A Handful of Walnuts

Ahmed Errachidi, a former Guantanamo prisoner, has had an extract from his book, A Handful of Walnuts, published in Granta magazine’s latest issue, “Ten Years Later,” dedicated to the consequences of September 11^th 2001. 

I was first privileged enough to read Ahmed’s manuscript when it was emailed to me by a colleague in September 2010 while I was doing research as a volunteer at Reprieve.  I printed it out and took it home, and read it in a few days.  I couldn’t believe how good it was.  I was gripped, couldn’t put it down, and although a lot of the content was about really dark and distressing stuff, the beautiful way in which Ahmed writes carried me through it from start to finish.  It was incredibly moving – I had never burst into tears while reading a book before – Ahmed’s made me do just that.

Ahmed lives in Tangier, where I have a family home, so it was easy for me to go and visit him there, which I did a month or two later.  Chris Chang, Reprieve’s investigator that found the documentary evidence that proved Ahmed’s innocence and got him out of Guantanamo, came with me, along with two film guys who wanted to make a possible documentary.  If I’d been taken in by Ahmed’s writing, I was perhaps a little star struck when I actually met him.  Here was a man who had been wrongly imprisoned and brutally tortured over the course of five years, but had come out gentle, dignified, humble and passionate about getting his story heard.  We spent two days with him and he showed us where he grew up, and where the roses were that he describes missing the smell of when inside his cell. 

I got back to the UK and set about finding Ahmed a literary agent.  In December I got a phone call, from Anthony Sheil, thanking me for sending him the manuscript and saying he wanted to take on the book.

Fingers crossed, a publishing contract with Chatto and Windus will be finalized and signed in the next week or two.  Gillian Slovo is set to edit and add to the book with Ahmed, and in the mean time, Sigrid Rausing has published an extract of the book in Granta, with a forward by Clive Stafford Smith.

To give you a glimpse of what the book is like, here is my favourite bit from the Granta extract:

Steel surrounded and captivated me. There was no horizon, no life and nothing to see. So I began to fly out of the cell with my thoughts and my imagination into the vast world of existence. I would put myself on the horizon, imagining that I was looking at this sun and its rays; I would travel to see birds and trees, imagine bees collecting nectar from flowers, and long for their honey. I would imagine the colours and scents of roses so that I wouldn’t forget them. I travelled into the scenery of clouds as they moved through the sky, as if they were ships sailing in the still blue sky, before breaking up and dispersing. I travelled to the moon, enjoying its quiet beautiful light, which did not disturb those who wanted to sleep. I imagined the stars sailing through the darkness of night, and felt their beauty and presence. I remembered every beautiful thing that I had known or experienced in the universe. I imagined the sunrise, a ray of light drawing a line on the horizon, slowly expelling the dark of the long night. I imagined newborn plants splitting the ground, fruits emerging from their skins. I imagined leaves falling to the ground, the sea and the fish, the rocks and corals. I imagined cattle and sheep as they grazed, and wondered how their milk could be such a brilliant white even though the grass they ate was green. Thoughts were not restricted, even though hands and feet were shackled.