Maryem Mint El Wadia

Maryem Mint El Wadia, the mother of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, is present in the account through family memory, a long-delayed telephone call, and the threat of her detention used against her son. She died in 2013; her absence later marked the family’s calls, while her importance to Mohamedou was also made explicit in his dedication of his writing to her memory.

Family and Dedication

Mohamedou dedicated his writing to the memory of his late mother. In the same dedication, he credited his lawyers Nancy Hollander, Theresa Duncan, and Linda Moreno with making that act of remembrance possible. Maryem’s place in the book is therefore both intimate and structural: she is a family member whose loss is named at the threshold of the text, and someone whose relationship with her son would become a target during his interrogation.

A Call After Six Years

The Slahi family’s first call with Mohamedou took place in June 2008, more than six years after he had disappeared. At noon on a Friday, his mother, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, and aunts gathered at the International Committee of the Red Cross offices in Nouakchott. Dressed in flowing robes they would ordinarily wear to a family party, they had come to speak with him by telephone. The Joint Task Force Guantánamo had approved the call, with the International Committee of the Red Cross acting as intermediary.

When Maryem heard her son’s voice, she asked, “My son, my son, how are you feeling?” and told him, “I am so happy to hear you.” She broke into tears: it was the first time she had heard his voice in more than six years. The call brought the family back into contact, but only through an institutionally arranged and tightly limited channel. The calls took place twice a year.

A Threat and a Lasting Absence

In August 2003, interrogators presented Mohamedou with a fake State Department letter designed to exploit his close relationship with his mother. The fabricated letter claimed that Maryem had been detained and would be interrogated; if she did not cooperate, it suggested, she might be transferred to Guantánamo, where she would be the only woman in an otherwise all-male prison. The threat made her attachment to her son part of the pressure applied to him, without evidence that she had actually been detained.

By the time of a later account, the family conversations remained much as before, but their form and their participants had changed: the calls were now by Skype, allowing the family to see one another, and Maryem was no longer there. She died on March 27, 2013. The first call had briefly restored her voice to a family separated from Mohamedou for years; subsequent calls carried the fact of her absence.