The first chapter is its own entity, while the rest of the book is divided into two sections: “BEFORE” (Chapters 2-4) and “GTMO” (Chapters 5-7). Together with the first part, Chapter 1 uses reverse chronology. One objective of this structure is to introduce the subject of the book and to create suspense by relaying shocking events in the author’s life between July 2002 and February 2003. These events involved his kidnapping from Mauritania to Jordan, to Afghanistan, and, ultimately, to the Guantanamo Bay detention camp run by the US Department of Defense. There, he underwent interrogations and torture. Chapter 1 is akin to a punch in the face. However, the chapter only briefly explains the reasons the US authorities gave for capturing Slahi. Thus, the author uses the subsequent three chapters in the “BEFORE” section to cover the genesis of his detention up to his arrival at Guantanamo by using reverse chronology. In turn, the book’s second section, “GTMO,” is the chronological extension of Chapter 1.

Another objective of the first chapter is to provide sufficient context for the second part of the book, “GTMO.” For this reason, the author discusses the structure of the Guantanamo Bay prison complex as well as the “society” inside the prison and its daily life. General Geoffrey Miller, in charge of the Joint Task Force (JTF) at Guantanamo, reorganized the camp to feature a hierarchic “class society” (58). Detainees were organized from Levels One through Five. Level Five detainees had “high intelligence value” (58), and interrogators used “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques”—that is, torture—to coerce “confessions” out of them: “The system was designed to keep us on edge all the time: One day in paradise, and the next in hell” (58). This dramatically introduces the Depersonalization and Dehumanization theme. The camp’s structure included various areas, like the general population area and solitary confinement—such as the Oscar Block into which Slahi was placed. Regardless of their level, the detainees—many of whom were Arab Muslims—were at the mercy of those at the top of the camp’s hierarchy: the lower-positioned guards and the higher-positioned interrogators from various agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the New York Police Department (NYPD), and ultimately the Department of Defense.

An important stylistic aspect of the book that Chapter 1 introduces is faux redactions. Highlighting another of the book’s themes, The Absurdities of Life as a Detainee, the originally redacted text is indicated via semi-transparent gray and is therefore legible. The purpose of the redactions is threefold. First, they’re a direct reference to the US government’s heavy censorship of the original Guantánamo Diary (2015), of which The Mauritanian is an updated edition. Second, the redactions symbolize the secretive nature of the Guantanamo prison compound and its unsavory methods of dealing with detainees. Just as the redactions erase words, the use of blindfolds or hoods on the detainees erases their identities to “make them unrecognizable” (10). Third, the faux redactions often feature generic descriptions such as “a tall white corpsman in his early twenties” (7), which would not make the person in question identifiable. They’re nonsensical and emphasize the Kafkaesque absurdities that Slahi and other detainees underwent in captivity. This chapter contains several examples of absurdities—and they multiply with each chapter. For example, an interrogator told Slahi, “Wahrheit macht frei,” or “Truth will set you free” (14). However, this statement was a clear reference to Nazi Germany’s “Arbeit macht frei,” or “Work will set you free,” which, as the author points out, didn’t set the concentration camp prisoners free. All the extrajudicial methods that the Guantanamo staff used—from kidnapping detainees from foreign countries to torture—were also absurd for a self-proclaimed democratic country with a rule of law: “Are you a Mafia? You kidnap people, lock them up, and blackmail them” (64).

Another literary motif that appears in this chapter and throughout the book is the mention of ghosts. Slahi refers to the blindfolded and earmuffed detainees flying from Bagram to Cuba as “our ghosts” (29). Later, he compares being on a hunger strike to being a ghost, and he calls the German interrogators “ghosts” (49). This motif alludes to something that isn’t fully human, a shell of a person, similar to the detainees who experience torture; in the case of the Germans, it refers to their subdued demeanor. It’s also reminiscent of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead prison diary, in which the Siberian prison camp’s name literally translates as “dead house.”