Rembrandt painted and drew nearly eighty self-portraits as an exercise in self-examination and a practice of artistic technique, using his own reflection as a model for studies in expression. The essays in Carrying War are my attempts at honest self-portraiture. Each one is an exploration of terror — psychic, criminal, spiritual, political — as seen through my eyes and my experience. I’ve tried to be as transparent and truthful as I can. Like Rembrandt, I believe that what is most personal is most universal. Terrorism impacts us, whether we suffer from PTSD or another form of trauma, or we’ve lived in a theatre of war or been witnesses or victims of violence. It touches our lives.
Terrorism in its traditional sense, both criminal and political, first intersected my life in 1982 when I was twelve years old and living in Israel. Its shadow loomed larger when my family moved to Lebanon, to accompany my father on his peacekeeping mission in Beirut at the height of the Lebanese Civil War. That was forty years ago. But the aftershock and the imprint of terror remain.
Carrying War picks up where my first memoir left off. Peacekeeper’s Daughter was published in September 2021, twenty years after 9/11, just as the Americans were pulling out of Afghanistan and the Taliban was reclaiming control of the country. I had expected my publication date — what the industry affectionately calls my “book birthday” — to be a long-awaited day of celebration. Instead, I found myself in the basement of our city’s teaching hospital, taking notes while a radiation oncologist outlined the dimensions of the cancerous tumour that had laid claim to my father’s esophageal tract. My parents and I began our slow walk through the valley of the shadow of death.
Anticipatory grief braided itself around all that I still had to say about violence and war and their impact on innocent victims, especially women and children. Terrorism, particularly in its psychic expression — the creation of a mood of fear — became my preoccupation. Carrying War is the result.
The English word “essay” comes from the French verb essayer, meaning “to try.” Carrying War, my memoir-in-essays, is my attempt to try out, weigh, and probe the distinctions between fear and terror, anxiety and loss. Evagrius, the fourth-century monk and theologian, called the exploration of this inner landscape cardiognosis: the knowledge of the heart. Seeing with the eyes of the heart has been key for me as I explore the hard questions: How does fear take root? What does it do to the human psyche? How do we live with trauma? How do we heal?
When I was small, I immersed myself in fairy tales and fantasy, anything that opened the door between the real and the unreal. I’m still interested in what lies beyond. Like Rembrandt, my preoccupations are both physical and metaphysical, encompassing this world and the next, the seen and the unseen. Description and observation become acts of defiance in the face of terror, offering a glimpse into another reality, one in which words and images — not guns and violence — have power.
Each of my literary self-portraits is an attempt to capture and understand, render and decipher an angle of my existence. Each is an attempt to make peace.