The Terror (and Boredom) of Being Held Hostage

In the early days of 2012, German-American journalist Michael Scott Moore was kidnapped by pirates in Somalia — the very pirates he was there to write about. In “The Desert and the Sea,” Moore details the extended ordeal that followed; more than 2 1/2 years of captivity.

“I still lived in a world of logic and purpose and resolve,” he writes of the early days, “and I hadn’t figured out how much pointlessness a hostage has to put up with.” After his return to safety, Moore began communicating on Facebook with one of his captors, a Somali man recently taken into custody by U.S. authorities and jailed in New York City.

Below, Moore talks about how he survived, the process he used for writing such an emotional story and more. This interview has been condensed and edited.

A: The decisive event was the trial of 10 Somali pirates in Hamburg, Germany, in 2011, but before that I was interested in pirates because I had covered the irruption of Somali piracy off the coast while I was in the newsroom at Spiegel Online. When the Captain Phillips thing happened, for example, I wrote that news piece. While I was finishing my second book, “Sweetness and Blood,” I was interested in piracy in two places I had been, Cuba and Morocco. It was hard to avoid that history. I noticed that nobody else was thinking of Somali piracy in historical terms. When I finally made the decision to go to Somalia, I had a book in mind as well as some articles.

I think writing from a distance is how I managed. Writing without mentioning the emotion was how I got started. I knew what happened in Somalia, and I could put down the events. But context, emotion, bringing in my own family background and making it a personal memoir — balancing all those things had to come in stages, one thing at a time. I thought of it as sediment, as putting down layers. I couldn’t sit there and have it all come out at once, even in rough draft.

A: People would ask me: “How have you changed?” Before I finished the book, I don’t think I could answer how. I certainly didn’t think about it while I was going through it; it was just a matter of survival day to day. And afterward, how I had changed is not the first thing I had to wonder about every morning. The surprising answer was that I learned to live without hope. I had to detach myself from the cycle of hope and despair. That’s one way I survived. And I only realized that when I wrote the book.

A: I certainly never wanted to write a hostage memoir. I set out to write a book that was not about me but about Somali pirates and how they fit into the history of piracy — what made them different and what made them the same. Luckily, I’m able to answer that question in the book, but I really wanted to spend more time on it, and on the trial in Hamburg, too, which I had thought about for a year. And those take up no more than a few pages in the book.

All three of my books are very different from each other, but one thing they have in common is that they seem to be obsessed with the idea of freedom. When I set out to write about pirates, that’s not what I had in mind. But the end result is that I’ve written a book that says a few things about freedom.

A: Bob Dylan is a really obvious one. I’m a terrific fan, and I actually had some of his songs in my mind while I was there; the beginning of “All Along the Watchtower,” for example: “There must be some kind of way out of here.” I’ve been a Dylan fan since high school, and now, partly because of how he was on my mind in Somalia, I may want to write one of those 33 1/3 books about “John Wesley Harding.”

A: If it sounds grim or boring, I worked hard to not make it that. I was bored in Somalia, but I hope the reader isn’t bored. I hope that it’s educational and enlightening in a way that being a hostage day to day isn’t always.

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‘The Desert and the Sea: 977 Days Captive on the Somali Pirate Coast’

By Michael Scott Moore

451 pages. Harper Wave/HarperCollins Publishers. $27.99.