"Translator of the human being" — a review of "The Shadow of the Sun"

Author: Michał Nawrocki source: “Tygodnik Powszechny” no. 37/1999 ——————————————————————–

The Shadow of the Sun is one of the most important books published here last year. It would surely have been among the seven finalists for this year’s Nike prize announced last week, had its author not been sitting on the jury.

In Lapidarium III Ryszard Kapuściński wrote: “The solitude of the reporter who travels the world to distant countries: he writes about those who will never read him, for those who take little interest in his subjects. He is someone in between, suspended between cultures — their translator. His question and his problem: how far can one penetrate and come to know another culture, when it is made of internal, hidden codes that we, arrivals from another world, will not manage to decipher and understand.”

Put most simply, The Shadow of the Sun is a collection of reportage about Africa. And yet, having said that, the problems begin. For on the first page the author writes: “This is (…) not a book about Africa, but about a few people from there, about meetings with them, about the time spent together. This continent is too large to describe. (…) Only in a great simplification, for convenience, do we say — Africa. In reality, apart from the geographical name, Africa does not exist.”

A surprising admission. How is one to understand it? A book about Africa that is not a book about Africa? Provocation? I doubt it. Coquetry? Probably not. So perhaps The Shadow of the Sun is a book not only about Africa. Perhaps it is a book about something more. That is a fairly important reservation and I will come back to it. It does not, however, alter the fact that Africa is the subject of the reportage collected here, and it is worth saying a few words about it. So — what, in fact, is Kapuściński’s Africa like?

Above all, Africa is immensity. It is a cosmos (one often wants to say: a chaos). It is a vastness into which the traveller-reporter is thrown; a vastness into which a traveller-human being, often lost, is thrown. The juxtaposition of a person and a continent, the dramatic tension along the line from individual to universe, is the first great opposition on which the reality of The Shadow of the Sun is built: the immensity of the continent, its macrocosm-chaos, set against the human cosmos-chaos on a micro scale. “The problem of Africa,” Kapuściński writes, “is the contradiction between man and his environment. Between the immensity of African space (more than thirty million square kilometres!) and the defenceless, barefoot, poor human being who inhabits it. Whichever way you turn, there is wilderness, emptiness, boundlessness.”

Twice I have used the word “traveller”. It is an important word. “All Africa is in motion, on the road, in confusion. Some are fleeing war, others drought, others hunger. They flee, they wander, they get lost.” The Shadow of the Sun is also a journey, and the technique of a distinctive “tale of the road” is very strongly present in it. That journey, though outwardly of a piece, lasts several decades. Except that its coherence is measured in a different time and takes place in a different dimension.

The Shadow of the Sun is an attempt to describe and understand Africa — its complexity and indeterminacy. Its weather. Its nature. Its people: their mentality, faith, hopes and fears. “Africa is a thousand situations. All different, distinct, utterly contradictory. Someone will say: there is war there. And he will be right. Someone else: it is peaceful there. And he will be right too. Because everything depends on where and when.” And that is what The Shadow of the Sun is like.

It is a kaleidoscope of events, scenes and experiences; a dynamic world, a world of continual action, a world that never stands still. There is a great deal of information in Kapuściński’s reportage about the whole continent, about particular countries, tribes and finally people. Much about the processes and transformations of decolonisation. Many genre scenes — some amusing, some moving, some terrifying. All of them attempts to show and to understand the customs, culture, mentality and spirituality of that world. Attempts to describe seeing that world through the eyes of its black inhabitants and through the eyes of an intruder, a White. And finally — last but not least — an acknowledgement of one’s own helplessness before the immensity, the strangeness and the complexity of that world. That is the word: world. For Africa is a different, a separate world. And that difference constitutes the second great problem of the book. That world is different, that human being is different. Everything is different.

