Authors: Brian Keenan
The book is also an exploration of the mind and personalities of hostage and captor, and their shifting and changing roles. For example, it was the psychological and emotional shock of the beatings, rather than the pain, that struck each man. The beatings were not merely a bodily encounter. The mind engaged itself with another kind of intensity quite unrelated to the event; it fused with something previously unknown. For such experiences one developed strategies of mind to hold oneself together.
Writing this book was most certainly self-exploratory and therapeutic. Its content is based on fact and experience. However, in piecing together memories to get the right mix of colour, texture and insight, the reader will find a book that is more reflective and meditative — a kind of reflective symphony of incidents, feelings, words, thoughts.
I try to illustrate not only what happens to the mind during prolonged periods in tiny cells without light or any other form of stimulation, but also, when a man seeks desperately to unite vision and will by whatever power is within him, how adversity is overcome. The process is long and awful.
I hope this preface, at least in part, reveals the implicit paradox that will be the principal subject matter of the book -how in the most inhuman of circumstances men grow and deepen in humanity. In the face of death but not because of it, they explode with passionate life, conquering despair with insane humour. There are other paradoxes, such as the degree to which, in a sense, the captors became our prisoners, perversely depending on us. And, that most awful paradox of all, how men under such extremes, knowing that they must do everything to support one another, can still fall into a kind of frenzy of rage and despair more soul-destroying to watch than all the brutality.
As I have said, the act of writing the book was part of a long process of healing which in truth commenced under the most extreme conditions of deprivation and abuse. During my captivity I, like my fellow hostages, was forced to confront the man I thought I was and to discover that I was many people. I had to befriend these many people, discover their origins, introduce them to each other and find a communality between themselves and myself. These ‘people’ included those which perhaps set me particularly apart from my fellow hostages.
Unlike them I did not come from the professional middle class. I was brought up in that harsh, divided landscape of the Northern Irish working class and I came into captivity with all its attendant baggage, good and bad. John McCarthy, from the utterly different background of the English upper class, discovered his own ‘people’ and baggage.
In the circumstances in which we found ourselves physically chained together we both realized an extraordinary capacity to unchain ourselves from what we had known and been -and to set free those trapped people and parts of ourselves. We came to understand that these trapped people included our own captors and we were able to incorporate them in our healing process. All these people that John and I discovered and shared in the deepest intimacy of our confinement spoke, I believe, of a world familiar to us all — a world laden with social, cultural, political and philosophical divisions which manifest themselves in their most extreme and confused forms on the streets of Belfast and Beirut.
The extraordinary bond that developed between John and myself was a bonding not just of two separate human beings caught up in a mortal whirlwind. It was also the bonding of our own innermost selves or ‘people’ in a manner which all of us perhaps deep down aspire to. This act of transformation and transcendence could be seen as a metaphor for the times we live in, an age that has seen the massive transformations in Eastern Europe and the Arab world and the West’s own sea-changes.
John and I discovered not only a love for each other which transcended our divisions and backgrounds. We also discovered a renewed love for the world and its possibilities which, whilst nascent in us as children, had become buried by the accretions of the conscious worlds we had been brought up in. In a way the book is a ‘love story’
in the fullest sense, a story which speaks beyond the confines of what happened to us physically and addresses many of our unrealised and unarticulated feelings and aspirations.
Perhaps all art is created out of malformity. If it is so then this book is only a beginning; a first phase of re-entry into life. Ultimately, not everything can be told. Each man experienced his imprisonment in his own way. Each man selected and chose his own truths. This work is only a selection of moments in search of a truth that is certainly meaningful to me.
Whether I have achieved my purpose I cannot know. All our lives are but a story, and this is only another. Stories should be a mirror held up to life. Sometimes those mirrors are cracked or opaque. Only those who look into it can truly know; you the reader will decide.
It is always difficult to find a beginning. All good stories have one, no matter how inconclusive or unexpected their end may be. The end of this story has not yet come, so it is particularly difficult to know where to begin. Were I older and had I lived fully the greater part of what life has been given me, then perhaps as in any good autobiography it would be easy to find a starting point, a rationale or a structure for my life: a place from where memory might begin to unfold the full and meaningful pattern of my time and how I have lived it.
But here is a different kind of search for a beginning. I do not wish to tell of a whole life, but only of an incident: an episode in time, a short sequence, yet one that seems dreadfully long and meaningful to me.
I think of the opening lines of the Bible: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God.’ Somehow those lines kept ringing back to me in the long captive silences, with a head full of words, a confusion of images, a mind not sane enough to find a rational perspective from which I could understand what was happening to me. Again I recall that ancient prologue to try to convey to you something of that imprisoned time and hopefully to explain something of what it meant and how it continues to have meaning; sometimes good, sometimes bad, and sometimes I don’t know. Those easy definitions of good and bad, right and wrong seem inadequate to my purpose: the same inadequacy that overcomes so many things that we as human beings are forced to deal with and to understand.
So now I try to find a starting point from which I can share with you part of the self that I knew, and to find the self that I may have become as a result of my strange sojourn in the Lebanon. Because ‘myself could never again be an easily defined and well-summed thing. I have been asked so many times ‘Why did you go? What took you to that place?’ In answering, I can at last find my beginning.
The depth or limitation of our understanding of the world about us sometimes faulted in our development by the kind of commitment we make to that world, the people who share it with us and the historical events that touch our lives. I am a product of my city and of this awful period in its history. Before I left Belfast, I had been torn with a desperate kind of love and distaste for my place and my people and even after coming back these scars of anger and of desire still mark me.
