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BOOKSLUT

NICK FLYNN interviewed by Rick Warick, feb 2010

One of the most incendiary and controversial poets and memoirists of his

generation, Nick Flynn first entered the literary spotlight with his two books ofpoetry for Graywolf Press, Some Etherand Blind Huber. It was the 2004 memoirAnother Bullshit Night in Suck City, though, that brought him national attention

and widespread praise -- Stephen Elliot, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle,called the book "a near-perfect work of literature." In Flynn's new memoir, TheTicking Is the Bomb, the writer reflects on both the birth of his daughter and thetorture of prisoners at the American-run Abu Ghraib prison. Flynn, a native ofMassachusetts, now lives in Houston and Brooklyn. He spoke with Bookslut inFebruary 2010.

In The Ticking is the Bomb, you write vividly about the first time you heardof of the Abu Ghraib photos -- you were driving from Texas to New York,

and the lead story on the radio was about the photographs. Has yourreaction has changed from those first impressions?

It took awhile for the photographs to make any sense at all, really, maybemonths, maybe years. Maybe they will never make sense, in a way they can beput aside. One thing about them, it seems, is that they sank very deeply into oursubconscious lives, as individuals and collectively, even if we only glimpsedthem, even if we turned away. And I think we, if there is such a think as a

collective we called America, have been trying to sort through what they meansince then.

You mentioned that few photos or pictorial representations matched the

earliest photographs, some taken by prison personnel themselves.

Well, they have become the iconic images of this war, which is perhapsunderstandable. As far as I understand it, there were fewer photographers in thiswar who were not embedded with the military, and so the range of photographsthey could take would be smaller, or more controlled, or even choreographed. Butthe Abu Ghraib photos are utterly surprising, simply because it seems they depict

something never meant to be seen.

You write about your trip to Istanbul, where you visit men depicted in theAbu Ghraib photos. How were your expectations of these prisonersmental states confirmed or disproved?

I found a group of men who had integrated the experience of what had happenedto them, what had been done to them, in utterly different ways. It surprised me,

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and then it surprised me that it had surprised me, for of course each man wouldbe utterly different, utterly human.

How did your daughters birth -- one of the great framing motifs of TheTicking Is The Bomb --change your so-called obsessions with torture and

terror?

I dont know if her birth did. I was never entirely comfortable spending all day

contemplating torture, and Im still not.

How does your past relationship with your own father -- explored so well inyour first memoir, Another Bullshit Night In Suck City-- inform your ownparenting, now that you have a daughter?

Well, for me, it was better that my father wasnt around, considering the way helived his life. I think his presence would have been rougher than his absence

was. I certainly hope that wont be the case for my daughter.

Although your relationship with your parents was often strained, do you

ever feel that your own parenting style was influenced by theirs?

My relationship with my mother wasnt especially strained. She never hit me. She

put a roof over my head, fed me, and was often fun to be around. I might haveneeded a few more boundaries, but its likely I would have pushed againstwhatever she tried to erect. She was young, I was a little wild sometimes. We didOK. In that sense, Ill likely try to recognize the need for certain boundaries, and

we

ll see how that goes.

What advice do you have for fathers-to-be?

One thing I can say is that your child will teach you everything you need to know,

if you can learn to listen.

What have you learned from your wife before/after your daughters birth?

Childbirth is obviously a very different experience for a man. It was so clear, attimes, that whatever psychic turmoil I was going through was a pale imitation of

[what] having that experience embodied. Perhaps she taught me the need to bemore embodied, or to trust the body more.

I understand you dont have a spleen. Neither do I. Would that make us, inpast ages, particularly nasty and spiteful?

In the West, the spleen is synonymous with anger, and so when I lost mine, Ithought the upside would be that Id be all peaceful, but it didnt work out that

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way, not always. Years later, I found out that in Eastern philosophy the spleen isthe center of joy, which didnt seem like the best thing to have lost. [Laughs]

You return to fathers and sons effectively in the "One Simple Question"entry in The Ticking. You quote the amazing William Stafford poem, "A

Story That Could Be True," which starts: "If you were exchanged in the realcradle and / your real mother died / without ever really telling the story /

then no one knows your name, / And somewhere in the world / your fatheris lost and needs you / but you are far away. / He can never find / how trueyou are, how ready." So being cast about, by people/relatives or externalcircumstances, can make you "ready," father to the man, before yourtime?

