Brian Keenan - A journey beyond imagination

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

A review in the English press said of An Evil Cradling, if you ever want to understand the Irish question you should read the story of Brian Keenan and John McCarthy.

“It is about validation,” Keenan said. “You need the other to validate who you are, what you are, or what you might aspire to be. You need another to listen to what you’re saying and you need to do the same with him.

The point he’s making is that a united Ireland “has to be a Republic of the heart, of the mind, of the word. It has to be a united place imaginatively brought together. Whatever might articulate itself in political terms or historical terms or visionary terms, I believe it’s the imagination that will create this [united place] and if you want imaginative Ireland you must go there first. Then begin to articulate it to the others.” 

Despite the destruction that the Troubles brought to the North, in the scale of things, it’s not as bad as other places Keenan has seen. “I’ve been to the Middle East, and other troubled places. And when I put them all together, the North doesn’t weigh too heavy, in a comparative sense. We’re not psychically hurt to the degree of some other people. I’ve walked through some places and Jesus, you know, I don’t know if those people can be rescued, if their humanity can be pulled up out of that very, very dark destroyed place that they are in and give them a sense of identity and purpose. At least we didn’t lose that,” he said.

There’s a pivotal moment in Keenan’s captivity that he writes about in An Evil Cradling when he realizes that Said his tormentor is himself tormented. Brian explains: “Said is praying and he’s annoying me with his prayers because he’s right on the other side of the sheet [dividing McCarthy and Keenan from their captors]. And he would do this because he knew it was like putting a hot poker inside me.  Now, I would have cut Said’s throat and smile while doing it because he was not a pleasant man, he got off on torturing you. But [this one night when he was praying] he started sobbing and  I realized, this man is genuinely disturbed. I knew that place because I’d been there. My instinctual reaction was that I would reach out and hold him, but I couldn’t because he was on the other side of the wall. In some strange way, Said knew that I knew. It changed things. No words were ex-changed, but Said knew that there wasn’t anything more he could do [to me].”  

Asked if he truly believes, as he had said, that the only way out is love – it’s like a stepladder out, he said: “But that’s very hard. It’s really hard for people to climb out of their own sense of dislocation or dispossession or to fight their way out of it.  For me the true revolutionary is really a lover and not a fighter. Because the object of his concern is all of the people — not all of the idea. There’s nothing in our DNA that marks you as terrorist. So people become that for some reason, and you’ve got to find out the reason.”
Given all that happened to him, Keenan seems remarkably normal. How had he managed to go on with his life while others did not? Hostage Frank Reid, taken at the same time, never recovered and died a broken man.

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Nster.com