“Ya hayyu! Ya kayyum!”
Guantanamo Diary“Ya hayyu! Ya kayyum!” is the crisis prayer Mohamedou Ould Slahi repeats in two accounts of being transferred into U.S. custody. He describes it as the prayer that comes back to him when other prayers escape his memory, making its recurrence a small but persistent thread through scenes in which others control what happens to him.
A Prayer in Crisis
Slahi says he learned the prayer from the life of the Prophet and that, in similar situations, he forgets his other prayers and remembers this one. The manuscript presents it as a practice he returns to under pressure, rather than as an explanation of the events around him.
During the Transfer
In one scene, as he is being prepared for a journey he did not choose, Slahi describes the procedure as humiliating and says that he keeps mumbling the prayer. The invocation accompanies his uncertainty about where he is being taken; it is the one prayer he can recall in that moment.
At the Processing Room
The prayer recurs after Slahi arrives at a processing room and is made to stand before U.S. soldiers. He quietly recites it again. No one stops him from praying, even as one military police officer watches him with a hostile expression. The contrast gives the repeated phrase its particular force: the surrounding procedures are imposed on Slahi, but this private act of prayer continues in both scenes.
