My father was a volatile man and easily hurt, so that from time to time the trumpet cry of 'I'll never forgive him!' would shake the house. 'Forget it!' my mother would instruct; or else she'd ask, 'Who are you to forgive?'
Forgiving and forgetting are weighty matters. It is unlikely, for example, that people like English Judith Tebbutt and Australian Nigel Brennan, both of whom were held hostage in Somalia, will ever be able to forget their experiences of prolonged isolation, near starvation, and regular threats of death. Brennan was held for an unimaginable 15 months, Tebbutt for six, but Tebbutt bore the additional burden of eventually learning that her husband, whom she had dearly loved for 33 years, had been murdered on the night of her abduction.
How have Tebbutt and Brennan coped with the inevitable flashbacks and hauntings? Both have written books (A Long Walk Home and The Price of Life respectively), which is a start, at least: we can't change experience, but we can make something positive out of it. It is difficult for memory to be deleted, but it is possible for it to be healed. We are narrative and expressive animals, so catharsis can be attempted by practising any of the arts.
Much has been written about forgiveness. Considered to be one of the seven heavenly virtues, the one opposing the deadly sin of anger, forgiveness, in cases of serious transgression and betrayal, is almost always very hard to achieve. My mother, in questioning my father, doubtless had Alexander Pope in mind: To err is human, to forgive divine. But surely there is also a human need to forgive? Oscar Wilde may have been right when he instructed: Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them as much.
How to achieve forgiveness, though? Tebbutt seems to have managed the matter, perhaps almost unconsciously. In her case and in Brennan's, a kind of forgiveness seems to have been reached via the effort to understand their captors' lives and environment. Brennan found himself trying to teach his captors yoga, and Tebbutt has publicly wondered why she doesn't hate her tormentors.
The answer to her question may lie in the fact that she has been able to separate the sin from the sinner. When she was asked whether one of her captors was a bad man, her reply was that she didn't know him as a man, but that his deeds, the deeds of all the people