The Madness
A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD
Fergal Keane
Having read it
★★★★★
A tough read but one written with poise, honesty and realism and as such, it is quietly life-affirming: a memoir that’s a humane example of – despite all the bad stuff that happens in this world and is reported on – a life’s journey being traveled, reflected upon and learned from; confident and assured.
A good passage
Nobody forced me to climb aboard the plane flying into the besieged Angolan city of Menongue and film the starving children Joao and Domingo, and later accept rice from the mayor because it was the only food to be found, or to feel that it was justice that I myself became sick with dysentery soon after getting home. Or made me go into the East Rand townships day after day and get caught up in gun battles. Or to count colleagues among the dead and go back into the world that killed them. Or drive on those mornings when steam was rising off the jungle roads, past the soldiers checking for mines, leaving safety behind to go into land contested by the Tamil Tigers and the Sri Lankan army.
Nobody forced me but myself.
[...]
The therapists call the skillsets I acquired in childhood maladaptive behaviours.
[...]
Childhood gave me the talent for reading danger. It also gave me the magic trick of seeming to be in one place, but being in another place, being another person, entirely: I could be a hero in my mind.
A second good passage
Most atrocities are not committed by psychopaths. There simply would not have been enough of them to carry out the kind of killing that happened in Rwanda, or in the Holocaust, or the Armenian genocide, or any of the more recent mass slaughters. It is the horror that is perpetrated by people with no psychiatric disorder, the potential of the monster within us all, that was exposed in my long conversations with the Rwandan killers.
[...a chapter later...]
Genocide is not the realisation of the unimaginable. Subject the human personality to a sequence of traumatising events and processes – in the case of Rwanda the collapse of prices for cash crops, the displacement of tens of thousands by civil war, the rise of hate media with its relentless demonisation of the minority as an existential threat, the ruthless determination of an ethnic elite to monopolise power, a colonial history of divide and rule, a long culture of obedience – and it becomes all too possible for the unimaginable to be imagined into being.
A third good passage
[In 2021, the author meets] Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse [survivor of the Rwandan genocide of 1994, who] is a woman of grace and sensitivity. Her home is filled with books and quiet. There is art from Rwanda. She is an accomplished writer, and the author of a prize-winning novel and collection of short stories.
[...]
The dead of her Rwanda cannot be brought back. The dead I saw cannot be unseen. But what a waste it would be to have witnessed all that, she says, and not have made our own lives as happy as we can.
Point taken, I say.