Zone of Nonbeing: Guantanamo Part One [Watch the entire documentary here]

In 2014 Press TV aired the first installment of film director and writer Turab Shah’s documentary series, The Zone of Nonbeing: Guantanamo. According to the Islamic Human Rights Commission who helped produce the film,

‘Zone of Non-Being: Guantanamo’ looks at how the process of Guantanamisation has taken place over the last decade in the USA, and through US and allied foreign policy from the introduction of the NDAA to the use of drones.  It argues that rather than being the exceptional event of the so-called War on Terror, Guantanamo is a continuation of a colonial policy that runs from 1492 and the conquest of the Americas and the destruction of Granada.

Guantanamo symbolises in a public and brutal fashion the creation of Fanon’s Zone of Non-being – ‘an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity’ where violence reigns and those deemed non-beings are trapped by the on-going colonial process.

The “Zone of Non-Being” derives its name from an excerpt from the book Black Skin, White Masks, written by the revolutionary anti-colonial Afro-French author Frantz Fanon, in which he wrote:

” At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man. There is a zone of nonbeing, an extraordinarily sterile and arid region, an utterly naked declivity where an authentic upheaval can be born.”