A love that cannot find an outlet turns inward, and not being able to reach out and touch the thing it loves, be it a place or the people in that place, turns to anger and becomes confused. I have lived through a terrible time, but seen something of the loveliness that is in a people and a country, and have known people who struggle, who insist on trying to rise above the forces that threaten them. But we all become tired, like a man struggling with a great load: Sisyphus pushing his awful stone only to feel it roll back and topple him down to the bottom of that hill from which again he must begin his upward heave.
When I think of my choice to leave Ireland, I constantly ask myself was it a wearisome walking away? Was it time to find another set of values, breathe another kind of air? One in which I would have to recharge myself with new ideas, new thoughts, new relationships, new feelings? I remember talking to a friend before I made my decision to go. I said to him ‘There comes a time when you get so utterly empty that you’ve got to move somewhere else to satisfy an inner hunger.’
So I sought change, not knowing fully what form that change would take. I suppose it was a kind of inner compulsion that I had not then articulated or understood. As we sat, my friend and I, over a few pints in a local pub, we talked of ageing. We had been friends from school days — one of those few constant friendships that a man or woman has in their lives. I remember remarking how I suddenly felt myself becoming afraid of never going anywhere, afraid of the challenge that life itself presents.
My departure was a way of taking up that challenge. All my friends and professional colleagues in teaching and from community work in Belfast had married, bought homes, started families; settled into a cosy domesticity which I had avoided and had perhaps feared. Lines from W. B. Yeats’s poem ‘The Choice’ had imprinted themselves on and directed my understanding of life’s trajectory:
The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life, or of the work,
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
That ‘heavenly mansion,’ domesticity, love, marriage, eluded me for so many reasons, and I was fearful that I was going to be swallowed up in the emptiness that was encroaching upon me. I was gripped by the irresolution of life that seems to drive us to take decisions.
Unlike many of my contemporaries, I was not tempted to take up the cudgels of full-time politics. Politics can only be a small part of what we are. It’s a way of seeing, it’s not all-seeing in itself, and people like me, who were fortunate enough to be born and educated before the start of the tragedy that has engulfed the North of Ireland, found the panacea of politics to be a bitter cul-de-sac. What was happening around us had moved beyond meaningful reality. So it was for me a time to move, to find out if I could remould myself. The energizing effect of politics had dissipated, the vibrant radicalism of our generation had become ghettoized and subterranean; the rival slogans of ‘Ourselves Alone’ and ‘Who Shall Separate Us’ marked political backwaters, stagnating and debilitating. At worst they were full of perverse arrogance, vindictive and malign. At best they were a sheltering place from the long war of attrition: bursting full of community and fellowship, they were a loud testimony to people’s determination not to be subdued.
I think of that decision to move as one which many men must face. I speak of men because I am one and because I understand as a man. I think something happens to us; people looking for a colourful expression call it the male menopause. We come to an age when choice is forced upon us. Some of us choose to change our job, knowing that in our late thirties it will be the last and final change we might comfortably make. Therefore we make it with some urgency, perhaps with fear, certainly with anxiety. Alternatively we decide on a change of house. It will be the last house we will ever be able to buy for we will never be able to increase our income. Some seek out the companionship of a younger partner, a kind of emotional assurance that we can still achieve, that we are still valued.
During my period of incarceration I felt that perhaps this urge to change is not unlike a woman’s in her late thirties or early forties when she decides to have her first or final child. Maybe something in the male psyche wants a child and since we cannot have it we redirect our inner compulsion towards something that vaguely declares itself as a renewing of love, a revitalizing of what is creative in us.
In the grey back streets of Belfast, aware of people’s unresolved desire and need and sensing myself becoming rooted and dead, burdened with a feeling that I had ceased to choose life, I forced myself to change, and consequently to go.
I had a half-formed notion about the effects of change on the personality. We seem to undergo a reactive process before any transition. A person’s initial reaction to change is one of immobiliza tion. We feel overwhelmed, and the more unfamiliar the change, the greater our paralysis. With the growing negative expectations result ing from this paralysis we feel ourselves frozen up. Such was my experience. I felt the debilitating cold of ice-floes gathering about me. I knew that I must find some free water, an open channel through which I might escape before I was trapped. How was I to know that I was to confront the same entrapment in another place? Literally as well as metaphorically, it seemed that islands of ice followed and gathered about me: dry ice, so cold that it burned the skin, melted into it. My resolution to action, as it turned out, simply drove me further into blinding snowfields of the mind.
My personal history is quite ordinary. I grew up in a working-class family in Protestant East Belfast, the only male child, the middle of the family. Being the son, I was given advantages over my two sisters.
When I sought out books and education, my family facilitated me.
With scholarships and reasonably good exam results under my belt I was able to continue my education.
But first I left school at fifteen. I was an academically bright lad, who was cajoled by some of his teachers not to leave, but I wanted out, to see life and not to reach beyond the expectations of the mates who left school with me. I worked for a year in a laundry, as a van-boy delivering dry cleaning.
On turning sixteen and feeling destined for an apprenticeship, I applied, and eventually began working my trade as a heating engineer with a medium-sized company in East Belfast. I still remember my first pair of overalls. They were strange, after the black blazer and grey flannels of secondary school. I can’t remember if they made me feel any older or more of a man. I just remember that the bloody things were so baggy. I walked to work every morning and walked home again in the evening, with my ‘piece-box’ snug under my arm.