone that has an interest in US and foreign policies would find it interesting. I hope a lot of people, especially from the US and the Western World, will read this. I am sure that if they do, they will find that they know very little about the topic of Guantanamo Bay, whether because information was just kept away and they never learnt about it or because they heard about it and simply looked the other way.

I volunteered to read this book, through netgalley in exchange, for an honest review. The artwork is beautiful in this book. It is very educational. I really enjoyed this book. This is the first book I've ever read about the guantanamo prison. It was opened in 2002. I absolutely can not wait to read more books by this author and see the beautiful artwork by this illustrator. This book is in stores now for $24.99 (USD). I definitely recommend this book to anyone and everyone.

I'm giving this 5 stars preemptively because I think this is an incredibly important graphic novel that needs to be recommended widely - unfortunately, though, I couldn't read it all because the text was so fuzzy in my file it started giving me a headache around the 25% mark! :( I'll definitely be picking up a finished copy some time so I can finish it, though.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me access to this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Guantanamo Voices by Sarah Mirk is a graphic novel that tells true stories of what went down at GITMO through multiple points of view. Mirk was inspired to look more into just what happened at GITMO after speaking with now friend Chris Arendt when she noticed him putting together a zine about his time as a guard at Guantanamo Bay.. Like many of us, Mirk didn't really know much of Guantanamo and took in Chris's stories and wanted to know more. How could a supposedly just nation subject so many people, the majority of whom never actually were convicted of any crime, to unspeakable torture?

Mirk explores the history of Guantanamo though a number of diverse voices, including prisoners who experienced the torture firsthand and those who went from indifference to working to get these men released after seeing the practices put in place at Camp X-Ray. Even Mirk experienced this for herself when visiting Guantanamo and seeing how what they could take back to report on dwindled over the short visit.

I was a senior in high school when the September 11th attacks happened, and was in a similar situation that Sarah Mirk was at the start of this graphic novel - I knew that GITMO existed, but not much else. Guantanamo Voices brings these stories to the forefront; it will break your heart, but these stories need to be told. Mirk works with many different artists to bring these stories so wonderfully to life.