THE CAMERA

How is The Shadow of the Sun written? The range of forms is very wide: from description (unusually dynamic, impressionistic) through dialogue and diary to lecture and much else. Yet Kapuściński’s African texts are perhaps best described by comparing them to film images. One often has the impression that the reader is the operator of some metaphysical camera accompanying the narrator-reporter. Or someone walking just at the operator’s shoulder. There are many panoramic shots in the book, static and calm: shots from a distance, from a vantage point. But there are also many snapshot situations of great dynamism: many medium close-ups and close-ups. A great deal is shot handheld, and often on the move, sometimes at a run, in confusion and tumult, not infrequently from the back of an antediluvian lorry crossing the savannah. Plenty of detail, but everything in constant motion; and so the whole blurs, producing an unusually impressionistic image. Further: a great sensitivity to sensory impressions. To sight, smell and hearing. And in this reportage it is the patch of colour that dominates, hue rather than precision and ornament. The line rather than baroque flourishes. The moment rather than the epoch. Very strongly marked — perhaps precisely through such means — is the sense of “here and now” in Kapuściński’s book. The Africa of The Shadow of the Sun exists very much “here” and very much “now”. And alongside that there is room for reflection that is deep, considered, and plainly wise. Perhaps that is why the “here and now” of Africa becomes a universal “here and now”. And The Shadow of the Sun turns out to be a tale about the human being.

SUFFERING AND PAIN

I do not think the value of The Shadow of the Sun comes down merely to its being a set of superbly written pieces of reportage: another skilfully assembled exotic travel narrative whose greatest merits are an ability to convey local colour and the “riddles of the Dark Continent”. It is rather a contribution to the description of the human condition: an attempt to say something new about the human being (or to renew truths that are known but strangely reluctantly recalled).

There is in the book a description of malaria, a terrible disease that decimates Africa year after year. This time, however, it is the reporter — the one leading us through Africa — who suffers it. From the point of view of reportage, that is a good thing. A reporter should write about what he has experienced himself. But there is another, more important aspect. Suffering is a form of openness to reality: a particular way of experiencing it. “An attack of malaria is not only pain but, like all pain, also a mystical experience. We enter a world about which we knew nothing a moment ago, while it turned out to exist beside us, until in the end it took possession of us and we became part of it.”

As a form of suffering, malaria thus becomes a distinctive — let us call it — epistemological modifier: a particular filter through which reality is experienced, recognised and described. At the same time suffering and pain — of which there is much in the world of The Shadow of the Sun — bring the subject who undergoes them into the foreground. Reality does not exist “impartially”, “objectively”, “reportorially”, because it is precisely the subject that constitutes the centre in which the sense of the experienced and described world is formed. In other words, in a broader sense, the human being is that epistemological modifier. Kapuściński’s reportage, then, is a tale about the human being, a reflection on the human condition. Or rather — a set of questions about the human being. Questions of every kind: from the simplest, about the way to somewhere (often in the most literal sense), to the hardest, about the order of the world and the meaning of existence.

“— Croyez-vous en Dieu, monsieur? (Do you believe in God?) I always waited for that question, because I knew it would come, because it had been put to me so many times already. And I knew that whoever put it to me would at that moment be watching me closely, following every twitch of my face. I was aware of the gravity of that moment, of the meaning it carried. (…) And when I said: Oui, j’y crois (Yes, I believe) — I could see from his face what relief it brought him, how it discharged the tension and dread that went with the scene, how it made him my brother, how it allowed the barriers of skin colour, status and age to be broken.

Generally it did not have to be any specific God. One who could be named and whose appearance and attributes could somehow be described. It was rather a matter of something else, of an unshakeable faith in the existence of a Supreme Being, one who creates and rules, and who also imbues the human being with a spiritual substance that raises him above the world of unreasoning animals and dead things.”

So The Shadow of the Sun is not only a collection of superbly written reportage. It is also a literary work of high order, a great question about the human being: a question about “something more”. The topos of the “traveller’s tale” is the foundation (the pretext?) for a broader question: the question of what a human being is.

Let us turn once more to Lapidarium II: “Which book was it from? That asceticism is required of travellers to Africa. The foreign reporter is a translator of cultures.”

In The Shadow of the Sun Kapuściński shows that a reporter of genuinely high class is also a translator of the human being.