From childhood onward, the life of Ryszard Kapuściński was shaped by journeying and displacement. First came the wandering forced upon his family by war; then, from the mid-1950s, the reporting expeditions he undertook by choice. The condition of the “man in motion” clearly marked everything he wrote — it was both an indispensable source of inspiration and, not infrequently, an obstacle to the writing itself:

“A reporter works like a battery — he charges, collects, absorbs the whole of reality, accumulates material, and during that time there is no time to write. The paradox of my profession is that literature comes from travel, but travel itself makes writing impossible. Because travel time is too precious, the situation of travel is too precious to write.” (Self-Portrait of a Reporter, 2006)

Kapuściński’s first journey — immediately a dramatic one — took place when he was seven years old. In September 1939 he set off with his mother and younger sister from the village of Pawłów, where the family was spending the summer, to their home city of Pinsk in Polesie, some three hundred kilometres away. Walking through a crowd of terrified refugees and seeing the destruction left by bombing raids meant the end of a peaceful childhood. The following months were spent in Pinsk under Soviet occupation, enduring hunger and fear that he would describe decades later in Imperium (1993). Then, in the spring of 1940, fleeing the threat of deportation, Maria Kapuścińska took her children to the outskirts of Warsaw, where she found her husband — he had escaped from a transport bound for Katyń. The family settled first in Sieraków, then in Warsaw on Krochmalna Street (near one of the ghetto gates), and later in Świder. After the war they made their home in the capital.

The Pinsk childhood and the experience of the occupation would always remain a crucial point of reference for Kapuściński. It is known that he intended to write a book about his birthplace, and although he never carried out that plan, the memory of the prewar eastern borderlands and the experience of war shaped the direction of all his interests. As Mariusz Szczygieł recalls:

“He admitted once that he so willingly spent time in poor countries because there was something in them of Polesie. (…) When interviewers repeatedly asked about the fear that accompanied him — as a reporter — on different fronts of the world, he spoke of the fact that the war was still going on inside him. ‘The war did not end for me in 1945, nor soon afterward. For those who lived through it, the war never ends definitively.’” (“One More Journey,” Gazeta Wyborcza, Duży Format supplement, 27 January 2007)

His dramatic childhood experiences also allowed Kapuściński to enter into the situation of people for whom — whether in Asia, Africa, or Latin America — poverty and violence, and the absence of basic rights, are everyday realities. The appeal to a shared experience eased contact and made possible the human bond that was, for him, the foundation of a reporter’s work. As Beata Nowacka and Zygmunt Ziątek, the authors of his biography, observe — taking Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder (1975) as an example:

“It is there and in the Middle Eastern reportages that we find a comparison of ’their’ wars and ‘ours,’ ’their’ emigrations and ‘ours.’ Rare is the treatment of those invocations as background or frame of reference for facilitating the reader’s understanding. The memory of war — or, more broadly, the personally lived and remembered substance of Polish history — appears usually as a reaction to what the writer is participating in, as a spontaneous complement to that participation, serving sometimes as eloquent authentication before the people about whom he intends to write, of his right and competence to speak about their affairs.” (Ryszard Kapuściński: A Writer’s Biography, 2008)

In the second half of the 1940s Kapuściński attended Stanisław Staszic Gymnasium. He trained football and boxing (becoming Warsaw junior vice-champion in the bantamweight class), and he also wrote poems and sent them to literary magazines. He made his debut as a poet before finishing school, in 1949, in the weekly Dziś i Jutro. Though he later called his youthful compositions “production Mayakovshchina,” their publication opened a path into journalism — it caught the attention of the editors of the newly formed Sztandar Młodych, who offered the young author a collaboration. Kapuściński began as a messenger (which allowed him to meet figures such as Maria Dąbrowska, Zofia Nałkowska, Leopold Staff, and Julian Tuwim), and in time he began publishing his own texts. He was then an engaged member of the Union of Polish Youth, and his enormous social sensitivity — which would never leave him — manifested in his early articles and poems as a fervent, principled, and naive faith in socialism. (His father had concealed from his son that he had escaped from a transport to Katyń and had later been active in the Home Army.)

