Brian Keenan didn’t talk to anybody when he was released from captivity 15 years ago. “It wasn’t denial,” he insists. “What happens in a small cell, 6ft by 4ft, in the dark over five years isn’t a lot. I didn’t see the point in talking about it.”
Keenan is talking literally: what happened to him in his cell in Beirut was an interior journey, and one that he has described at length in his book, An Evil Cradling. But the question is relevant now that Norman Kember has been released. How does a former hostage begin to reintegrate into the world he knew before? According to the mores of the 21st century, talking heals everything — but how will Kember feel as he re-enters his former life, and will talking necessarily be a panacea?
Keenan suspects that Kember will be required to be debriefed by military personnel who will advise him what he can and cannot say to others. Keenan refused such a debriefing: “I’d had enough interrogation,” he says. “I can only say from my friends who did go through it, John McCarthy and Terry Anderson, that it was a waste of time.”
So Keenan flew home to Ireland. After seven days in hospital, during which time a friend smuggled him out to a pub for a pint of Guinness that tasted like old pennies, he took himself to the West of Ireland where he lived largely alone for three years. That way he escaped the media, and by saying nothing in public, was able to protect the interests of his friends who were still incarcerated. He also escaped those who, however well-meaning, did not know him but who “wanted a piece ” of him, he says.
“Part of the problem of being locked up alone is that you live in a very heightened reality. Your mind works at a very heightened level. When you come out, it’s very different and you re-attune yourself. If you talk to someone who’s well intentioned and wants to help you, you’re going to be led along a line not of your choosing. You have to choose your first steps into reality, you have to take possession of your life, not do what other people tell you.
“The only person who knows what’s in front of them is me; I have to make my world. I had to find out where I was on my own. I had to take those first steps on my own and take possession. It was nine months before I knew where I was going and what I was going to do.”
He was not a recluse, he points out. He lived near a small village where he would shop and go for walks, and his sisters and a few close friends had his phone number, and he sometimes saw them.
Keenan stresses that the choices he made after his release were personal ones: “Everybody has a different way of dealing with things,” he acknowledges. Kember, he believes, will be helped by his faith. “He will have assurance from that and he is likely to be more committed because he has had time to dwell on it.” How would he advise him? He suggests that the relevant phrase is the one used when astronauts return to Earth: “Fear re-entry.”
“That’s what he should be aware of,” says Keenan. “Things will take their own biological and psychological time, they can’t be led. Where people might want help and guidance and analysis, this thing takes time. My understanding is that there’s a psychological and biological body clock that lets you re-enter at your own speed. I think you’ve got to do that on your own.”
But Kember is married? “I imagine that when you’ve been married for a long time you don’t need to talk a lot,” Keenan replies. “My friends never asked, they never wanted to know. That’s very helpful. I was still the same person. I didn’t know that then but I knew I didn’t want to talk about things because as far as I was concerned the past was another country, physically and metaphorically and literally, and I chose not to revisit it.
“That’s not where I was any more. Norman Kember and his wife will have an empathy they’ve shared over the years, and they’ll know that. There may be nightmares that happen in the unconscious. I had one or two of those, I had no control over that. I wrote about that but I never sat down and talked about it and I still consider it an incident in my past.”
Keenan’s family were equally sensitive in their response to him. However anxious they were about him, and Keenan recognises that they were, they understood too that although he had been profoundly affected by his incarceration he did not wish to talk about it.
“When I was with people I was listening to what they were saying and I noticed every nuance of everything they said; I took my time answering slowly and deliberately. They looked at me as if I was a bit nuts and I realised that this is harder for them than it is for me. In a normal conversation someone asks a question and you talk around the subject, but I was taking everything apart and reassembling it, extracting every meaning from it because that’s the way your mind works, and sometimes I thought, ‘what’s the point?’”
