An Evil Cradling

AN EVIL CRADLING

BY

Brian Keenan

Brian Keenan was born in Belfast in 1950 and after completing a degree in English literature at Coleraine University he worked in Brussels and Spain. Returning to Ireland he took up a teaching post at his former school, and later worked in community development centres across Belfast. He then went on to take an MA in Anglo-Irish literature and an adult education course.

It was after taking up a position at Beirut University that Keenan was taken hostage in 1986.

‘The equal of Darkness at Noon -Koestler’s account of his imprisonment during the Spanish Civil War. It is the vividly-drawn, sometimes funny, sometimes harrowing story of the author’s four years in captivity in Beirut.

Keenan comes across as an extraordinary man in an extraordinary situation’

Books of the Year Alan Rusbridger, Guardian

‘My non-fiction nominee is Brian Keenan’s vivid account of his Lebanese kidnap, An Evil Cradling, plunging far deeper into a mind stripped to its essentials than one had a right to expect’

Books of the Year James Saynor, Observer

‘Could I bear to read this? Could I bear not to, having tortured myself with thoughts of the horror the hostages were enduring while they were still held captive? So I read it. The surprise is to find that, even though the cruelty and terror experienced are all in this amazingly fluent book, reading it is not a matter of recoiling. Brian Keenan wants to concentrate not on what was done to him but on what he made of what was done to him. In the process he gives us the most eloquent, moving and illuminating testimony to how man can triumph over senseless suffering.

Not since I read Primo Levi’s If This is a Man have I been so humbled and yet uplifted by the bravery of one man’s spirit, Books of the Year Margaret Forster, Spectator

‘There may have been more important books than Brian Keenan’s An Evil Cradling, but its thoughtfulness and delicacy of feeling are unforgettable. Four years of savage captivity in Lebanon have been transmuted into understanding, not bitterness: a remarkable achievement’

Books of the Year John Simpson, Daily Telegraph

‘His book is colossal. Although it is painful, at times almost unbearable to read, it brilliantly relates the static conditions of his captivity and the awful odyssey of his mind. It manages this by a near-perfect balance of narrative and reflection… One of the remarkable things about this book is that while Keenan’s experiences are, mercifully, unusual, and while his responses over the years take him into areas of self-knowledge that most people will never need to visit, the processes of his mind are entirely comprehensible. He is thus able to take the reader with him through unfamiliar levels of despair and self-discovery…

Keenan has nothing extenuated nor set down aught in malice: the scope and grandeur of his reflections is supported by the concrete detail of his narrative. It is a moving and remarkable triumph’

Sebastian Faulks, Independent on Sunday

‘This is one of the most harrowing books I have ever read. It is the chronicle of Brian Keenan’s suffering at the cruel hands, fists, feet and minds of his captors in Lebanon. The scale of torture to which he was subjected is terrible. The man had to face every humiliation imaginable.

He endured violation of his body and of his mind calculated to drive him insane. This is more than the record of a season in hell. This is year after year after year in hell. And the tale is told unflinchingly, sparing no detail. Yet from this horror has come something wonderful. An Evil Cradling is a great book… it has been created from harsh reality, and it has been created by a true writer. Keenan’s prose alternates between intense speculations on his fate and lyrical remembrance of times good and bad. His compassion can be tempered by sharp stabs of judgment, especially against himself. There is burning rage throughout the book, but it is controlled by a detachment born from the urgency to tell what happened, and to forget nothing… This is a mighty achievement by a magnificent writer’

Frank McGuinnes, Irish Times

Brian Keenan

An Evil

Cradling

V

First published 1992

Š Brian Keenan 1992

The right of Brian Keenan to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published in the United Kingdom in 1992 by Hutchinson

Vintage Edition published by Arrow 1993

Random House UK Ltd, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA Random House Australia (Pry) Limited

20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney,

New South Wales 2061, Australia

Random House New Zealand Limited

18 Poland Road, Glenfield

Auckland 10, New Zealand Random House South Africa (Pty) Limited PO Box 337, Bergvlei, South Africa

Random House UK Limited Reg. No. 954009

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 09 999030 X

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading, Berkshire

Acknowledgements

Created by Tshirtman

Preface

The Beginning

Leave-taking

Arrival

Kidnapped

Jailhouse Rock

Into the Dark

Music

On the Move

Abed’s Hotel

The Emperor’s New Clothes The House of Fun

The Devil’s Barbershop The Hammam Mail

The Great White Safari Out of the Fairy Cake Rape

Southward Bound

Obo and the Snake Bastinado

Letter From Home

Into the Bread Basket The Tollund Men

Back to Beirut

Back to the Beginning

Regina McCormack, who was locked up with this book for longer than I was. Without her patience and concerned skill this book would still be a work in progress. Thank you again Reg. Now give your fingers a long holiday.

Neil Belton, my editor, a fellow Irishman whose ‘tender chastisement’, advice and friendship pushed me over the ‘humps’ and gave real form to the book.

Matt and Geraldine Molloy, whose sensitive and caring friendship was more supportive than they knew.

A special and most grateful thanks to all the Corcoran family and staffat Castlecourt Hotel. Their giving hand was never withheld. To Ann, especially, a guardian angel, who proved more truths about the joy of life than I could ever write. Without her coaxing and cajoling, I would still be fumbling to find a finish.

