“The Camel Sits Down in Two Steps”
Guantanamo Diary“The Camel Sits Down in Two Steps” is a proverb that gives shape to the abrupt reversal in Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s apparent return to safety. Its comic lesson—that a first easing is not the end of the ordeal—becomes a transition from his release and resumed life to the threat of renewed state action against him.
The Proverb and Its Two Falls
The saying is introduced through a tale of an urban dweller riding behind a Bedouin on a camel. The rider holds on to the Bedouin to steady himself. When the camel bends its front legs to rest, the Bedouin loses his balance and falls; the urban dweller laughs, thinking the mishap is over. The Bedouin warns him, “Too soon to be happy: the camel rests in two steps.” When the camel bends its rear legs to settle fully, the urban dweller falls on his face. The joke depends on a mistaken reading of an incomplete movement: the first fall looks like the whole event, but the second stage is still coming.
Applied to Slahi’s Return
Slahi connects the tale to his own situation. After the Americans left, the Mauritanian government released him without charges, and the security directorate told the media that he was innocent and cleared of every charge. His former employer welcomed him back, and he received more job opportunities than before. Yet the government had also been ordered by the United States to keep him under house arrest. As he resumed his life, he says, the United States government began conspiring with the Mauritanian government to kidnap him. The proverb marks the contrast between the welcome signs of release and work, and the danger that had not passed.
Narrative Function
The anecdote is more than a decorative saying: it prepares the reader to understand a reprieve as provisional. Its two-stage structure supplies a compact pattern for the passage’s reversal, moving from release and return to ordinary routines toward a new threat of abduction. Slahi’s aside that, as far as he could remember, he had never fallen off a camel sharpens the irony: the danger in the passage is not a literal fall, but the political reversal that follows his apparent recovery of freedom.
