Author: Ryszard Pietrzak. Source: Nowe Książki no. 6, 1993. Published: 1993-01-01

This is a line from a poem by Ryszard Kapuściński, contained in his Notebook. That poem speaks more penetratingly than any of his statements or interviews about the problems bound up with his reportage prose. It is short and worth quoting in full: “Why / did the world / flash past me / so fast / would not let itself be stopped / come closer / be addressed as thou / it rushed off / a vanishing point / in fire and smoke.”

It is hard to say at what moment Kapuściński began to realise that — as he would later write in Lapidarium — “the process of accelerating information is accompanied by the phenomenon of its shallowing.” It may have been when he was a correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, first in Africa and then in Latin America, when the Third World — the terrain of political conflicts and armed actions — already fascinated him. He was then obliged to produce terse dispatches of a few sentences. At the same time he began writing reportage that would eventually coalesce into books: If All Africa, Christ with a Rifle on His Shoulder, Another Day of Life, The Soccer War.

In any case, early on he reached the conclusion that reportage dominated by informational content, written for a newspaper that lives a single day, did not pay. He began a different kind. He built it from images, moods, reflections, proceeding no doubt from the assumption that the genre could absorb the experiences of narrative prose just as that prose had long been absorbing techniques from reportage. He excluded only the mixing of authentic material with invented plot and the creation of intrigue and character. The Emperor and Shah of Shahs were already different books from those mentioned earlier — one might speak of reportage-essays saturated with historical-philosophical reflection.

Kapuściński was now gripped by the mechanics of dictatorial power and keenly observed its disintegration — one section of The Emperor is even titled “The Collapse.” That book, an unbroken monologue, or more precisely a collection of monologues — the confessions of people from the immediate circle of the Emperor of Ethiopia — is marked by a somewhat baroque and metaphor-laden style (it could in a sense be described as a stylised utterance). Containing elements of grotesque, it bears no resemblance to the earlier books with their deliberate stylistic plainness. (In Poland, The Emperor was read allegorically during the Gierek era.) Shah of Shahs, in certain passages, reveals an inspiration from Latin American prose. I wrote elsewhere that in the section containing portraits of the grandfather and father of the last Shah of Iran (Daguerreotypes), one finds — as in Borges’s essay-stories — a long-dead truth of detail, someone’s gesture fixed as in an old photograph.

It is in Shah of Shahs, I think, that Kapuściński fully grasped the weight of the problem: how difficult it is to achieve the highest literary standard in reportage. For while the first section — precisely Daguerreotypes — possessed that quality, the second — Dead Flame — devoted entirely to the Islamic revolution and its aftermath, was more journalistic in character. This resulted simply from the fact that events were still unfolding and could not be captured in a closed formula, yet the book had to appear at some point.

The author encountered a similar challenge on a larger scale when writing his newest book, Imperium, passages from which were first printed in Gazeta Wyborcza. It is characteristic that he had not initially planned such a vast journey encompassing the wide expanses of the former Soviet Union. “I only wanted to go to the Caucasus, where I had been two decades earlier, at the end of the 1960s. That small area, conquered by Russia and then forcibly incorporated into the USSR, genuinely interested me, because what interests me most is the mental and political decolonisation of the world, and precisely that process was developing there, beyond the Caucasus.”

Had Kapuściński limited himself to the southern republics, it would presumably have been a different book — perhaps more cohesive. He would have followed only “familiar paths,” and familiar in a double sense: he had been there more than twenty years before (the journeys produced A Kirgiz Dismounts), and he knew that comparable East well, “fragrant with anise and cardamom, mutton fat and fried pepper.”

Tehran or Damascus would have reminded him constantly of Baku or Yerevan. These are very important matters for a reporter: knowledge of the realities of a region or country where one has stayed before. Moreover, as he himself writes, he could have encountered again the problems he knew well from the Third World — the disintegration of colonial empires — for a similar process was by then underway inside the last colonial empire on earth: the USSR.

But Ryszard Kapuściński — though with great difficulty he eventually reached the Caucasian region, where Azerbaijanis had already begun fighting Armenians — did not stop there. He decided to travel through the entire Empire. And it was probably well that he did not limit himself to the southern republics, where in any case he could not have stayed long. Paradoxically, those sections of the book turned out paler than others — those dealing with Russia, and Siberia in particular.

