This spring, the stoner screwball movie of 2004, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, will get a sequel. This time, because of some unfortunate confusion on an airplane between a “bong” and a “bomb,” our slacker antiheroes are shipped off to the moviemakers’ idea of the worst prison imaginable.On April 25, on a screen near you: Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay.Seriously, dude.Six years after the detention camp opened on Cuban shores, officials in Washington continue to consider its fate. The charges filed last Monday against six detainees in connection with the September 11 attacks are renewing international focus on the prison and the policy discussion about whether it is part of the solution or part of the problem. But in popular culture, the debate about Guantanamo is largely over, as suggested by a look at a growing number of novels, nonfiction books, movies, plays and other forms of expression.“Whether it’s America’s Devil’s Island or not, that’s how people are going to keep thinking about it,” said Dan Fesperman, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who set his 2006 mystery novel The Prisoner of Guantanamo at the base.Harold and Kumar’s escape is only the latest cultural road trip through the detention center on Cuba’s southeast corner. And in most of them, Guantanamo is an eerie outpost, with scorpions, five-foot iguanas and banana rats — rodents the size of small dogs.The image of a forbidding prison camp is not entirely false. But it is not the picture Bush administration officials would prefer to emphasise. They portray Guantanamo Bay as a clean and modern detention camp, where humane treatment of terror suspects is the rule.But Guantanamo is no longer just a naval station or even just a detention centre. It is an idea in worldwide culture — in more than 20 books and half a dozen movies and plays, with more coming out every month. t has become shorthand for hopeless imprisonment and sweltering isolation. “The strange new Alcatraz,” one writer calls it, “the gulag of our times.”The portraits of Guantanamo run the gamut, including sober lawyers’ books and accounts by former inmates, military insiders and other critics, literary novels, a book of detainees’ poetry and farce. The routine of an Irish comedian, Abie Philbin Bowman, assumes that if Jesus were to show up before American immigration officials, he would be hustled off to Guantanamo. “Putting Jesus in Guantanamo was the ultimate symbol,” said Philbin Bowman, a graduate student who has taken his Guantanamo act to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and to London, Massachusetts and Lahore, Pakistan.“The beard and the hair,” Philbin Bowman continued, “and the orange jumpsuit and the wire mesh, which is optional I suppose; you put those elements together and people see it and they get the idea.”
