“Faces of the Media” Live with Ryszard Kapuściński on TVP1, 26 November 2003

Piotr Kraśko: Unfortunately very few Polish journalists are someone about whom everyone, without the slightest hesitation, will say: an authority. There is certainly one.

Some call him a living legend of Polish and world reportage. When he travels he does not write; when he writes he cuts himself off from the world. He chisels his text. He can sit over three sentences for a whole day. He uses neither computer nor internet. He began as a journalist at “Sztandar Młodych”. It was then that he made his literary debut with the reportage collection “Bush po polsku”. That is the only cycle in his output on a domestic theme. Then for many years he worked as a foreign correspondent for the PAP news agency in Asia, Africa, and South America. He was a witness to almost 30 revolutions. Many times he came close to death. But he is also the most translated Polish writer. His books have been translated into 25 languages. He became a literary discoverer of the Third World countries.

About himself, about the media, about journalism he has in fact not spoken in any of his books until now. But recently an extraordinary work has been created: “A Portrait of the Reporter” — a mosaic of excerpts from interviews he has given to Polish and foreign media.

Piotr Kraśko: I must say that I am almost terrified, because I must ask the first question of a man who is the master of the first sentence. If I get that first question wrong, it’s all over. The first sentence of “The Emperor”: “It was a small dog of Japanese breed, it was called Lulu. It had the right to sleep in the imperial bed.” How did that sentence come about?

Ryszard Kapuściński: It was the early 1970s; there was a revolution in Ethiopia. The Emperor had been deposed and the army had taken power. I went there then to write about this revolution, about the coup d’état. I returned to Warsaw. The weekly “Kultura” was waiting for my reportages. I began writing reportages about those Ethiopian events and at a certain moment I realised that tanks on the streets, searches, shooting — I had written about that so many times that I could no longer write in the same way. I had to find a new form of writing. I could not find it for weeks.

Finally I shut myself in my flat; the editor-in-chief was sending me telegrams asking what was happening, why there was no material. But I knew one thing: that I could no longer write as I had written before, yet on the other hand I was unable to write it differently. And finally, in complete despair, I am looking through books, notes. At a certain moment I saw a photograph that reminded me of the Emperor. He had a small dog, with which he was often photographed on the throne. And I think: maybe I’ll begin with that, with the dog. And so I began writing that first sentence.

I remember it to this day, because when I had written it, I already knew I had a book. The first sentence opens the book and that is why it is so important. Gombrowicz writes in his “Diaries” about that horror, that macabre nebula of the beginning. When one has the first sentence, one already knows that the sentence will pull the next and the next. And slowly that narrative will begin to take shape.

Piotr Kraśko: How can you remember details when you take almost no notes; when you talk with people you don’t switch on a microphone?

Ryszard Kapuściński: My practice is this: if one sets up a microphone, one’s interlocutor, if he has no experience, begins to speak differently. He immediately stiffens, loses his natural language, begins to speak officially. The same is true of taking photographs. One also listens differently when recording. In a normal conversation most of what we say serves only to sustain the conversation. A reporter should learn to listen. When our interlocutor sees that we are listening, he tries to speak better, to tell us more. In listening we perform a certain selection. In every conversation one important sentence falls, one important story. We must know how to select that, because it is the essence of the conversation. The other person, through what he tells us, reveals himself to us. Taking the other person upon oneself is an important act — psychological, humanistic, and also reportorial.

Wojciech Jagielski: Ryszard Kapuściński is a journalist and a writer. I think that the journalist in him dwells there like some curse, some character trait that one will never manage to get rid of. He is a journalist who practises literature.

Mariusz Szczygieł: In reportage the most important thing is the detail. In Kapuściński’s work these details always grew to the rank of great metaphors. When Kapuściński describes his journey in the 1950s from China to Warsaw across the Chinese-Soviet border, he shows a customs official examining the sacks of groats belonging to each traveller. The travellers pour those sacks out onto the table and the Soviet customs official examines every grain of groats with his fingers. And for me that is a metaphor for the all-powerful state, a state that will not let even a single grain of groats through.

Wojciech Jagielski: Mr Kapuściński is, and perhaps this will sound high-flown, the sole reason I became a journalist. I decided that if I was to be a journalist, only this kind of journalism counts.

Mariusz Szczygieł: Ryszard Kapuściński has privately embarrassed me many times. Whenever we met in the editorial office or at his home, he always talked with me in such a way that I had no chance to ask anything — it was he who asked. After half an hour I realised that he had asked me about all my family matters, and I had not noticed when. I think that is his journalistic method, his method for reportage. He is one great ear, he listens very well, and he is the most empathetic person I know in the world.

