Author: Wojciech Giełżyński. Source: Nowe Książki no. 2, 1979, pp. 60–62. Date of publication: 1978-01-01

Once upon a time, in the legal days, when the Opole Festival was a splendid, living event teeming with surprises, the Piwnica pod Baranami appeared at the late-night cabaret, at that time in peak form. People were choking with convulsions of laughter, then again they froze in meditation and burst out squealing anew. This went on for a solid three or four hours. Until at the very end an extra, completely unknown girl suddenly appeared and sang “Black Angels”. That was Ewa Demarczyk; she had missed her train and arrived on the next one. Chance had directed a punchline that knocked everyone out.

Now Czytelnik has repeated the same trick with Ryszard Kapuściński. The raptures over “Another Day of Life” had scarcely died away when “The Soccer War” appeared in bookshops, and now after it “The Emperor”. And already superlatives are running out; critics are in difficulty. The greater difficulty in that more words have been written about Kapuściński than he himself has published in print. It is now hard to add anything fresh and adequately laudatory.

“The Soccer War” is a selection of the best reportages from earlier volumes, each of which was already a bestseller (plus a few texts equally splendid, not previously printed). Reviewing and publicising this book is therefore superfluous, because by the time these words appear it will already be gone from bookshops. “The Emperor” is the author’s first single-subject book-length reportage; until now he has preferred shorter forms. If, of course, “The Emperor” can be called a reportage — for that is not certain. But more on that in a moment.

Kapuściński’s writing, who himself most willingly calls texts all works issuing from his pen (without paying any attention to their classification and genre “purity”), has usually been assessed from the standpoint of his particular reportorial poetics, his lapidary form, austere to the point of asceticism, and especially from the angle of “literariness”. These were not very interesting criteria; with their help the attempt was made at all costs to prove what requires no proof at all: that Kapuściński is a w r i t e r and a distinguished one, not a press reporter. This whole dilemma, which consumed so many passions, is humorous. Of course he is a writer, although he does not carry a Polish Writers’ Union membership card, because he considers himself a journalist. But at the same time he is a great reporter; the literariness of his texts does not after all consist in fabularisation or in “fine writing”, but in an extraordinary ability to dramatise reality through appropriate selection and exposition of verifiable facts drawn directly from life. Thanks to these reportorial procedures his texts — alongside their documentary value — also acquire the dimension of a great political, moral, and philosophical metaphor.

However, besides the classical reportages that predominate in “The Soccer War”, there are in it texts of a different genre, which in Polish journalistic terminology has no name and is therefore denoted by the foreign word “story”. These are descriptions of a generally broader fragment of reality, rather processes than events, reconstructed on the basis of reading and second-hand accounts rather than composed according to the results of one’s own first-hand, eyewitness reportorial investigation; at most fragmentary personal impressions play the role of incrustations. Personally it is precisely these texts of Kapuściński’s, in which he reveals himself as a superlative connoisseur of Africa and Latin America, that I value most highly. This arises from a simple premise. It is a physical impossibility for a reporter always to be in the right place at the right time, where something gripping happens — such opportunities are unfortunately as rare as pearls in a scallop shell, at least in the conditions in which Polish reporters work; the best (let us say: of necessity) test of reportorial craft is therefore the collection and critical ordering of whole strata of others’ accounts, the selection from them of significant facts, and then the arrangement of these — together with accounts from personally questioned witnesses — in a coherent, logical, and gripping construction. In terms of their cognitive value it is precisely these texts of Kapuściński’s (without detracting from the others) that are especially valuable — for example the splendid account of Ben Bella and Boumédienne, from which students of political science and African studies should learn. A secondary consideration is the fact that even these “second-hand” texts are moreover written with a masterly pen, which guarantees them the same readability as Kapuściński’s most “personal” reportages.

It is worth recalling that Kapuściński began with effective reportorial miniatures, or rather neat pseudo-reportorial novellas, based on sharp observation of some detail of manners or of an individual psychological state. They enjoyed enormous recognition from readers and critics. But these debut texts, collected in the celebrated volume “Busz po polsku”, had the character merely of stylistic exercises, although they betokened an enormous talent for synthesis and metaphor. The great achievements of Kapuściński — these are above all the descriptions and penetrating analyses of the reality of Third World countries, especially Africa and Latin America, leading to precise syntheses; Asia, the most dramatic part of the world, somehow failed to draw him in. That is good, because something is left for others too.

Is the task of a reporter, however, not only an accurate description but also an interpretation of the world, an explanation of the sources of the “otherness” of distant continents and foreign cultures? Most certainly, since science approaches this cautiously, sluggishly, and in a wholly schematic fashion, constantly succumbing to Euro-centric distortion of perspective. And so a reporter of Kapuściński’s calibre, who has accumulated in his head the knowledge of an entire library and research institute, cannot take refuge in safe literariness — if this concept is understood as a presentation of one’s own feelings evoked by the events of the external world. Once such an adventure happened to him — in Angola. “Another Day of Life” was rather introverted literature tout court than reportage, despite the fact that around it one of the most interesting episodes of the African liberation epic was unfolding. Readers and critics acclaimed this book, which was in a sense an evasion, as the most perfect work of Kapuściński — not without reason, for that matter, if one is speaking of writing craft. Only that as a document it was a misconceived book.

“The Soccer War”, on the other hand, is an ornament of the Library of Non-Fiction and it is hard to imagine any reporter being able, within the framework of this series, to equal Kapuściński. There is not a single dubious text in it; even the Angolan ones gain in value, since they are precisely the best fragments from “Another Day of Life”, extracted from the whole that was excessively subjectivist. I use this last word pejoratively, in contradistinction to the word “subjective”, which — positively — characterises all of Kapuściński’s work. (Subjective, very personal, one’s own view of reality can give — and in Kapuściński does give — a fully objective picture of events and phenomena; the subjectivist approach, in my understanding, denotes ignoring what is happening outside in favour of what is happening in the author’s emotions.) And there is no point in recommending the stylistics of “The Soccer War”, since for an unspecified time one would need to repeat compliments about the lapidariness, vividness, precision, and simplicity of the writing means employed.

