The following letter by Fergal Keane to his newborn son was broadcast on the BBC radio program,
"From Our Own Correspondent." As a BBC correspondent, Keane has reported from various international crises areas including
Northern Ireland, Southern Africa, and Asia. His reporting has been honored with an Amnesty
International Press Award, and an Order of British Empire Award for services to journalism.
His recent book on Rwanda, Season of Blood, won the George Orwell Prize for political writing.
In this letter, Keane reflects on the world his newborn son has entered.
Hong Kong, February 1996
Daniel Patrick Keane was born on 4 February, 1996.
My dear son, it is six o'clock in the morning on the island of Hong Kong. You
are asleep cradled in my left arm and I am learning the art of one-handed
typing. Your mother, more tired yet more happy than I've ever known her, is
sound asleep in the room next door and there is a soft quiet in our apartment.
Since you've arrived, days have melted into night and back again and we are
learning a new grammar, a long sentence whose punctuation marks are feeding and
winding and nappy changing and these occasional moments of quiet.
When you're older we'll tell you that you were born in Britain's last Asian
colony in the lunar year of the pig and that when we brought you home, the
staff of our apartment block gathered to wish you well. "It's a boy, so lucky,
so lucky. We Chinese love boys," they told us. One man said you were the
first baby to be born in the block in the year of the pig. This, he told us,
was good Feng Shui, in other words a positive sign for the building and
everyone who lived there.
Naturally your mother and I were only too happy to believe that. We had wanted
you and waited for you, imagined you and dreamed about you and now that you
are here no dream can do justice to you. Outside the window, below us on the
harbour, the ferries are ploughing back and forth to Kowloon. Millions are
already up and moving about and the sun is slanting through the tower blocks
and out on to the flat silver waters of the South China Sea. I can see the
trail of a jet over Lamma Island and, somewhere out there, the last stars
flickering towards the other side of the world.
We have called you Daniel Patrick but I've been told by my Chinese friends that
you should have a Chinese name as well and this glorious dawn sky makes me
think we'll call you Son of the Eastern Star. So that later, when you and I
are far from Asia, perhaps standing on a beach some evening, I can point at the
sky and tell you of the Orient and the times and the people we knew there in
the last years of the twentieth century.
Your coming has turned me upside down and inside out. So much that seemed
essential to me has, in the past few days, taken on a different colour. Like
many foreign correspondents I know, I have lived a life that, on occasion, has
veered close to the edge: war zones, natural disasters, darkness in all its
shapes and forms.
In a world of insecurity and ambition and ego, it's easy to be drawn in, to
take chances with our lives, to believe that what we do and what people say
about us is reason enough to gamble with death. Now, looking at your sleeping
face, inches away from me, listening to your occasional sigh and gurgle, I
wonder how I could have ever thought glory and prizes and praise were sweeter
than life.
And it's also true that I am pained, perhaps haunted is a better word, by the
memory, suddenly so vivid now, of each suffering child I have come across on my
journeys. To tell you the truth, it's nearly too much to bear at this moment
to even think of children being hurt and abused and killed. And yet, looking
at you, the images come flooding back. Ten-year-old Andi Mikail dying from
napalm burns on a hillside in Eritrea, how his voice cried out, growing ever
more faint when the wind blew dust on to his wounds. The two brothers,
Domingo and Juste, in Menongue, southern Angola. Juste, two years old and
blind, dying from malnutrition, being carried on seven-year-old Domingo's
back. And Domingo's words to me, "He was nice before, but now he has the
hunger."
Last October, in Afghanistan, when you were growing inside your mother, I met
Sharja, aged twelve. Motherless, fatherless, guiding me through the grey ruins
of her home, everything was gone, she told me. And I knew that, for all her
tender years, she had learned more about loss than I would likely understand in
a lifetime.
There is one last memory, of Rwanda, and the churchyard of the parish of
Nyarubuye where, in a ransacked classroom, I found a mother and her three young
children huddled together where they'd been beaten to death. The children had
died holding on to their mother, that instinct we all learn from birth and in
one way or another cling to until we die.
Daniel, these memories explain some of the fierce protectiveness I feel for
you, the tenderness and the occasional moments of blind terror when I imagine
anything happening to you. But there is something more, a story from long ago
that I will tell you face to face, father and son, when you are older. It's a
very personal story but it's part of the picture. It has to do with the long
lines of blood and family, about our lives and how we can get lost in them and,
if we're lucky, find our way out again into the sunlight.
It begins thirty-five years ago in a big city on a January morning with snow on
the ground and a woman walking to the hospital to have her first baby. She is
in her early twenties and the city is still strange to her, bigger and noisier
than the easy streets and gentle hills of her distant home. She's walking
because there is no money and everything of value has been pawned to pay for
the alcohol to which her husband has become addicted.
On the way, a taxi driver notices her sitting, exhausted and cold, in the
doorway of a shop and he takes her to hospital for free. Later that day, she
gives birth to a baby boy and, just as you are to me, he is the best thing she
has ever seen. Her husband comes that night and weeps with joy when he sees
his son. He is truly happy. Hungover, broke, but in his own way happy, for
they were both young and in love with each other and their son.
But, Daniel, time had some bad surprises in store for them. The cancer of
alcoholism ate away at the man and he lost his family. This was not something
he meant to do or wanted to do, it just was. When you are older, my son, you
will learn about how complicated life becomes, how we can lose our way and how
people get hurt inside and out. By the time his son had grown up, the man
lived away from his family, on his own in a one-roomed flat, living and dying
for the bottle.
He died on the fifth of January, one day before the anniversary of his son's
birth, all those years before in that snowbound city. But his son was too far
away to hear his last words, his final breath, and all the things they might
have wished to say to one another were left unspoken.
Yet now, Daniel, I must tell you that when you let out your first powerful cry
in the delivery room of the Adventist Hospital and I became a father, I
thought of your grandfather and, foolish though it may seem, hoped that in some
way he could hear, across the infinity between the living and the dead, your
proud statement of arrival. For if he could hear, he would recognize the
distinct voice of family, the sound of hope and new beginnings that you and all
your innocence and freshness have brought to the world.
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