Finding freedom in captivity

Brian Keenan, one cannot help feeling, is an extraordinary man. His experience as a captive of the militant group Islamic Jihad has forced him to come to terms with himself in a way that very few of us will ever have to. He talks freely about those five horrific years as a hostage - years during which he was not only chained, blindfolded, beaten, and regularly subject to torture, but in which he knew himself to be clinically insane. Moved no less than 15 times to secret locations in Lebanon, South Beirut, Baalbeck and near the Israeli border, Brian discovered what it meant to really appreciate - and even welcome - the thought that each hour might very well be his last.

As an ordinary teacher in Beirut, Lebanon, Brian was sure he could cope with the violence that was a feature of everyday life in the city. Living in Belfast, Ireland had taken care of that, he says. But April 11, 1986, would belie this hope.

On that bright, sunlit morning, with butterflies drifting by, Brian’s nightmare began. Four men abducted him, yanking him into a van and driving him to a secret location where he would begin his time as a hostage. He still remembers that morning with perfect clarity – lying there, his face pressed into a captor’s leg as the four men squabble over his possessions. Who will take the sunglasses? Who the shoes? Who the watch?

His captors were convinced he was a spy and the fact that he had an Irish passport (while the British government was calling him one of their own) only cemented their suspicion. For months, Brian was kept alone in his cell. “It’s very hard to tell the time because you’re alone in the dark for 24 hours. The only way you could tell that a day had passed was when you were given food.” “The rest,” he would say in a later interview, “was unremitting darkness and despair.” Without access to books or papers, radio or T.V, Brian was effectively isolated from the outside world, and did not even know till much later why he was being held. Looking back, he says, “I wept, first with self-pity and then with rage and frustration and finally with exhaustion.” He remembers, how filled with horror, he listened helplessly as the militants executed two teachers who had been confined in an adjoining cell.

As the situation became increasingly unbearable, Brian remembers finding ways to cope. “I gave lectures to the walls,” he says, then adding with a smile, “and it was great because for once I had an audience that was really attentive.” As his mind struggled to keep itself from madness, Brian would spend hours thinking about the strangest things – like what salmon thought about and how best to re-write D.H Lawrence’s novels. Quoting Milton, he says, “The mind is its own place…” [And in itself, Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.] As time past, for Brian those hours became almost enchanted. Increasingly he came to an awareness of his own inalienable freedom. Stripped of all his belongings and his liberty, Brian anchored his well being in his own sense of self.

Each move to a new prison, however, would shake that fragile security, drumming up a fresh surge of terror. Brian recalls being taped up, “like a mummy,” immobile, with only two breathing holes cut out under his nostrils. Hoisted like a sack, he would be then slid under a false floor in a van or truck.

The unbearable oven-like heat made him feel like he was being basted in his own sweat, he says with a grimace. It was while being moved for the umpteenth time, that Brian realised that for the first time, he had company. The man who lay bound and gagged beside him was John McCarthy, a British journalist. In the years that followed, he and John would share their cell, pooling their dwindling stores of humour and hope as they helped each other through another day. Hours and hours were spent analysing the merits of various places and exactly what would take them there. Famously, the duo once planned to move to Patagonia and farm yaks.

In the meantime, isolated with their captors, Brian found the dynamic between guards and prisoners shifting all the time. “Terrorists are not born,” he says ruminatively, reflecting on the intense hurt he sensed in his captors. He compares his imprisonment, chained in utter darkness for five years, to the blind violence which his captors seemed to embrace as the only way to defend themselves against a seemingly hostile world. “I had my chains, they had their Kalashnikovs…we were both prisoners,” he says.

When Brian was finally released by the Islamic Jihad on August 24, 1990, he emerged a profoundly different man. Accepting that some part of him would always be defined by his captivity, Brian says that his time as a hostage liberated him – allowing him to figure out what he really wanted for his life. Refusing counseling, he retreated to an isolated cottage in Ireland to pull himself together. Looking back, he says the one thing that helped him to heal was that he did everything he told himself he would do while still in prison – from building his own house, to writing a book about a blind musician and starting his own family – Brian set about realizing the life he had only dreamt of.

Today Brian is the author of several books, including Four Quarters of Light, a non-fiction book about his time in Alaska. He and John McCarthy remain close friends, but both men are now very involved with their own families. Brian is in demand as a speaker. You see, meeting him, listening to his story, changes you. He invokes near awe – and often members of his audience clamour to speak with him or shake his hand.

Brian takes it all in his stride, explaining that perhaps people see in him “proof that great trauma and pain can be overcome.” But it is perhaps even more than mere overcoming – Brian embodies humanity’s ability to do nothing less than triumph, to lay claim to love and peace even in the deepest, darkest hours of the soul.