Author: Zbigniew Bauer. Source: Życie literackie no. 7/1979, p. 6. Date of publication: 1979-01-01

The writing of Ryszard Kapuściński is a phenomenon. That sounds high-flown, but the reviewer has no other way of putting it. The “phenomenality” of Kapuściński’s reportages is not only a question of their subject matter, style, language — in a word, of all that is a characteristic of a literary work. It also relates to the social reception of the books of the author of “Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder”. It is extraordinarily rare for non-fiction literature to be able to cause such resonance, such controversy, and to enjoy such enormous popularity. Though admittedly — and here one must agree with opponents — this is also sometimes caused by fashion, fame, perhaps gossip, those quiet regulators of readers’ reactions.

The twentieth century — together with its superfast means of communication and transport — brought a change in the attitude towards what used to be called “foreign correspondence”. Journalists working for news agencies are usually anonymous. It does not occur to the reader of the morning newspaper that behind a dry, laconic dispatch there lurks a real human being, for whom obtaining a few items of information may not infrequently have been connected with a risk to his health, life, or freedom. It is of this sensational-adventurous side of Kapuściński’s writing that people most often speak. It is worth, however, drawing attention to something else. For many young readers he is not so much a reporter as an expression of a way of life that does not wish to “consume”, to merely assimilate others’ knowledge, others’ thoughts — a way of life in which experience is the most important thing. I think that such too were the reasons for the success of Kapuściński’s two most recent collections: “The Soccer War” and “The Emperor”. Books very different thematically and compositionally, yet strongly connected with each other.

“The Soccer War” is a retrospective volume, a selection of texts. It is rarely the case on such occasions that authors take the trouble to write down their reflections about their life: they simply reprint what they wrote ten or fifteen years ago. Kapuściński composes from his own texts a kind of autobiography, perhaps even confession. Groups of reportages are connected by “the plan of a book that could begin at this point” — the project of something that — never realised — was an image of “an empty place” demanding to be filled. It is precisely in this design of autobiography that the motives of risky decisions and risky journeys are revealed.

Is this only ordinary curiosity about the world and people, or rather a need to understand the mechanisms governing them? Kapuściński writes: “No one excuses or defends someone who makes a lot of noise, whereas the person who introduces silence in his state is protected by the apparatus of repression. That is why fighting with silence is so hard.”

But the author by no means chooses places emanating silence. He is — tries to be — where silence is suddenly broken by an explosion. Ghana, the Congo, Algiers, the front between Honduras and El Salvador, Angola, the Middle East. It is a particular geography, a geography of places where something is born and something ends at the same time. Places where in a few months there will be nothing, because silence will again overcome them.

Reportage is a literature of states of emergency, inflammatory, swollen, in which conflict causes an eruption of what had long been accumulated beneath the tight surface layer of silence. Wars beginning in stadiums are not wars about the result of a match. States of emergency do not have to have the dimensions of a revolution, a military coup, the sudden death of a leader, police repressions. They breed on bazaars, in slums, in luxury hotels, on city streets, and on plantations. It is impossible, when reading, to forget that Kapuściński, a foreign correspondent, wrote from his home Polish “bush”. This capacity for micro-observation, the ability to record small, seemingly insignificant events — acquired from the practice of the domestic reporter — gives his texts inimitable colours.

On the other hand Kapuściński is a historian: his book becomes a compendium — not at all simplified — of knowledge about politics, economics, and social phenomena preceding the explosion. Were only this, however, the core of the reportage, the author would not differ from ordinary journalist-travellers. The third component is a distinctive “autobiographism” of style (!). The world described becomes a part of himself. Kapuściński does not reduce reality to possessed schemas and values, to what he could have lived through previously. His reportage is a search for a formula of his own “being” in situations constantly new, requiring a constant revision of one’s own “I”. From this arises — so often raised — the charge of “literariness”, visual quality, metaphorical quality of style. Where interpretation, understanding, is impossible, the role is taken over by a suggestive, plastic image, abbreviation, paradox.

The “I” of the reporter changes, adapts, and at the same time stubbornly holds on to its own identity, to the right to what it was before.

That time, the limit of which has been crossed, and the flickering present time wish to merge. The past becomes myth. Every return is painful: the myth becomes embodied and suddenly it is revealed that in the country on the Vistula something has changed, something has survived, something has happened, some events that it is impossible to understand. The person who tries to comprehend the Angolan revolution, the situation in the Congo, the absurd wars of tribes divided by artificial borders, does not understand what he left behind, does not understand the past. He endures in some “moment without an hour”:

“I felt internally shattered, scattered, I did not fit into anything, had no contact, was absent. (…) I realised that they no longer regarded me as one of their own. Life had moved forward and they were flowing with its current. They were discussing something, arranging something, plotting something, but I did not know what, they did not tell me, did not draw me in, did not try to win me over — I had been switched off.”

