Mohamedou Ould Slahi—Maryem Mint El Wadia relationship

Maryem Mint El Wadia’s relationship with Mohamedou Ould Slahi is traced through departure, long separation, brief and carefully mediated contact, and the threat that his captors would use family bonds against him. She was his grieving mother at the start of his life abroad, the voice he heard again after more than six years of disappearance, and the person whose memory he later placed at the heart of his dedication.

Family Bonds and Departure

Maryem Mint El Wadia was part of a large family whose circumstances changed after the death of Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s father. The family had moved from Rosso to Nouakchott as he was finishing primary school; he was one of eight older siblings, with three more children to follow. His mother’s later image as a weakened woman after years apart is set against the earlier family life from which he left.

In the late summer of 1988, Mohamedou Ould Slahi boarded a plane for Germany on a scholarship. He was the first member of the family to attend university and the first to travel by air. His mother, described as distraught at the departure of her favorite son, wept so intensely that he briefly hesitated before boarding. The family persuaded him to continue. The scene makes his departure more than an individual step toward education: it registers the emotional cost of a journey that the family also hoped would help secure its future.

Separation and Reunion by Telephone

After years abroad and subsequent detention, Mohamedou Ould Slahi disappeared from his family’s ordinary life. The first approved telephone contact came in June 2008, six and a half years after he had vanished. At the International Committee of the Red Cross offices in Nouakchott, his mother, siblings, and other relatives gathered together to speak with him. When she heard his voice, she asked, “My son, my son, how are you feeling?” and began to cry. She said she was happy to hear him; it was the first time she had heard his voice in more than six years.

The call offered contact but not a return to family life. His older brother spoke with him for forty minutes, while Mohamedou Ould Slahi asked about marriages, siblings, and children. The family’s questions and updates carried the ordinary details of kinship across the distance imposed by imprisonment. Years later, calls still connected him with relatives in Nouakchott and his brother Yahdih Ould Slahi in Germany. They had become Skype calls, allowing the family to see one another, but they remained limited to twice a year.

His return to the family home after nearly seven years away offers another measure of what the separation had cost. He did not recognize the way home until the police car stopped outside the house. Children had grown into adults, young people had aged, and his once-strong mother had become weak. Relatives and visitors crowded around the family, and the household welcomed him. He found a job and took pleasure in seeing her face each morning. That happiness was temporary: the later calls would take place without her.

A Family Bond Turned into Leverage

The relationship that sustained Mohamedou Ould Slahi through separation also became a target of interrogation. In August 2003, interrogators showed him a forged State Department letter claiming that his mother had been detained, would be questioned, and might be transferred to Guantánamo if she did not cooperate. The letter expressly exploited his close relationship with her. Its threat was not evidence that she had actually been detained; it was a false document intended to make the possibility of harm to his mother part of the pressure placed on him.

A later interrogator invoked her age and suggested that she might not withstand conditions in a detention facility. Mohamedou Ould Slahi understood this as a threat designed to extract information, and he connected it to the possibility that authorities would harm or detain family members. In these episodes, the mother-son bond appears in two sharply opposed forms: as a source of attachment and longing, and as a vulnerability the interrogators sought to exploit.

Loss and Remembrance

The family’s twice-yearly calls changed again when Maryem Mint El Wadia died on March 27, 2013. The calls continued as visual conversations, but she was no longer among the relatives on screen. The difference between the first call, when she cried at hearing her son, and the later calls without her marks a permanent break in a relationship already constrained by distance and imprisonment.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi dedicated his writing to the memory of his late mother. He also acknowledged that, without his lawyer Nancy Hollander and her colleagues Theresa Duncan and Linda Moreno, he would not have been able to make that dedication. The dedication thus joins private mourning to the conditions under which his account could reach readers: a family bond repeatedly interrupted by detention, preserved in scarce calls and memory, and ultimately carried into the written work.