COMM 337: A foreign correspondent's letter to his newborn son

In class Thursday we will listen to a 1996 broadcast by Irish journalist and historian Fergal Keane. At the time he was a foreign correspondent for the British Broadcasting Corp., and he was in Hong Kong for the ceremonies that marked the former British colony's incorporation into the Republic of China. But Keane's broadcast wasn't about that historic occasion, it was about the recent birth of his son Daniel ... and, as he explained it later, he spoke "not just about becoming a father, but also about my own past, about loss and the failure of dreams, about the pain of different children I had met along the roads of war, about my father and how alcohol had taken him from me." Some of you may remember it from COMM 150 last year, when I played it as we discussed journalistic ethics. This time we'll look at the way it's written; it is considered a masterpiece of on-deadline writing.

So ... read Fergal Keane's Letter to Daniel as a writer, look for his turns of phrase and any literary techniques you find him using ... and ask youself if there's anything in you can use in your own writing. Post your analysis and thoughts as comments to this item below.

To get the full impact of Keane's mastery of the language, open two windows:

• Read the letter by opening this window.
  
• Listen to it by opening a second window and click on the link at lower right that says "Audio" Listen to the letter."

That way you can follow along as Keane reads the letter aloud. Listen especially for alliteration and assonance (repeated vowel sounds), word pictures, images and the cadence of his words, in other words for the textures of poetry in his writing. Remember: Poetry is written to be read aloud, and so is broadcast writing. So should all good writing.

Several years later, Keane told how he wrote the piece for an on-air feature called "From Our Own Correspondent," and what it meant to him ... and to his listeners:

There was one draft of the letter. No re-writing. And after the piece was done I went back to my paternity leave.

And then the letters started to arrive. By the sack load. From a mother whose only son had died on a military exercise in Canada; from a man writing by the light of an oil lamp in a tent in Antartica, missing his family back in Britain; and many, many letters from those who had struggled with alcohol or seen loved ones die from it.

***

Some of my friends worried that I would be identified with "Letter To Daniel" for the rest of my life; they felt for me when a critic attacked me for writing so personal a piece.

And I replied that nothing anybody says about it - good, bad or indifferent - matters a damn in the long run.

When I read the Letter now, and I remember that morning with the baby asleep in my lap, I see a young father about to start out on the greatest adventure of his life. He doesn't know that yet, of course.

But that child will be the making of him, the saving of him.

Keane, who is Irish, has had a distinguished journalistic career. It is frequently said of him that he displays a typically Irish awareness of the moral dimensions of social and political upheaval. His first job was on a small newspaper in Limerick, and he moved on to cover trouble spots in Northern Ireland, Africa and Asia. As an occasional contributor to the BBC for the last 10 years, he now is able to pick and choose his assignments, and reported on the aftermath of the government crackdown in Mynamar (a country the Brits still call Burma) in 2007. Most recently, he has turned to writing history.

Keane was one of several BBC reporters in Rwanda in the spring of 1994, when government backed militias murdered hundreds of thousands of people. "For some of us," he said years later, "it has left an enduring mark, a sense that we failed, not so much as journalists, but as human beings, because we saw things we were powerless to stop." In 2004 on the 10th anniversary of the genocide, he was interviewed for an American public television show on what he saw and how it changed him. He has taken an active interest in the Third World since leaving day-to-day news coverage for the BBC, and most recently he has written "Road of Bones: the Siege of Kohima 1944," a history of British and colonial troops in Asia during World War II.