Current Issue: Spring/Summer 2011

The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands by Nick Flynn   
Graywolf Press, 2011. $22

Review by Sara Eliza Johnson

“The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places," wrote Ernest Hemmingway in A Farewell to Arms. Hemmingway wrote in the context of World War I, a very different war than the War on Terror considered in The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands. But all wars, of course, leave wrecks in their wake. In its ruminations on war and torture, on human cruelty and helplessness, the Captain Asks considers an irreparably broken world, a space marked by brokenness of bodies and landscapes, hearts and minds. Whatever breaks in this space cannot be fixed, will not rise from the ashes of its wreck like a phoenix. Here, "inside darkness there is simply more darkness," not a seed of light or bioluminescence. It is a world without miracles. But the lack of a redemptive arc does not preclude the book from presenting the hopeful or beautiful human moment.

The majority of The Captain Asks arrives through the voice of a solitary voice—an emblematic soldier ordered by his or her "cap'n" to torture prisoners at Abu Ghraib—and so examines the world of this war as filtered through one mind and memory. The result is a disorienting and hallucinatory experience of witness, as the psychological fracturing of the speaker through trauma in turn presents us with a fractured landscape, a "broken" view of the external reality. In the midst of all this chaos comes a longing to return to a state of order, to impossibly cross both spatial and temporal distances in order to reach an uncorrupted state, a version of home. The desperation culminates in “saudade,” the final poem in the collection, the title of which is a Portuguese word that roughly translates to “a melancholic and nostalgic longing for someone or something lost.” The soldier, seemingly back from the war, or perhaps in fact dead, surveys a battered landscape that may or may not be real:

this boat, this broken boat—beam, stem, keel,
oar—this beach littered with broken

boats—broken beam

broken stem broken keel broken oar
this head littered with broken eyes this mouth

littered with broken teeth
rot stench mold stench tooth stench

gone. I
pass a woman on the street, we slept together

once, a night too stormy to row
back out—

Later in the poem the speaker considers that the life and home for which he or she had been longing is now unattainable, or perhaps never truly existed, confessing that they “no longer seem to see/ each other” and wondering “if we’d ever been together/ at all.” The sea stretching between these two people, between a life before and after war, is not crossable in the broken boat, the broken body. Everything is broken; only ghosts remain.

Flynn conveys this fracturing particularly well through the prose poem, a form typically marked for its wholeness. Each prose poem in The Captain Asks is interrupted by a series of sudden and enjambing empty spaces, like a field with patches blown up by mines. Even the breaks, the places that indicate we should take a breath, are broken even further by slashes:

our dead, what do we do / with them, we have to turn them in- /
to something, right? Mine / never came back, mine keep coming /
back, please, I beg you, open / your eyes, please, open your mouth,
or let me / open it, please, there's something I need / to taste.

The double-fracturing is disorienting to the eye, as if the poem lies in pieces it cannot sew back together. Also somewhat disorienting is Flynn’s constant use of allusion throughout the collection, how a riot of outside voices, from Whitman to Celan to Modest Mouse, floats in an out of the poetic scenes like hallucinations from another, distant life. This resistance to wholeness and completion of form and voice, for the most part, is perhaps an attempt to simulate the psychological experience of wartime—the traumatic effect it can have on a mind’s workings—and for the most part succeeds (especially coupled with the militaristic repetition present in many poems).

While all this deliberate fracturing and disconnection can at times make it difficult to connect with the book, Flynn’s use of a single participatory speaker ultimately fosters a relationship with the reader, heightening the emotional experience (and stakes) of the book by asking us to empathize with the unnamed soldier, to effectively experience his or her personal grief, guilt, and longing. The speaker talks to his or her lover on the telephone in "haiku (failed)," asking "the thread, so thin, this thread, are you still / here, is it still, your heart, is it well?" We can feel that longing. We can feel it, too, in "forgetting something," where the speaker envisions a reunion with his lover, saying so simply, "the first thing we should do is close our eyes." Such moments are particularly sad and endearing.

But then, a few lines following that tender moment in “forgetting something,” the soldier recounts his or her torturing of the prisoners, confessing "If you/ bring this one into the light he will not stop / crying, if you show this one a photo of his son / his eyes go dead." In the span of a few lines spoken by a now-familiar voice, humanity shifts from beautiful to monstrous. The moment of this poem asks readers to care for both the speaker and yet feel revulsion toward his or her actions, to privately reconcile their empathy for this person and their horror at what he or she can do and has done. The persistent anxiety in the soldier's voice complicates our relationship with him or her even further. Do we sympathize with or condemn the speaker, and ourselves? Is it possible to do both?

The tone of the collection shifts dramatically in its third section, when we finally reach the prisoners’ accounts of their experiences. Flynn presents these accounts as erasures of actual testimony, which both distills and disguises the horror simultaneously. Titled "seven testimonies (redacted)," the poems float like little dreams, as if we are looking through a mesh curtain at the actual scene occurring. It feels as if we are watching the inside of a mind during the moment of terror, clambering to make sense of it and the seemingly distant memories of the life preceding it. "I remember/ two days / laughing" one says. "My hand stretched to kiss/ electric," says another. And all the while, the reader knows what horror actually occurs through the curtain (because the testimonies transcribed in the notes section provide the difficult details, fill in the gaps for us). The erasure is an intelligent choice of vehicle for this material; given the context, many moments arrest, and the overall effect of the testimonies becomes greater than the sum of their parts.

These poems, collectively, create a difficult and dark space for readers by asking them to imaginatively participate in the traumatic act, to situate themselves as complacent and culpable agents in it. Still, for all its hopelessness and brokenness, obscenity and cruelty, The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands presents a human world (or, perhaps more accurately, a human mind) that retains glimmers of the tender and sacred. What breaks stays broken here, but genuinely human moments still flicker like matches before going out in all the darkness. There is still sunlight over a field, a face. A kiss on the neck. Flynn does not abandon us here. And what should be done with the good that remains? The soldier says:

First thing we should do / if we see each other again is to make /
a cage of our bodies—inside we can place / whatever still shines.