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 essays, the reader moves from the Middle East to Europe, from Quebec’s Eastern Townships to Yellowknife, from exercise studios to hospital rooms by way of theatres and opera houses. The journey is challenging, yet it carries both redemption and hope.

When asked how to defeat terrorism, Salman Rushdie answered, “Don’t be terrified. Don’t let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.” The essays in Carrying War are about one woman’s life-long struggle with fear and the ways she has found to overcome it.

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. * Susan Olding, author of Big Reader *
Carrying War is a profoundly moving tribute to love, conflict, parenthood, childhood, and family. These exquisitely crafted essays and reflections act at once as time capsules of an unsettled family legacy as well as in-progress, vignettes of a gifted daughter, spouse, and mother on a journey to understand herself through the lens of childhood trauma. Bellehumeur-Allatt accomplishes something approaching the miraculous: her vulnerability, faith, and strength carry us with her and her loved ones as they navigate decades of challenges and miracles, and we, too, are transformed. * Brent Van Staalduinen, author of Unthinkable *

Tanya Bellehumeur-Allatt is the author of the critically acclaimed Peacekeeper’s Daughter: A Middle East Memoir and a poetry collection, Chaos Theories of Goodness. Tanya lives in North Hatley, Quebec.