Brian Keenan - A journey beyond imagination

Brian Keenan, author and former hostage, talks to Patricia Harty

Asked about his story of stopping his buddies from taunting a Catholic boy, he said: “It was this kind of intuitive thing that kids have about what’s just and what’s fair. And [the boy’s] sense of alienation mirrored something that was articulating back to me in an unspoken way. There were lines of psychological and emotional connection. One was about justice and one was about being different. And he mirrored me and I mirrored him and it couldn’t have been a reason thing at that age.” Brian explained further: “I suppose I always was a reflective child. I wasn’t like the other kids. I had what’s called buck teeth, very prominent teeth. So I got called names like Bugs Bunny, which didn’t seem to bother me. Your mates are still your mates (‘Listen, Bugsy’). It really only bothered me once girls came onto the scene ‘because who’s gonna kiss you, man?’ And I didn’t play football and if I was picked I was the last person picked to play. So I read books.”

The first book he read was Jack London’s Call of the Wild.  And half a century later he says he can remember it. “I was about nine when I read it. While my mates were out kicking a football or robbing orchards I was reading Jack London and running with a pack of wolves. So I suppose I was quiet, reflective in that sense. I got a lot of compensation out of taking myself other places or going other places imaginatively. Imagination was always a buoyant lifebelt I wore.”

Keenan left school at fourteen to become a heating engineer. Later he decided to become a teacher and enrolled at university. In 1986, at age 30, he found himself at loose ends; his friends were all getting married, and he decided that he needed a change of scene. “I was tired of the intransigeance, the backward mess, the terrible sense of stoppage, politically and socially. I’m saying that about myself on a personal level too. I wasn’t married. I didn’t have a job.” 

He applied for a position to teach English at the American University in Beruit and was accepted. Four months into his contract, in April 1986, he was kidnapped by fundamentalist Shi’ite militiamen and held hostage, apparently because they believed he was British. Despite pleas from the Irish Embassy in Beirut (he was traveling on an Irish passport) and an active campaign put together by his two sisters back in Belfast, he remained hostage for almost five years until he was finally released into Syrian custody in August, 1990.

Needless to say, the Brian Keenan sitting across from me is different from the image of the emaciated hostage that went around the world when he was released. Today, he’s a fit-looking man, a badly healed broken nose the only remaining evidence of his physical torture.

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Nster.com