Author: Krzysztof Wojna. Source: Nowe Książki, 1975. Date of publication: 13 July 1975.

The struggle for national and social liberation is one of the integral elements of contemporary life. It has occupied a particularly large place in the political life of the world since the Second World War. Reading the daily press we accept as normal that in various corners of Africa, Asia, or Latin America people are being killed, villages burned, armies carrying out executions. We are somewhat numbed to this kind of information. Too often and in too great quantity do such dispatches reach us in the course of a day — with details not all that different from one another, with almost identical mechanisms of events.

It takes someone who can break out of this circle of passive consumers of knowledge about the world, occupied day by day with their own affairs — someone who can perceive what human dignity looks like in distant parts of our globe and describe it as something personal, something that grips, compels action, arouses emotion, erases indifference. It matters not whether we are speaking of a mestizo, a Black man, or an Arab — these are matters that touch us closely. That someone is, without any doubt, Ryszard Kapuściński. He has proved it many times before — for there is surely no one to equal him in describing the various stages of struggle of people who believe in the rightness of their cause in the fight for full social and political liberation.

Kapuściński’s new book is titled Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder. The figure of Christ with a rifle was created by the Argentine painter Carlos Alonso. His poster became the symbol of all the partisans fighting native and foreign reaction on the South American continent. Kapuściński’s heroes are precisely those partisans — but not only they: in this book the reader will also encounter Palestinian fedayeen and fighters for the independence of Mozambique.

I have more than once asked myself where that otherness lies which distinguishes Kapuściński’s books from so many other reportorial works available on the bookshop market. I am not even sure whether Kapuściński can be called a reporter, because what he writes is in essence not reportage. Literary sketches, perhaps? For factual material does not play the most important role. What matters most is the atmosphere, the extraordinary simplicity in the formulation of ideas, the crystal clarity of the reconstructed drama. I will admit that in this book certain brief formulations explain more than multi-column journalistic articles.

One such passage comes from the sketch on Guatemala, titled “Death of an Ambassador,” about Count Karl von Spreti, the West German ambassador to Guatemala who was kidnapped and then shot by the partisans. We all read the press notes about it in 1970 — but it takes Kapuściński to understand why this man had to die. A dispassionate account of Guatemalan reality, described as something that exists because nature allows people to live even in such situations, produces a shattering impression. In Guatemala a great many people must work in the service of silence, since almost every sentence seems to reveal before our eyes a realm of all-encompassing evil. Evil here has an immanent dimension, and there is virtually no knowing whether there is any hope it will ever become only a terrible memory of happier people.

Or: Guevara and Allende. Can these two men be compared? Kapuściński writes: “At a certain point in his life Guevara abandons his ministerial office, abandons his desk, and goes to Bolivia, where he organises a partisan unit. He dies as its commander. Allende — the reverse: Allende dies defending his desk, his presidential office, from which — as he always said — ’they will carry me out only in a wooden pyjama,’ that is, in a coffin. Superficially these are very different deaths; in reality the difference concerns only the place, the time, and the external circumstances. Allende and Guevara give their lives for the power of the people. The first — defending it; the second — fighting for it. Allende’s desk is only a symbol, just as Guevara’s peasant boots are a symbol.”

And once again, in an extraordinarily lapidary summary, we have an answer to one of those questions that must arise even for a barely seasoned reader of dispatches from the world.

The everyday life of the world is made up of small, even trivial matters — and it is only when we arrange them into a larger whole that we perceive what usually escapes our attention: the interdependencies and connections between individual events. Yet understanding the world demands exactly this of us. Since, however, we do not always have the time, let us avail ourselves of others’ knowledge. In the case of Ryszard Kapuściński that knowledge is particularly valuable, because it has been acquired in the course of journalistic travels around the world.

Everything would be well — indeed, very well — if only the publisher, Czytelnik, had approached this book with somewhat greater care. It is not large, true, but it deserves better graphic design and a significantly larger print run.

source: kapuscinski.info