Author: Andrzej W. Pawluczuk. Source: Literatura no. 9, p. 14, 1979

Every time I read a new book by Kapuściński, every time I took him to task for writing only about what happens far away from us. After his debut “Busz po polsku” his early reportages were already reporting from distant foreign parts. And they did so with an extraordinary sense of conditions there, of the mechanisms of power and corruption there, and with such splendid understanding of the exotic soul, that I would sometimes recognise in a Latin American faint with fear my own, frightened face. There grew in me then a grievance that I would read nothing about our own rough-hewn reality that would be equally gripping. Something written in that transparent language where one does not notice individual words and sentences but sees only whole scenes. Whole images from life, with their meanings already inscribed in them. With meanings so meaningful that from them it may sometimes follow that they have no meaning at all. I thought then, especially when reading “Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder” and the reportages about Angola, that Kapuściński with particular relish delights in seeking out and tracking down the nonsenses and paradoxes of history. That he likes to undermine our European measure of the world — smoothed, clean, sated, contented. But when I recently read “The Soccer War”, which is a kind of synthesis of his previous books, I perceived something more.

It is a strange and surprising book. It seems at first that it constitutes an ordinary, quite ordinary selection of texts from previous books, from all the collections of foreign reportages that Kapuściński has written until now. These texts, arranged in chronological order, are interspersed with personal reflections that most often speak of what the author was doing and thinking between writing books. One of these books is a gripping description of fear, another — a splendid political treatise, a treatise on the philosophy of silence. The rest are very short and there are few of them. Just enough to facilitate correspondence between texts from different collections, so that the second flows from the first, the third from the second, the next from the previous. And thanks to this we have received a new book, as if newly written, as if a relation about a new, or for the first time seen, world. Previously Kapuściński provided us with the world piece by piece. Here America and Palestine, there Armenia and Georgia, and there Angola. And we read these books also like separately framed pictures: over there they are fighting and killing, elsewhere they are building something new, somewhere someone has overthrown someone. “The Soccer War” allowed me to perceive that the whole world of Kapuściński, the whole world, is governed according to one, total rule.

From this rule it follows that the boundary between killing and creating, destroying and building, is less obvious than we suppose. Where a new idea, a new order is needed, the old and rancid order must first be filled out to completion. And so even there where great new irrigation systems are being built and modern buildings are rising — Kapuściński brings decomposition. Old beliefs and customs are departing, the old morality collapses, old dignity, their place is taken by rapid-fire rifles, steel, concrete. The new is not yet visible, and in any case people do not long for it. What then do they do?

Well, they can sit for hours without moving, dreaming and drinking tea, they can play billiards, they can run about with rifles through a deserted city or sit in front of the television and watch a public execution. Often, however, crushed by slogans like a certain ministry official, they understand nothing of it, because this disintegrating world does not correspond to their stylised circulars. Africa, where Kapuściński spent a few years of his life, taught him forbearance and modesty. Nothing is obvious, nothing is certain, and nothing is settled once and for all. When one reads “The Soccer War” one can see that according to this principle things happen thus everywhere Kapuściński goes. And it is no coincidence that this world is partly what the great Timur created several hundred years ago. We are inclined everywhere to look for movement forward, progressive, progressive movement. Kapuściński perceives catastrophe, destruction, absurdity, and where no one can any longer afford a rationally experienced sense of the absurd — pitiable irony. And the author of “Busz po polsku” does not with a single sentence say whether this is good or bad. He does not judge this world, as if he lacked the courage, as if he himself did not know which world is better. This one — which is coming into being before our eyes, or that one — which is irreversibly departing. Before Kapuściński wrote “The Soccer War”, it was difficult even to see that world. In the reportage about Angola one still saw only the mechanism itself, faultless, precise. Now one already sees the whole.

This reportage by Kapuściński goes far beyond Ethiopia and is another of the fragments with which the author patiently composes his image of the world. In “The Emperor” too we observe decomposition, dusk, the fall of a certain form, considered by many to be durable and unshakeable. It is a complete and total fall, because only with such a fall do absolutely authoritative, authoritarian rule end. But before the fall comes, those rules exist, are supported, in newspapers praised for wise decisions. They rule in silence and calm, because they employ whole teams working to ensure silence and calm around them. If from this angle we look at the corrupt apparatus of power in imperial Ethiopia, we see Haile Selassie not as a petty despot bustling about the palace, but as a deliberate and refined dictator who knows how to create for his purposes an excellently functioning mechanism. And Kapuściński’s book speaks of this mechanism, reveals it, demasks it, tears away the veil of silence not from the emperor, who is already dead and can no longer harm anyone, but from the system, which by no means departed with him. This system, if not in Ethiopia, will appear elsewhere, everywhere where it proves necessary, where silence and corruption will be needed. It will serve anyone who wishes to enslave and degrade someone.

The stylistics of this book also suggest, moreover, that it is not a reportage about a declining autocrat who happens to be called Haile Selassie. It consists of the accounts of courtiers and servants of the emperor, but all these people speak in the same language. The sentences uttered by them have the same phrase, intonation — even similar internal rhymes. It is a strange method of writing reportage when the reporter strives for this stylisation to be visible, to be evident. So that no one should have any doubt that the accounts of witnesses are only a fragmentary and auxiliary raw material for weaving the author’s own visions. The fate of the tsar’s courtiers after the abolition of the monarchy also deserves attention, though Kapuściński dismisses them with a single sentence — these people must hide from the new power.

But why? What wrong did they do? What harm did the footman of the third door, the purse-bearer, the table-bearer, cause anyone, whom did the cloth-bearer harm, wiping away the dog’s little puddles with a satin cloth? They had the misfortune that their master was overthrown by force, and the power that came after him also has to strive not to lose power. This is an ancient and obvious law, which is why it is better to hide in time, lie low, keep quiet, wait it out.

With the fall of Haile Selassie no epoch came to a definite end, either in Ethiopia or elsewhere. In “The Emperor” Kapuściński shows the decomposition and destruction of a certain, small, piece of the world, but in his usual way does not say whether this new piece will be better and more just. For who can know whether what comes will prove better than what has departed.

source: kapuscinski.info