Seamus and Ann Geraghty, my first ‘minders’ and now my constant friends.

Father McGreal, who lent me his cottage in the hills beneath Croagh Patrick, where healing first began.

Frank and Mary from Dublin, who did so much to help me in my return home and to write this.

To John Lydon, who showed me some of the beauties of Mayo and provided a house overlooking the sea in which to work.

Mike and Shelagh, eternal friends, who have been forever helpful.

Many, many thanks.

Gerry and Dorothea Dawe and their daughter, Olwyn, who gave me my first shelter: ‘Memory’s the Great Minder’.

To all the people of Westport whose quiet and unobtrusive embrace was a balm beyond measure.

To Johnny Furse, who helped wipe the scales from my eyes and held my hand while my vision cleared.

Finally to my family, who understood my need of space and time.

‘They also serve who only stand and wait’ was never more true.

My abject apologies to the many people I have missed. There is a sea of faces and names before me. Forgive me.

To my close friends from Belfast, thanks for understanding and not asking.

Finally I am extremely grateful to the following for their kind permission to reproduce their poems: Leland Bardwell for The Colour Orange, Luis Veiga Leitao for A Bicycle Designed in the Cell, Trevor Magee for Exile, Conor S Carson for The Hostages and Frank McGuinness for The Com Crake.

I feel like a cross between Humpty Dumpty and Rip Van Winkle -I have fallen off the wall and suddenly awake I find all the pieces of me, before me.

There are more parts than I began with.

All the King’s horses, and all the King’s men, cannot put Humpty together again.

Brian Keenan

Dutch Embassy,

Damascus,

24th Aug 1990

Preface

I think it was D. H. Lawrence, speaking about the act of writing, who said that writers throw up their sickness in books. So it is with this work. It is the process of abreaction in art form, both a therapy and an I exploration. I once wrote in an article about the process of readjustment that we are our own self-healers. The writing of this book has been part of that healing.

The book will not be the usual conventional chronology of events, I people and places. This kind of neat patchwork does not capture or represent the significance or the depth of experience in that quarter-life, enclosed in a very heightened and very different reality -a strange

reality far removed from normal human experience, yet one in which, paradoxically, so much more of what we are as human beings was revealed. Such intimate and profound exposure of mind and body was a kind of branding and unholy stigmata, an affirmation of the richness, perhaps even enchantment of humanity. A zealous poet might - describe

the experience as a deification of one’s humanity. In the most I intense moments of despair and suffering, something of this was truly present. The book will be an attempt to reveal men ‘in extremis’.

I wish to reveal the richness of that phrase ‘in extremis’.

It is a kind of pun or play on words. There were many types of extremes. The extremes of language, for example: its savagely humorous crudity; the contrived and concocted language I that McCarthy and I invented almost instinctively and spontaneously with intimate understanding. A strange and wonderful contrivance I considering our very different backgrounds: an Irish, working-class socialist from Belfast; an English ex-public schoolboy and international journalist. It was a language that one might associate with the private world of children, created out of fantasy and need, which others cannot enter, a language impervious to holy warriors filled with righteous rage: all God-tormented and screaming Allah-uAkbar.

In this linguistic haven we established a refuge for ourselves and at the same time made a world richly meaningful for us.

There was also humour ‘in extremis’: that vast playhouse of situations, resources and creative impulses that repulsed again and again the crucifying despair that drove some men to less than animal condition, to a state of inanimateness — day-long, unmoving silence when the body became to all intents and purposes a corpse, where normal bodily functions shut down and where the mind found its own place outside the mind. Here was the real terror, and the desperately anguished clawing back to some semblance of reality or half reality was the real pain. The real hurt was psychic and terrible and made the bruises, beating and torture insignificant, a mere passing inconvenience.

Freud described insanity as ‘a flight from a traumatic reality into another world of madness’. I saw it, I travelled it, I left men trapped in it, not wanting to return. I want now to imprison it on paper.

I hope to illustrate this humour, that special quality which acted as a shield and also to show this humour as a counterpart to the depravity.

In terms of the book’s structure it serves to reinforce and highlight the cruelty, involving the reader in the emotional highs and lows of hostage existence. Further, this story seeks to evoke the extremes of human communication. How, in those conditions, discussion turned into debate and debate degenerated into poisonous argument. How men misdirected their anger and aggression onto one another, and mutual support turned into mutual dislike and seething silence. Yet why did John McCarthy and I, who had more reason for mutual antipathy, find a deep, enduring bond of friendship and support that eventually became a prop for others? Most assuredly, all of us changed, and deeply. For some it was a re-humanization and affirmation of something lost or forgotten. For others it was loss -a turning away from oneself in awe, in horror and in fear.

There will be, I am sure, a desire to know of the torture and brutality. I will not spare the reader but neither will I feed the voyeuristic vulture. I will reveal the moments of physical abuse but with extreme care and sensitivity so that what might be vicarious and even terrifying may be underscored with sympathy. I, who grew up in Belfast, perhaps knew the terrorist mind better than any other hostage. Knowledge was my sword. I could cut through our captors’ aggression, their perversion, their constant humiliation. I could see the man, a man not defined by Islam or by ethnic background, perhaps a man more confused than the man in chains; a man more hurt and anguished than the man he had just beaten.