By Susan Matthews
Can you be angry and happy, shy and outspoken, dignified and traumatised? Clearly yes if you are Hamja Ahsan, the campaigning brother of Talha Ahsan - the poet held without charge for six years in the UK before extradition to solitary confinement in a US Supermax prison - in a country he had never visited. Hamja organized a protest - or was it celebration - to ‘Welcome Home Talha’ outside the Home Office last Saturday, and a bunch of about 150 diverse supporters gathered to listen to speakers including the veteran anti-nuclear campaigner Bruce Kent, writer A.L.Kennedy, London assembly member Murad Qureshi, Talha’s poetry tutor Pat Winslow, and others who had written poems on Talha’s imprisonment. A Green party representative read out the supporting letters that Caroline Lucas had sent to the US judge who finally freed Talha.
Despite Talha’s continued absence, held now in an immigration processing centre in the US, it was his voice in his poems that spoke loudest, even though though they were read by others, including the Artist Taxi Driver. (Hamja said it would be odd when he no longer served as his brother’s voice, reading his poetry at events across the country) For Talha’s poetry is extraordinary, capable of making your hair stand on end, of making you see the ordinary in a new light. His poems take you into the consciousness of someone in a situation that is otherwise impossible to imagine, into the experience of imprisonment without term or meaning. It was clear that those who had written to Talha in prison felt blessed by the letters they had received in reply. So it was hard to know whether this was a protest, poetry reading or celebration. Talha’s freeing by an apparently humane judge is certainly cause for celebration, but it comes at the cost of eight years taken illegitimately from a young man’s life and from his family. It is cause for celebration that he was sentenced to time served - but this was the limited vindication available from a system that automatically imposes a guilty verdict in terrorism cases, leaving as the only option a plea bargain and a forced admission of guilt.
Talha’s poetry is a rebuke to the injustice of his imprisonment. And it isn’t the first time that poetry has had this role: in 1773 the African American slave Phillis Wheatley visited London from Boston and her poetry was acclaimed by early abolitionists as proof of the inhumanity of the slave trade: if she could publish poetry, slavery could not be justified. Talha’s poetry is extraordinary, but an ability to write extraordinary poetry cannot be a prerequisite for escape from unjust imprisonment. Can it still be necessary to prove the humanity of groups within society? As I write Theresa May has announced supposedly tough new measures to counter extremism and to prosecute suspected extremists. The appalling injustice of the eight year imprisonment of Talha Ahsan stands witness to the consequences of a desire to look tough by any means, when the identity of the individuals hauled in to make the country feel safe hardly matter - just so long as they look different. Boris Johnson claims that the presumption of innocence should be removed in cases of suspected terrorism in order to safeguard civilized values. But ‘civilised values’ centrally include the presumption of innocence.
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