The Conversation: Fergal Keane

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The Conversation is a series of weekly events at St Martin-in-the-Fields in central London in which well-known writers are interviewed, followed by an open conversation with the audience. I went to hear the BBC war correspondent and award-winning journalist and author Fergal Keane discussing conflict, brutality and addiction and why, despite his own acute ‘complex post-traumatic stress disorder’, he continued as a front-line war reporter for so long.

The interviewer, Peter Florence, concentrated on Keane’s latest book The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD. We learned about Keane’s Irish roots; great-grandparents who survived the famine, a grandmother and her siblings who fought with the IRA against the crown and in the civil war which followed, the inter-generational alcoholism and physically abused childhood. This fostered his love of books and words, as an escape from a frightening reality, and created in him the desire to be ‘a hero’. He credited a schoolmaster with instilling in him a profound sense of social justice and that same teacher ran a school radio station, which was Keane’s first taste of broadcasting. He went on to become a young reporter, sent first to Dublin and then, the first ‘war’ reporting, to Northern Ireland.

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How such a background created a man who subsequently spent so much of his life in war zones and covering atrocities, was fascinating. The stories he heard in his childhood were stories of ghosts and deaths (from the famine time) and the family history he learned was about who killed who and why. Thus, trauma is passed down the generations as history. This theme continued into discussion of how ordinary people could commit acts of horrendous atrocity, like the Rwandan genocide. In a very moving section, which was sometimes difficult to listen to, he recalled an interview with a Hutu university professor who had incited his students and others to murder thousands. The man was, on most levels, relatively ‘normal’, not a psychopath, but he and his students had been fed a diet of propaganda and hatred, going back to historical divisions exacerbated by colonial overlords and stoked by stories that the Tutsis were less than human and had committed heinous acts of violence and cruelty.

Keane was interesting on his role as a journalist; he said it was almost impossible, during a genocide or war, to hit upon the truth. The best he could do was to confront a killer with his own actions, so that the killer knew that the world knew about what he had done. Yet witnesses to such events, including himself, were, he believed ‘spiritually damaged’.

This led on to discussion of his own mental breakdowns, his alcoholism and addiction to the adrenalin rush of reporting conflict, as well as his need for validation nourished by the winning of awards and plaudits. He no longer goes to the front line, as he believes he could no longer survive it, but will cover refugee stories. When Florence asked if his PTSD was triggered by news reporting from places like Gaza, his answer was informative. He was, he said, ‘triggered’ by gunshots near his head, loud bangs and the imminent threat of death, not by news coverage.

This was a thought-provoking and insightful conversation, about how history creates the psychological circumstances which enable great and horrible crimes. Keane is optimistic; the human capacity for evil springs from fear and prejudice, he says, and most people are good and fight against that. Yet trauma doesn’t go away, it must be faced. This made me think about the late-life suicides of many Holocaust survivors. Propaganda against certain groups continues today, here and elsewhere, which is how the seeds for future violence are sown.

‘The Conversation’ has only two more weeks to run, including a conversation about climate upheaval and how to survive it, with Gaia Vince and Monica Feria-Tinta and a discussion about the principles of probability with Cambridge Professor, David Spiegelhalter. I’ll certainly be keeping a look out for the next series.

Fergal Keane’s other books include Wounds, Road of Bones, All of These People, Letters Home, A Stranger’s Eye and Season of Blood.

The Conversation at St Martin-in-the-Fields runs from 14^th January until 6^th May – Tickets £15, or watch online for £10 www.stmartin-in-the-fields.org/the-conversation