Is that how you read the poem? Thats cool. It always chokes me up, still, forsome mysterious reason, but I dont think I could distill out why, or what itmeans

Going back to your statement that each of the Abu Ghraib detainees had

integrated the experience in their own unique way; is it the kind of thingyou would want to do again, interview people in extreme circumstanceslike that?

From working with the homeless Ive found its something I am able to do, to justsit with someone and listen to whatever it is they are struggling with, and itll likelybe some part of whatever I do. Whether or not Im of any help is another story.

Certainly seeing the Suck Citypeople in their shelters, including yourfather, made for a transition to being able to interview people who are sortof at the end of their tether. What did you think of [Susan] Sontags early,much-publicized commentary on the Abu Ghraib photos?

You mean when she equated what the photographs depicted with our culturesobsession with pornography? Id say she was on the mark, as far as why thegrunts were so easily manipulated. It might not have been the whole story, whichwe are still sifting through, but it was insightful, at the time. Shes Sontag, forchrissakes.

Did you ever interview anyone you understood to have been subjected to apost-9/11 "rendition," to one of the "black sites" weve read so muchabout?

Ive met Khalid El-Masri, the German citizen who was kidnapped by the CIA and

rendered to a black site; I believe it was in Afghanistan. Ive become good friendwith his ACLU lawyer, Ben Wizner, and when El-Masri has been in New York,weve gotten together. He was held for six months, tortured, then flown to

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Albania, where he was left barefoot, yet he somehow made his way back toGermany. His case is well documented, though it seems unlikely that the U.S.,even under Obama, is ready to pay him any restitution.

You quote the Noah Cross character from the film Chinatown, played by

John Huston. Hes a man who has raped and impregnated his daughter,

and when its all revealed he says the famous lines, "Given the right time

and the right place, a man is capable of just about anything."

At some point I realized that The Ticking is the Bombwas not simply about thefew bad apples at Abu Ghraib, or even about those in the Bush Administration(basically the entire Bush administration) which ordered the torture -- none of thatwas, or is, very surprising. That Cheney would torture someone is not surprising.What was surprising was how quickly we Americans accepted it, so the bookbecame more a study of the darker impulses in each of us, that led us toembrace torture. Maybe not all of us embraced torture (only 78% in one poll), but

we all have darker impulses.

In the "Fruits Of My Deeds" section of The Ticking Is The Bomb, thecompression of which is marvelous, you mention that a filmmaker (in 1999)was interested in having your stepfather Travis, a Vietnam veteran, appearin a documentary where the conceit was whether war trauma passeddown through generations. Do you think that propensities like brutality,harsh interrogation techniques -- even torture -- can be passed down inter-generationally?

It seems everything is passed on, both the darkness and the light. Our job is notto water the seeds of darkness. At least thats what the Buddhists tell me.

At the end of the "Fruit Of My Deeds" passage you have a moment where

the filmmaker, following Travis through Vietnam, and specifically My Lai,gets down on his knees and kisses a Vietnamese womans hand, askingfor forgiveness. Do you think well ever have a similar situation with AbuGhraib? Will Lynndie England or Sabrina Harman or one of those guardsever do that?

The reason we even know about Abu Ghraib is that not everyone went along with

what was happening there -- a whistleblower (Joe Darby, I believe is his name),passed the photographs along, as did several other soldiers. Many others

refused to participate in the brutality, recognizing what was happening as illegal,as war crimes. Others who were there have done enormous amounts to get thetruth out -- Eric Fair, Sam Provance, others. These are the real heroes of thiswar. Whether what theyre doing counts as apologies is another question.

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You have as an epigraph to The Ticking Is The Bomb, an amazing quotefrom the great child psychiatrist D. W. Winnicott. It is joy to be hidden, butdisaster not to be found. What are we to take away from that?

Ive spent a lot of my life in hiding, in one way or another, and found some

comfort in it, or at least what felt like comfort, but maybe it allowed me to indulgesome of my darker impulses, at times, and those impulses began to feel likedisasters. But its a a koan, isnt it, so its probably best to let each personmeditate on it in whatever way they want.