Before long Kapuściński abandoned poetry for journalism.

“However, as is known,” note Nowacka and Ziątek, “the writer would return to poetry in the 1980s, and at that point people would begin to speculate that even those first, clumsy experiments — quickly suppressed by Socialist Realist poetics — were not without significance for his artistic development. In them one looks for attempts to marry poetry with reportage. Conciseness, a predilection for metaphor, sensitivity to language and its possibilities — these are only a few of the most important stylistic hallmarks of Kapuściński’s later writing, hallmarks rooted precisely in poetry.”

In October 1950 the fledgling journalist enrolled in the Polish philology programme at the University of Warsaw, but then transferred to history, temporarily leaving the newspaper. As a student he led seminars in the third year of the philosophy faculty and attended the classes of Leszek Kołakowski’s department. In 1952 he married Alicja Mielczarek, a medical student and future paediatrician; the following year their daughter Zofia was born.

After defending his thesis under Professor Henryk Jabłoński, Kapuściński returned to Sztandar Młodych. And it was then — in 1955 — that a sudden acceleration in his career began, set off by the appearance of his first important text: “This Too Is the Truth about Nowa Huta.” The article was intended by the editors as a riposte to Adam Ważyk’s Poem for Adults, which had depicted the life of Nowa Huta’s workers in dark tones that undermined Socialist Realist triumphalism. Kapuściński went to see for himself and found that reality was even worse than the poet had portrayed. He wrote a courageous, critical reportage — all the more powerful because the obligatory doctrinal loyalty of the moment had not blinded the author to the terrifying facts.

The publication of that article caused a great stir, and its author had to hide for several days among the Nowa Huta workers. “I learned that writing is a risk,” he recalled in 1987, “and that writing is essentially not about what you publish but about the consequences. When you set out to describe reality, your writing affects reality.” (Self-Portrait of a Reporter)

Later, on the wave of the October Thaw, his courage was officially recognised — at twenty-four he received the Gold Cross of Merit for his text. He was then sent for a few weeks to India — possibly, as some suggested, to keep him away from uncomfortable domestic topics. Kapuściński himself had at most dreamed of crossing the Czechoslovak border. The trip was a cultural shock he describes vividly in Travels with Herodotus (2004). Thrown in at the deep end, knowing no English, knowing nothing about an exotic country, he started by buying Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls from a street seller in Old Delhi and learning the language from it.

A year later came another encounter with radical otherness — a journey to China via Tokyo and Hong Kong. The absurd stay in Beijing, where he was under constant surveillance and completely cut off from information, made him feel what genuine totalitarianism meant. The visit was cut short by news from Warsaw of the suppression of the troublesome Sztandar Młodych. Kapuściński returned to Poland on the Trans-Siberian Railway; refusing to accept the changes imposed on the editorial team from above, he left the paper along with most of the old staff.

After losing his position at Sztandar, he was taken on by the Polish Press Agency, and later offered a post at Polityka. As the magazine’s correspondent he spent four years travelling the country and writing reportages, the best of which were gathered into his book debut The Polish Bush (1962). The subtitle — “Adventure Stories” — captures the character of these pieces: they are accounts of people and places encountered often by chance, far from the beaten track; the reporter’s openness to adventure and his ability to exploit unforeseen coincidences play a central role. Through such a disposition he found subjects that allowed him to go beyond purely informational description or even sociological observation and approach a deeper existential perspective.