This might in turn suggest that for a writer-reporter endowed with imagination and sociological intuition, the so-called first glance is equally important. Kapuściński possessed an enormous body of knowledge about Russia, yet he did not know it deeply from personal experience. Quotations from the books of Russian writers familiar to the educated Polish reader appear throughout the text of Imperium. This weakens to some extent the book’s force as reportage — yet the artistry of the author of The Soccer War rests on something else. The quintessence of that artistry is the ability to observe, to notice details, apparently insignificant trifles that acquire the stature of generalisations. In Imperium Kapuściński adopted a perspective similar to that in his other books: the perception of everyday life. “I mention these afflictions and nightmares of daily existence because in the flood of information flowing out to the world about events in the former USSR there is a complete absence of images of the lives of ordinary people — those millions upon millions of shaken, worn-down, and impoverished citizens searching for food, clothing, and often simply a roof over their heads. Little can cheer them now, stir joy or enthusiasm.”

These are not “snapshots,” as critics who happen to write about reportage sometimes note with a touch of condescension. (Kapuściński remarks in Lapidarium that criticism of reportage barely exists, because “reportage demands of its critic a double qualification — he must know not only the literary craft but also the subject the reportage deals with.”) These are not snapshots but a body of elements, dense with concreteness and plasticity, constituting a reflection of some reality — social, historical, or psychological.

Such is the character of one of the best texts in Imperium — Jumping Over Puddles — which could comfortably find its place in world journalism anthologies. From a seemingly trivial conversation with a little girl, Tanya, there emerges an image of Zalozhna, a district of Yakutsk sinking into mud and filth — that “Siberian Kuwait” sitting atop gold and diamonds. At the same moment comparisons with Latin American slums arise in the reporter’s mind: they are the same kind of closed structures. “As far as the eye can see there are no contrasts here, no symbol of prosperity rises above the landscape of poverty.” Yakutsk never sees or touches its diamonds. “Straight from the mines they are shipped to Moscow, to pay for the production of tanks and rockets and the Empire’s global politics.”

In this brief text we have everything: the hopeless existence of ordinary people and grand politics. We come to understand the way people in Yakutsk think. The little Siberian girl is amazed by the naivety of this grown-up Pole, who cannot grasp what is obvious to her; for her, the whole world is the Zalozhna district.

The way people think in the Empire — that is what seems above all to interest Kapuściński. In this civilisation, not so long ago, questions were not asked because asking was extremely dangerous. And when democracy arrived, people could not cope with it. In Vorkuta, the coal basin where prisoners once worked (many of them, upon release, stayed on — they had nowhere to go), the author attends a meeting of striking miners and observes that they cannot even conduct it, deferring in the end to their directors. “Nowhere does the division of society into a ruling class and a ruled class show itself so clearly as here. This division, moreover, has persisted at least since the time of Peter the Great. The names of the classes change, but the relationship of dependence, asymmetry, and subservience between them remains the same. There it is — so simple a thing, it would seem, as knowledge of how to organise and conduct a meeting — already monopolised by the ruling class.”

This is one further example of Kapuściński not shying from synthesis — and more such examples could be cited. It works best when the writer proceeds from his own observations and impressions, venturing even into the higher reaches of abstraction. It works less well when — without the support of those observations and impressions — he limits himself to purely synthetic judgements. This characterises in particular the last section of Imperium, The Sequel Continues (1992–1993), which resembles to a degree the already-mentioned second section of Shah of Shahs — Dead Flame — though that section is better, more “reportorial” than the one in Imperium.

Was this because history in the case of Russia had accelerated even more than in the case of Iran, making it impossible to keep up, to come close to that world and address it as thou — as in the poem from the Notebook? There is no doubt that this acceleration of history, felt on a global scale, together with the sheer vastness of the country with which the author had to contend, played a decisive role. In taking on such a theme, one had to reckon with the fact that not all aims could be achieved.

Ryszard Kapuściński was perfectly aware of this, describing his book at the launch event as a “work in progress,” a “work somehow interrupted.”

“Nowe Książki” no. 6, 1993

source: kapuscinski.info