I think that this book “A Portrait of the Reporter” is the journalist’s bible, the bible of today’s media person. Kapuściński reminds us, sometimes with a child’s naivety, of everything that in our professional blasé-ness we consider obvious and unimportant. He tells us what we must not forget. And we must not forget that presenting and describing the world is an attempt to understand the world for the reader. Today’s journalism based on shock, on sensation, on flash, on glimpses is no attempt whatsoever to understand reality.

Piotr Kraśko: You wrote: “This is not a job for cynics. To practise it, one must above all be a good person.” But many young people, when they come to work in the media, are told: remember, bad news is good news; be first and show the face of the mother weeping because her child has been killed. This is in effect a school of cynicism.

Ryszard Kapuściński: I don’t think so. It is very important in our profession that it is a very special profession. It contains something more than the purely technical performance of work, something more than simply earning money. In this profession taken seriously there is always some element of social concern — of wanting to help with something. There are us, and then there are others.

Piotr Kraśko: But increasingly journalists ask themselves whether we were the first to get this piece of information, whether we will be the first to report it. Not whether the world will be better after this information.

Ryszard Kapuściński: It always fascinated me too, to be the first. Sometimes I managed it. And that is our professional passion. To inform means to let people find out about something. One does not exclude the other. It is a very difficult profession. If someone wishes to devote his professional life to it, then in the conviction that he has a role to fulfil here, a mission — to make the world that tiny bit better.

Piotr Kraśko: You wrote: “It is a destroying profession; many people practise it only for a certain period of life because they cannot endure it.” How did it come about that you endured it, having been a witness to the world’s horrors, 27 revolutions, coming close to death so many times?

Ryszard Kapuściński: It is some character trait consisting in curiosity about the world; it really does interest me, fascinate me. I am curious about how this world will develop. And I think that is the criterion for practising this profession. If that natural curiosity begins to cool, to dim, that is in effect the end of practising this profession. Because this profession cannot be done in any other way if something in it doesn’t interest a person. It is a profession that requires passion and curiosity. If that curiosity ceases to move us, it is time to say farewell to the profession.

Piotr Kraśko: Young people who want to work in television must have a screen card. To have it they must pass an exam. One of the questions asked is: “Does a journalist have the right to present his own opinion in a discussion about, say, a change to traffic law?” 90 per cent answer that he has no such right. Are they right or not?

Ryszard Kapuściński: They are wrong. Our duty is to report the opinions of others, but it is very important to have one’s own opinion about what we write. To have one’s own opinion is to have one’s own character, one’s own identity. Our opinion is an expression of the fact that we are different, that we are unique. And it is important to mark that. The journalist’s task is certainly to inform objectively, impartially, but at the same time to express his own view on a given subject, which should also be an important view.

That is why self-education is extraordinarily important in our profession. It is a profession in which we learn until the very end. If the listener or television viewer realises that the journalist has no opinion of his own, has nothing of his own to say, he will stop listening or watching.

Piotr Kraśko: “In “Imperium” I put only 10 per cent of what I know about that reality.” Are those good proportions? And advice for journalists: speak with the humility of knowing little?

Ryszard Kapuściński: Accumulating enormous knowledge about a given subject is the basis of writing at all. If we want to say something of our own, something fresh, something new, we must know what has already been said on the subject. Otherwise the well-read reader will say it has all been written, shown, said before. Such a journalist will cease to be noticed by his audience. That is why it is important that we work to have the sense that we are saying something that may be useful to our audience.

Piotr Kraśko: That is why you once said you must read several hundred pages in order to write one.

Ryszard Kapuściński: Once I wrote a small book about Central Asia, “A Kirghiz Dismounts from His Horse”. It is small — 110–120 pages. To write it I read 14,000 pages of scholarly, historical, geographical, and cultural books. The contemporary reader is so inundated with information that he needs something lapidary, aphoristic — something that will allow him quickly to grasp the depth and essence of a given question.

Piotr Kraśko: You quoted Kazimierz Dziewanowski, who said that the reporter’s profession is a lottery prize won. Do you have the feeling of having won the lottery as a reporter for so many years?

Ryszard Kapuściński: Very much so. I remember when one of our masters, Marian Brandys, was still alive. I remember one of our last meetings. We were there with Hania Krall and Kazik Dziewanowski at his place. I remember how he sat in his flat and said: “You know what, this profession of ours is so wonderful.” And it is true, what that man told us then.

It is a profession that allows one to live among people, allows one to be fascinated by people, and allows one to create momentarily a kind of family, a collective, with chance people. We sign a given text with our own name, but in reality every one of our texts is a collective, communal work. Every one of our texts is made up of the voices and opinions of various people. We collect these, synthesise them, make choices — but they all work towards our text.

Piotr Kraśko: It was an honour to have you in our programme.

source: kapuscinski.info