This metaphorical storytelling quality caused considerable controversy in the literary world. But it also drew attention to a new genre: literary reportage. “People realised,” Kapuściński recalled, “that literary reportage belongs to literature and should not be reduced to newspaper information that anyone can use as they please.” (Mariusz Szczygieł, “One More Journey”)

Nowacka and Ziątek point to the influence exerted on the author of The Polish Bush by the great world literature then appearing in translation: on one hand the philosophically minded French writers — Camus, Sartre, Malraux, Saint-Exupéry — and on the other the Americans, above all Hemingway. Already in the reportages of the debut collection Kapuściński reaches toward philosophical and existential generalisation; ethical concerns are central; and the main aim becomes to present not so much collective reality as individual human fate.

Africa

Kapuściński made his first journey to Africa in the winter of 1959–60, visiting Ghana, Dahomey, and Niger. Fascinated by the then-unfolding process of African decolonisation, the following year he flew to Cairo and made his way to the Congo, then engulfed in civil war. Together with two Czech journalists he was arrested, sentenced to death, and miraculously saved by UN soldiers. What a man feels upon learning that he is to be shot the following day, he would write only in The Soccer War (1978):

“Almost instantaneously he is seized by a state of depressing emptiness, collapse, numbing inertia, as if he were under anaesthesia or a heavy dose of sedatives. This state is deepened by a sense of utter helplessness, the awareness that nothing can be changed, nothing countered. Suddenly all strength drains from the muscles; there is not even energy enough to raise a cry, to beat the walls with one’s fists, to bang one’s head on the floor. No, the body is no longer ours — it is alien matter that we must carry a little longer before someone relieves us of this wearisome burden.”

In 1962 he was sent to Dar es Salaam as the first Polish PAP correspondent for the whole of Africa. He spent five years at the posting — first in eastern, then in western Africa. He was present at the first conference of African heads of state in Addis Ababa; as one of the few journalists in the world, he made his way to Zanzibar immediately after the overthrow of the sultanate and the proclamation of the republic; he observed the independence of successive countries and watched as they fell victim to anarchy, wars, and tribal hatred.

His work was made harder by a catastrophic state of health. In Africa he contracted cerebral malaria and tuberculosis, which he treated in a local hospital under primitive conditions, without informing PAP — he was afraid of being recalled. The treatment succeeded (his wife Alicja came for several months to nurse him), but in 1966 he fell severely ill with tropical fever and after two months in hospital in Lagos had to return to Poland.

The result of those years was If All Africa… (1969), a book composed of longer analyses and dispatches sent by Kapuściński from the continent to PAP. Thanks to his time in Africa he had become an expert analyst of the mechanisms of power, and an authority on revolutions and coups.

Latin America

In the autumn of 1967 Kapuściński left as a PAP correspondent for Latin America. He spent five years there, living in Chile, Peru, Brazil, and Mexico, following the foci of revolutionary change and conflict. His first book from this journey was the reportage Why Did Karl von Spreti Die? (1970). Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder (1975) is devoted to fighters from the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa. In the essay “Guevara and Allende,” Kapuściński compared the diametrically different yet similar fates of two famous figures, united in the moment of defeat by their refusal to make compromises and their willingness to die for their convictions.

In that collection’s most devastating piece — the two-page “Victoriano Gomez Before TV Cameras” — Kapuściński shows how a heroic sacrifice of life can be exploited in a perverse way: a public execution of a young guerrilla, broadcast live on television in El Salvador. In his spare account, virtually without comment, only the violation of the condemned man’s dignity counts. Human dignity was Kapuściński’s abiding theme, one that allowed him everywhere in the world to break through the barrier of otherness and perceive problems equally significant under every latitude.

The Emperor and Shah of Shahs

After returning from South America, Kapuściński resigned his permanent PAP post and began reporting for the weekly Kultura. The 1970s brought intensive travel — to the Middle East, India, Cyprus, and many African states. His stay in Angola yielded Another Day of Life (1976), while his travels to Ethiopia and Iran produced two books that brought him international fame: The Emperor (1978) and Shah of Shahs (1982).

