TM

An Evil Cradling

Rating

7.5/10 An honest and thrilling recount of what Keenan went through for 4.5 years in captivity at the hands of Lebanese para-militia. I am giving it a 7.5/10 since roughly the middle 100 pages required some grit to get through. Keenan chose to write the book in a very introspective style, revealing all the thoughts and psychological torments he went through during his captivity. This makes the book that much more whole when some action is happening, however, when the action is lacking, the amount of description, introspection and repetition got a bit boring and unnecessarily stretched out for my taste. Nevertheless, it’s a story I would recommend people to read - to get a glimpse of what a strong willed individual is capable of surviving and to take some of his coping mechanisms to their own every day’s hostage situations.

Synopsis

Brian Keenan, an Irishman teaching English at the international university in Beirut is kidnapped by the Lebanese militia in 1986. He is held in various makeshift prisons, underground cells, vacant apartment buildings and barns for four and half years. His imprisonment serves as the grounds on which the Shi’ite militia can negotiate with the Irish and British governments. They demand ransom and favorable guarantees for the peace attainment in the war-torn Lebanon of those times. Keenan describes his time of torment and survival in these drastic conditions; both the functional details of the hostage life and the psychological ups and downs that occupy the mind without much external input.

Notes

Throughout the book I couldn’t resist but find parallels to my own kidnapping, not by Lebanese para-militia but by an unexpected cancer diagnosis at 23 years old. It was exactly the same; one day you are free, living through the motions of your everyday being, the next day you are held in a sterilized hospital room by an apparently evil group of rogue cells growing around your spine. My notes and reflection thus heavily revolves around this experience and the parallels I found relatable or enlightening.

  • (p. 32) He speaks of the initial imaginary trips and adventures his mind took him on during the first few weeks of solitary confinement in an underground prison cell: “At times I felt the compensations of this gift and at other times cursed my imagination that it could bring me sensations so contorted, so strange and so incoherent that I screamed; not out of fear but out of the rage and frustration of having to deal with these flashing pictures of which I could make little or no sense.”
    • In contrast to Keenan, the images and dreams floating up to the surface of my conscious mind during the cancer treatment made full sense - they were varying wild scenarios of my own death or survival. Vivid constructions of the ways I could take my own life. Just so I could be in control of when and how it happens, instead of letting the cancer decide. The one I remember reoccurring often was an image of myself on a little rowing boat in a middle of a lake with a dumbbell tied to my ankles, peering over the edge of it, visualizing how it is going to look and feel at the bottom. Or they were detailed short films of living on a little farm, in the woods, enjoying the simple life I might not get to have.
  • (p. 96) “I wanted to wash my conscience and my memory clean from the experience that had overpowered them and had in some way contaminated them.” - I still feel like this, I still feel my mind contaminated by the memory and experience of cancer treatment, of standing face-to-face with mortality, of seeing my parents and my girlfriend cry with worry, of feeling guilty for causing it and so on.
  • (p. 109) “Hope should always be restrained by objectivity lest it leads one off on a dance into fairyland, which is the final delusion. If that hope is somehow shattered then the level of despair becomes unbearable.”
  • (p. 123) “They could not understand why men in our plight chose to laugh in the face of what might ultimately happen. We ourselves did not know. I only knew the necessity of it and the strength that lay in it.”
    • the above two perfectly encapsulate my treatment experience. We laughed in the face of what could actually happen and I kept my hopes extremely realistic and nuanced in order to keep my faith alive.
  • (p. 141) Keenan on being forced to shave for the first time after over a year in captivity: “‘This is the last remnant of who I am, of my identity, John. They have taken everything from us, everything, everything by which we defined ourselves… clothes, money, jewellery, possessions, letters, liberty, the whole fucking lot whipped in a matter of hours and licked up in this stinking hole in the ground where you have to, hour after hour, day in day out, reaffirm to yourself that you are someone and that you are meaningful and that you are bigger, better and beyond their futile stupidity’. I was flying now. John remained silent. ‘We can’t give in to everything. We have to stand firm on something that gives us back who we are, we have to say no. We have to be self-choosing. We have to keep hold of ourselves or sink forever in this fucking quagmire.’”
  • (p. 250) Keenan on when he had violent diarrhea for two weeks: “I often thought how having to live beside a man so ill and watch his illness and his helplessness is almost as bad for those who watch as those who suffer.”
  • (p. 257) “That the human mind can travel into those dark regions and return exhausted but intact is more a miracle than that world can ever convey.”