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Instead of letting fear rule her life, Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt found ways to overcome it.
Terrorism first intersected Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt’s life in 1982 when she was twelve years old and living in Israel. Its shadow loomed closer when her family moved to Beirut at the height of the Lebanese Civil War to accompany her father on his United Nations peacekeeping mission. That was forty years ago. But the aftershock, the trauma, and the imprint of terror remain. In these narrative essays, the reader moves from the Middle East to Europe, from Quebec’s Eastern Townships to Yellowknife in a personal exploration of terror — psychic, criminal, spiritual, and political. The journey is challenging, yet it carries both redemption and hope.
When asked how to defeat terrorism, Salman Rushdie answered, “Don’t be terrorized. Don’t let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.” The essays in Carrying War are about one woman’s lifelong struggle with fear and the ways she has found to overcome it.
Terrorism first intersected Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt’s life in 1982 when she was twelve years old and living in Israel. Its shadow loomed closer when her family moved to Beirut at the height of the Lebanese Civil War to accompany her father on his United Nations peacekeeping mission. That was forty years ago. But the aftershock, the trauma, and the imprint of terror remain. In these narrative essays, the reader moves from the Middle East to Europe, from Quebec’s Eastern Townships to Yellowknife in a personal exploration of terror — psychic, criminal, spiritual, and political. The journey is challenging, yet it carries both redemption and hope.
When asked how to defeat terrorism, Salman Rushdie answered, “Don’t be terrorized. Don’t let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.” The essays in Carrying War are about one woman’s lifelong struggle with fear and the ways she has found to overcome it.
Price: $21.99
Pages: 288
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Imprint: Dundurn Press
Publication Date:
08 September 2026
Trim Size: 8.50 X 5.50 in
ISBN: 9781459756182
Format: Paperback
BISACs:
BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs, Memoirs, SELF-HELP / Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays, HISTORY / Wars & Conflicts / General, Coping with / advice about PTSD and other psychological traumas
Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt returns in memory to her early adolescence with her peacekeeper father in war-torn 1980s Beirut, and with honesty and courage traces the legacy of terror in her life and the lives of loved ones and strangers. Each of these thirty-two essays illuminates the psychic consequences of trauma from a different angle, adding up to a multi-faceted portrait of a woman whose personal history won’t let her ignore the costs of societal violence. Thoughtful, compassionate, and relevant, Carrying War is an eloquent plea for peace, and a testament to human resilience and the healing power of art.
Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt is the author of the critically acclaimed Peacekeeper’s Daughter: A Middle East Memoir as well as two poetry collections, The Hospitality of Trees and Chaos Theories of Goodness. She lives in North Hatley, Quebec.
- Preface
- Part I
- Atlas, Bayonet, (War) Correspondence: An Abecedarian
- The Monster on My Pillow
- Maria Lactans
- Terrorist Narratives: April 18, 1983
- City of the Dead
- Like a Flock of Homesick Cranes
- 5972 12th Avenue, Rosemont
- What the Thieves Left Behind
- Terrorist Mythologies
- Deportment Classes and Other Calamities
- The Healing Virtues of Olives
- Part II
- Subways: An Inventory
- The Dirty War
- Out of Deep Waters
- Ticket to the Opera
- Learning the Cello at Forty
- Vulnerability
- Dear Marquise of Huxelles
- Sanctuary
- Wrestling Cerberus and Scylla
- Mirrors: A Triptych
- Soldier’s Heart (and Other Names for Trauma)
- Part III
- My Libraries
- With the Skin of My Teeth
- Choking: A Diptych
- Jellybeans
- Pathologies
- Valediction
- Guns: A Personal Geography
- Old Clothes
- The Edge of the Map
- Jam Tomorrow: Alice in Wonderland, My Father, and Me
- Author’s Note
- Gratitude