Another Day of Life announced a breakthrough in his writing. Journalistic material is here subordinated to novelistic construction; from the mass of data only those are selected that can be generalised, elevated to the status of metaphor. Mariusz Szczygieł wrote of the Angola book:

“It was the announcement of the genre he would practise in the future: the essayistic reportage or reportorial essay — as he himself called it — without thousands of unnecessary numbers and facts, where observation is a pretext for broader intellectual reflection.”

The Emperor, an account of the reign and fall of Haile Selassie in Ethiopia, became a milestone in the history of reportage. Tired of providing information about successive revolutions and the overthrow of dictatorships, Kapuściński resolved to describe the story of the “King of Kings” in an entirely new language. He recalled how difficult it was to find that language. Finally, he lit on a sentence about the imperial lapdog: “It was a small dog of Japanese breed. It was called Lulu.” That sentence organised the whole book.

The Emperor is composed — framed by a reporter’s narrative — of monologues by the monarch’s former courtiers. Kapuściński styled them in a grotesque quasi-archaic Polish register, full of archaisms and rhetorical excess that perfectly characterise the absurdity and ossification of the imperial world. Though apparently about exotic reality, The Emperor was read as a metaphor for People’s Poland — and more broadly as a parable about all oppressive and corrupt power. The book’s universality was confirmed by the international recognition it has enjoyed since 1983, when its English translation by William Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand appeared. Kapuściński’s reportages had been translated earlier (into Spanish, Hungarian, and Czech), but The Emperor launched his global career. To this day his books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, and John Updike wrote about him with enthusiasm. According to Updike:

“The Emperor is a parabolic tale of power from which several lessons emerge. Foremost is the inevitable tendency of a despot — whether king, department head, or dictator — to value loyalty over competence in his subordinates, and to seek security in stagnation. (…) Kapuściński’s book also teaches a less evident lesson about the fragile or even phantasmatic nature of the bonds between ruler and ruled.” (“End of Empire,” The New Yorker, 16 May 1983)

Salman Rushdie wrote that in the books about Haile Selassie and the Shah, and in Another Day of Life:

“Kapuściński’s descriptions (no, his reactions) achieve what only art can achieve: they give wings to our imagination. One Kapuściński is worth a thousand whining and fantasising scribblers. Thanks to his extraordinary combination of reportage and art, we finally stand as close as possible to what Kapuściński himself calls the incommunicable, true image of war.” (The Guardian, 13 February 1987)

Shah of Shahs — describing the regime and fall of the last Shah of Iran, Reza Pahlavi — represents the bitterest possible summing-up of Kapuściński’s long observations of the mechanisms of revolution. Unlike The Emperor, it is stripped of literary ornament: ferocious, lapidary, deliberately austere. Kapuściński assembled his account from a variety of puzzles: descriptions of photographs tracking the history of Iran, excerpts from notes, quotations from books, a tape-recorded transcript, and a concluding essayistic section (“Dead Flame”). Both the collage structure and the opening image of the reporter’s hotel room in chaotic disarray foreground the self-reflexive dimension: the means by which a confused, language-less writer attempts to understand the analysed reality become as important as the reality itself.

Work on Shah of Shahs, begun in 1979, was interrupted by the events of the Polish August. Kapuściński went to the coast and was in the Gdańsk Shipyard during the strike. Moved by the significance of the August events, he decided to write about Poland again; he committed himself to Solidarity and spent a year travelling the country. But nothing came of those plans — he was by then too recognisable to gather reliable information, and martial law soon crushed the transformation that had fascinated him. After its imposition he resigned from the Polish United Workers’ Party and lost his post at Kultura, having refused to submit to the verification process.

Later Works

Under martial law Kapuściński gave up reportorial travel. He began making loose notes and collecting quotations that eventually formed the first Lapidarium (1990). The free composition of this book — a collection of reflections, brief sketches, and specimens from the reporter’s workshop — arose from the conviction that epic description cannot master the contradictions of the modern world, and that only by operating with the fragment can one catch them. He continued the Lapidarium series until the end of his life; it runs to six volumes in all.