On the other hand, one must emphatically draw attention to the excellent, innovative formal device that Kapuściński applied, separating (or perhaps precisely connecting?) individual blocks of reportages with a quite peculiar text. This is a narrative about what the reporter has not written “for lack of time and insufficient strength of will”; a collection of notes hastily recorded in the margin of the draft; unpretentious accounts of the secrets of the reporter’s craft; sketches and dispositions, each of which could grow into a reportage or even a whole book; broken sentences, signalling reflections left incomplete, even unthought through to the end; excerpts from reading, constituting apt pendants to his own reportages; crumbs of events that have no great resonance for the reader but must have lodged in the author’s memory (“I have no idea what the name of that Congolese man was who saved our lives. I never met him afterwards. He was a human being, that is all I know about him”); but also in these scraps from the notebook there are capital, full-blooded observations, helping one understand the world — for example, a treatise on SILENCE, which “is as much a political instrument as the clatter of arms or speeches at a rally”. Just such a silence had for decades enveloped the court of the Emperor of Ethiopia. Haile Selassie had an exceptionally good image in the world. Skilled propaganda combined with a taste for exoticism, particularly of the honoured kind, had made him in Europe a hero of the national liberation struggle, a hero who was the first to say NO to fascism, a wise Father of the Nation who shows grace to humble people at the foot of the ancient Solomonic throne and even generously scatters coppers among the indigent, and finally a fighter for the idea of African unity. Silence, however, surrounded the dark backstage of his court; a still deeper silence concealed the plundering by the imperial dignitaries; while the most particular silence, carefully fabricated, camouflaged hundreds of thousands of deaths from starvation in the provinces struck by drought.

“The Emperor” strips away the cover of silence from Emperor Haile Selassie, cries out about the violence that day by day, amid silence and order, was inflicted upon the Ethiopian people. Kapuściński adds little of his own; he trusts the accounts of the courtiers whom he tracked down in the nooks and crannies of Addis Ababa, once the hand of revolution had cast them from their erstwhile glorious functions — which consisted of wiping up the little puddles of the imperial dog Lulu, or of placing cushions under the feet of His Most Serene Highness so that they would not dangle from the throne, or of cuckooing, that is performing for the Emperor a series of bows indicating to Him the passing of each successive hour, or of carrying a small bag of money behind the imperial treasurer, or else of opening with second-precision the three doors of the Audience Chamber when His Highness intended to leave it. From lackey accounts Kapuściński built a work that synthesises the mechanisms of Ideal Courtliness — in the African version, to be sure, and quite anachronistic, but not without resemblances to the customs of certain other cultural spheres. Whether this apocryphal text is still a reportage is questionable; it seems that Kapuściński frequently gave free rein to his ungovernable imagination, since it is hard to suppose that Ethiopian lackeys would have been capable of so deftly operating the refined stylistics of paradox, grotesque, parable, and self-irony, and in an archaic language to boot. But — reportage or not — in this case it makes no difference; this time, by classically literary means, the author constructs a “reportorial synthesis”, a true image of tyrannical courtliness, though painted in over-bright colours. The elements of the construction are slightly falsified, but its structure holds together. One can practise reportage in this way too, though only with Kapuściński’s talent, knowledge, and intuition; provided one does not overshoot.

Once he gave himself licence — that his short sentences, crystal clear and resonant, adjective-free, biblically austere, already so sparse in stylistic ornament, stripped of all that is not absolutely indispensable, built from the simplest of bricks, like the cell of a barefoot Camaldolite — once he recently confided in me that critics were strangling him by demanding he mix and muddy his writing a little, that his sentences should be more complicated, polyphonic, multi-layered with subtexts. “And I can’t — he said — because I begin and immediately look for how to express it in the simplest image. That is my weakness; I am aware of it, because in a florid, baroque style one could pack much more in.” And then he showed that he can do it, and wrote “The Emperor” in precisely that stylistics, which, according to his own words, he allegedly could not manage. He thus became a bilingual reporter, as if he too had undergone the transformation about which an Ethiopian spoke to him under the pseudonym P.M.: “…and in consequence of our benefactor’s care for the development of the forces of order and the generosity displayed in this sphere, so many policemen multiplied in the last years of his reign, so many ears appeared everywhere, glued to the walls, flying through the air, hanging from door handles, lurking in offices, crouching in crowds, sticking out in gateways, pressing into marketplaces, that people — to defend themselves from the plague of informers — somehow, without courses, without records, without dictionaries, who knows when or where or how, learned a second language, quickly, polyglotically mastered the new language, assimilated it and achieved in this extraordinary proficiency, so that we, plain and unenlightened, suddenly became a bilingual people. This was very helpful in life, and even saved lives, saved peace of mind, and allowed one to exist. Each of the languages possessed different vocabulary and different meaning, even a different grammar, and yet everyone managed to cope with these difficulties and to speak in time in the appropriate language. One language served for external speech, the other for internal; the first being sweet, the second rough; this one turned outward, that one tucked back into the throat. And already each person gauged according to the arrangement and circumstances whether to draw that language out, or put it away, whether to uncover it, or cover it.”

I hope readers will forgive me this unusually long quotation, but it represents well both the stylistics in which Kapuściński wrote “The Emperor”, and the general idea of the book about Ethiopia at that historical moment when the throne was already badly undermined.

source: kapuscinski.info