Is this the price that Ishmael pays for succumbing to the magic of the infinity of land and sea, the infinity of the pursuit of Moby Dick? A price that forces a person to abandon some stable “here and now” of their own, to agree to an unclear, shifting “everywhere and always”?

The bush extends not only around Luanda, along the road that must be driven at the risk of bullets. That “bush” also lies between Łomża, Nakło, and Wejherowo, between Jerusalem Avenue and Kraków Market Square, between the greasy buffet in the Praha bar and the blue-green cocktail bar in the Wiktoria. Here too hundreds of invisible eyes belonging to people who “lost their wars long ago” follow your every move.

But what is truly extraordinary in Kapuściński’s reportages is the immediacy of death, the physiology of violence and terror, all that animal nature that reveals itself in a person when he tries to break through silence, the conspiracy of silence. Extraordinary perhaps too is that a person makes for where from chaos something new appears — improbable for the European and the American, who had their war thirty-odd years ago, and the word “revolution” — depending on convictions, variously resonant — see only through theoretical considerations and the slogans of ideologues.

Perhaps Ishmael is drawn by the possibility of choosing between that which is Unknown, being born, slowly taking form, and that which devours itself, writhes in paroxysms of artificial “novelties”?

“Today the world is great and infinite and constantly becoming more immense, and truly sooner will a camel pass through the eye of a needle than it will be possible to know, feel, and understand all that constitutes the existence of us, several billion people.”

No wonder that Kapuściński the recorder of facts increasingly extracts from facts a clearer, increasingly verifiable philosophy of the human being, of society, of politics, of culture in general. From the recording of events towards the recording of thoughts. From the image of the world to the hypothesis of the world. This evolution of writing is revealed by “The Soccer War”.

It is also confirmed by the volume of reportages “The Emperor”, the fruit of Ethiopian experiences. This book was met with the charge of “literaturisation” of reality, a charge of inauthenticity, of invention. It seems unfounded. “The Emperor” was written in the language of Sarmatian-Gombrowiczian mockery, but not without reason did Kapuściński record what the elders, the grotesque officials of the former empire, that pompous, sanctity-enveloped power propped up by silence, were saying. He recorded in their monologues the memory of past greatness and significance, the process of the decomposition of that greatness. Only in this way, in a mocking, parodistic record, could he interpret what people hiding today in the darkest alleyways of the former imperial capital were telling him. They were saying that it is better to be the cushion-bearer, the purse-bearer, the nth step of the throne, than nothing.

And Haile Selassie is absent. Gone is the monarch who aroused the admiration and respect of the world. Friendly gestures were made by the leaders of truly different states. But when he was gone — and he was going terribly slowly, horrifyingly silently, infinitely slowly cut off from the organism of the state — it turned out that he was a tyrant, a sclerotic despot, standing at the head of a police regime. Is it honest to laugh at those who are absent, dead, defeated? When he was still King of Kings, did anyone laugh? No, and not only out of fear. From Ethiopia there emanated silence — or rather the fame of a progressive monarch, developing and reforming. Now, thanks to journalistic investigation, the world has learned of the error. Few are the leaders who, after their departure, sudden and unexpected, remain in the grateful memory of those they governed. Far more often they become symbols of evil, despotism, corruption. The Ethiopian revolution did the same to Haile Selassie.

From the monologues of the emperor’s people one can read the truth about disintegration and the sources of greatness. About goodness and stupidity. About wisdom and cruelty. And here too Kapuściński supplements the facts he records with historical information. They speak objective truth — but which Europeans knew what was happening in the mythical kingdom, as long as the ruler was travelling and giving greetings?

Ryszard Kapuściński has written a book not about Haile Selassie, but about the idea of all imperial rule and the idea of all upheaval. A book written as if from within the imperial palace — an island in a sea of distrust, hostility, and fear. A book about how slowly a people sheds its fear, how slowly the emperor’s robe falls away, and from the upheaval — the curse. “The Emperor” is a study of the imperial person at the moment of defeat. Closed in on himself to the end, inaccessible, unknown.

Beneath the layer of grotesque, mocking narrative a tragic and inhuman portrait is extracted. For the state of the old emperor seems grotesque to the European who prides himself on his republicanism. While for the African it was an eternal law. Is the imperial person still a human being? No one will find out. There will be no time to find out.

“The conversations would begin, but as if they would not end — recalls a former court official. — They always reached a dangerous but palpable point, beyond which silence fell, and in that silence was contained the statement that everything was already known and clear, but clear in a dark way, known in a way impossible to know, powerful in its powerlessness.”

The kingdom of silence falls. Ishmael, having known the sound of silence and of a cry, chooses the further road. Ever further, ever closer to himself.

source: kapuscinski.info