In 1986 he published the volume of poems Notes, and in 2006 Laws of Nature. Poetry was, as he said, a rare luxury for him, since it demanded time that he never had. Both the writing of poems and photography (in 2000 the album From Africa appeared) deepened his way of seeing reality and fed into outstanding reportages.

This turn toward more personal literary forms — the intellectual notebook, poetry — heralded the reflective character of his late books, above all Ebony (1998) and Travels with Herodotus (2004). Earlier among them, Imperium (1993) was the fruit of a two-year journey through the disintegrating Soviet Union. Kapuściński did not attempt to create an overall portrait of Russia, knowing this to be an impossible task. Instead he wrote about his successive encounters with the empire: his childhood experiences in Pinsk under Red Army occupation; his journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1958; his travels to the southern republics of the USSR in 1967; and finally his wandering through the remotest corners of the country in 1989–91, ending with a visit to his native city.

Ebony is a magnificent summing-up of African experience. Guiding it is the same principle of the chronicle of the author’s expeditions — this time into the heart of the continent. But compared with the Russian chronicle, it is far richer, which follows naturally from the biography of Kapuściński, who had for decades travelled Africa intensively, written about it, and felt himself deeply rooted in the continent. In the 1990s and after, beyond journeys connected with presenting books, giving lectures, and receiving prizes, the writer undertook travels that were less reportorial than anthropological. And it is the anthropologist’s gaze that dominates Ebony, in which Kapuściński, studying cultural otherness, discovers — as if before the reader’s eyes — beneath and beyond the layer of current history, the spirit of African antiquity and distinctiveness. At the end of this journey in space and in time there grows a great tree, described in the final chapter: a dense-leafed mango, which for the inhabitants of an Ethiopian village forms the centre of the world — shelter for morning classes, midday shade for people and animals, evening meeting point for the elders, and at night a gathering place for women telling stories. It is, literally and not only metaphorically, the tree of life.

The most essayistic of Kapuściński’s books, Travels with Herodotus (2004), is — to use Mariusz Szczygieł’s phrase — a kind of professional autobiography. Its hero is both the ancient Greek and the Polish reporter who never parted from The Histories of the master from Halicarnassus during his travels, and whose reading, he insists, often gripped him more than current events. Kapuściński’s adventures, from his youthful encounter with the alien world of India onward, are interwoven with passages from Herodotus’s work; his reflections on what sort of man the Greek traveller was, what drove him into the world, how he related to other cultures, how he gathered information and why he recorded it — all become also a reflection on his own writing and his hunger for experience. In drawing the portrait of the author of The Histories, Kapuściński says something important — and harsh — about himself:

“Herodotus’s mind cannot stop at one event or one country. Something is constantly driving him on, restlessly urging him forward. (…) People like this, useful to others, are at bottom unhappy, because they are in truth very lonely. They seek others, and even think that in some country or city they have already found kindred souls, already come to know them and learned everything about them — but one day they wake to find suddenly that nothing connects them to these people, that they could leave immediately, because they see that some other country, some other people, have drawn them and dazzled them, and the event by which they were still excited yesterday has faded and lost all meaning. They never really attach themselves to anything, never sink their roots deep. Their empathy is genuine, but shallow. (…) To which country would they most like to return? Again confusion — they have never asked themselves such questions. They certainly want to return to the road, to the route. To be on the road again — that is what they dream of.” (Travels with Herodotus)

One qualification must be made here: of Kapuściński’s empathy one might say many things, but not that it was shallow. Yet only when we understand at what cost of loneliness, anxiety, hardship, and risk he paid for his magnificent books, are we able to appreciate them fully.

Author: Krystyna Dąbrowska, April 2009.

source: kapuscinski.info