Journalists are unpopular, as a profession, but war correspondents get a rare pass. In films, books and the wider culture there is a dark glamour, a reckless heroism that attaches to people (mostly men) who head with laptop and camera towards battles that other civilians are fleeing.
Fergal Keane, one of the most celebrated faces of BBC news, embodied that myth. His new book The Madness, part memoir, part meditation, picks it apart. He explores with brutal honesty why he and many colleagues travel to conflict zones in the first place (it is different, of course, for journalists who have war break out on their doorstep), and keep going back when their mental health is fraying.
“Nobody forced me” begins his account of multiple journeys to see first hand the cruel things humans do to each other, from missile strikes to terror attacks and genocide by machete and club. He knew he was risking his mind amid the violence, as well as his life, but couldn’t stay away. That mixture of fear, vanity, inadequacy, driving ambition: this is as familiar to anyone who has spent time with a press pack in a war or at its margins as explosions, checkpoints and guns.
Keane is gentle but unflinching in describing an obsession that had its roots in a difficult childhood, overshadowed by an alcoholic, sometimes violent father. He felt himself unlovable, desperate for the validation he imagined would come from going to war: “The melancholy boy on the edge of the playground was thinking of the days when he could show himself unafraid and have the world applaud him for it.”
The book started as an “attempt to understand myself”, he writes, as he untangles his trauma and twin addictions (alcohol and war). He spent nearly 20 years sober but feeding his other habit instead. “If I feel self-loathing I start to need to escape to war, the ultimate land of forgetting.” Its third strand is the effect of conflict itself, the long-term damage it causes to everyone caught up in it and, ultimately, how to survive the mental fallout if you get through the fighting alive.
He is most thoughtful exploring the nuts and bolts of reporting: how it is done, how it should be done and how it affects those who do it. The best examples of it can change how people far away understand a war and serve as a spur to action, as images of a bombed maternity hospital in Mariupol did in March. They were taken by two Ukrainian journalists who drove into a city under attack, and stayed as Russia set a horrific siege.
Sometimes the presence of a journalist as witness may reduce brutality, even perhaps save lives, if aggressors fear someone recording their misdeeds. But it can also make things worse, retraumatising survivors, or spurring punishment for speaking out, as Keane fears may have happened when he reported from a refugee camp during the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. “I didn’t know one way or another. But that question unsettles me. If you are a journalist, if you cannot make things better, you should at least not make things worse,” he writes of that night, when there was a vicious, possibly punitive, raid.
Keane also explores – though he could do so in more depth – the disturbing power dynamics of a job that meant “the suffering of others was my daily bread”, and which affords foreign journalists privilege over their subjects through the passports and wealth that allow them to leave and get help. After reporting on the genocide in Rwanda, he “was shadowed by the memory of those who had witnessed the murder of their families, endured rape and mutilation, and unlike me had no access to medication or therapy”.
He records how he flinches in recognition when Susan Sontag writes of “star witnesses, renowned for their bravery and zeal” whose reports at the same time “nourish belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward – that is, poor – parts of the world”. And he is honest about the guilt he feels that journalism transmutes the pain of others into prizes and professional recognition. “I felt guilty that I was acclaimed. But not enough to reject the awards. I needed them. They were my substitute for self-worth.”
The book traces a line back through the alcoholism that killed his father to his “family history of hunger and war” in Ireland: the famine of the 19th century and then the bloody fight for independence. His grandmother received an injured veteran’s pension for her role in a conflict as brutal as those Keane went on to cover. “Only as an adult did I realise that our history was a shallow grave, where the dead beckoned from beneath the topsoil,” he writes. “Did any of it make me more predisposed to PTSD?”
Conflict sears psychic wounds into individuals, families, communities and countries, he argues. And once the dead are in their graves, the horror is smoothed over in an attempt to bury the terribleness of it all for the next generation. Though we now embrace the idea of catharsis through speaking out, Keane understands why so many people who survive atrocities choose not to discuss them. Family memories of past horrors, be they Holocaust or civil war, went unspoken not because of a stiff upper lip, but an instinctive understanding that some memories are so dark they cannot be safely revisited.
For Keane, many of these memories are of Rwanda. Going to testify at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which he saw as a moral duty, triggered another breakdown: “I dreamed vividly of the dead, horrible images that caused me to wake sweating, sometimes fighting in my sleep with arms flailing, knocking over my bedside lamp. I had experienced such symptoms immediately after the genocide but now they were accompanied by crippling anxiety. Panic attacks kept me in bed for days.”
These experiences make his meeting with Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, a poet who survived the genocide, one of the most moving parts of the book. He had unknowingly followed the convoy escorting her and her mother to safety – hidden under blankets and orphaned children – years earlier. “The girl who will help me years later is here. I have no idea of this. We do not know each other. She is hiding and I am too focused on all that is going on around me.” As an adult, she offers him a possible way of living with his painful memories.
The path she suggests has echoes of the approach taken by many other reporters I know who cover war and have avoided the breakdowns Keane endured – whether through luck, predisposition or driving themselves less hard. Mairesse “has taken the awfulness of her memories and shaped them into a monument against the denial of genocide. But she also uses them as a spur to embrace the beauty in life.” She tells Keane that “the dead of her Rwanda cannot be brought back ... But what a waste it would be to have witnessed all that, and not have made our own lives as happy as we can.”
• The Madness: A Memoir of War, Fear and PTSD by Fergal Keane is published by HarperCollins (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
