The "new" Kapuściński — a review of "Another Day of Life"

Author: Stanisław Głąbiński source: Nowe Książki no. 3 date: 1977-03-01 ——————————————————————–

The “new” Kapuściński appeared and vanished like a meteor, and any review is of course too late and serves no informational purpose — why inform readers about a book nobody can get hold of anywhere? It is probably hard even to borrow privately.

All the same, we cannot fail to notice this little book and pass it by indifferently. Not even on account of its author, rightly regarded as one of our finest writers of reportage, nor on account of the undisputed beauty of Kapuściński’s prose, but on account of its subject. Another Day of Life is the notebook of a reporter filing to the Polish Press Agency headquarters in Warsaw on the course of the war of liberation in Angola. A war that no other journalist observed as Kapuściński did, and at the same time a war that became one of the most important political events of the last decade, with a significance reaching far beyond the African continent and, in all likelihood, far beyond the 1970s.

It is not often that we get to watch history as it is actually born — that is, without pathos, without heroism, without loftiness and without brilliant commanders who, in laudatory accounts, manage to foresee everything, plan everything, understand everything, seize every chance and forestall every evil. Older and more experienced people know from their own lives that history is really born in pain and in chaos, and that it consists of hundreds and thousands of small pictures, fragments, private tragedies and often tragicomedies. That is what real history is like everywhere, and that is how it is recorded in the best, the truest, the most valuable works. That is how Kapuściński recorded the course of the Angolan war. I dare to think these notes will one day be among the more important materials for understanding what happened in Angola in 1975. I also believe these events could not have had a better chronicler. Where else would one find a writer of this stature — emotionally committed to the left, at home in Angolan affairs, in command of the necessary languages, on friendly terms with the leaders of the Angolan revolution, and finally a conscious Marxist? It is almost impossible to find all these qualities in one man, and all of them were indispensable for a conscientious and intelligent account of the war in Angola. And they came together precisely in Kapuściński. I am certain that not only in Poland but anywhere at all it would have been impossible to find someone better prepared to become the chronicler, or the reporter, of the events that brought a free Angola into being.

Kapuściński used every one of his advantages faultlessly. He has given us an account that is almost artistic and at the same time faithful, gripping, and washed clean of that insufferable and usually false pathos. So we wander with him across the boundless expanses of a depopulated country and watch through his eyes as, in fear, in torment, in confusion, amid continual misunderstandings and unending tragedies, a new country and a new society are born, and as disoriented boys and girls hungry for life, for joy and for love grow into fighters.

And all this happens in an atmosphere of unbelievable turmoil, amid constant friction and an endless confrontation of the small and the smallest things with the great and the greatest. An old woman does not flee, because she has to bake bread as she has done for decades. Now she bakes bread for the soldiers of the revolution, but she does it not out of love for them, or for the new, or for what is coming. She does it because she knows that people simply cannot be left without bread, whether they are good or bad, subversives or conservatives. Her son comes back to her. He has abandoned a safe refuge, and he — a Portuguese — arrives in a town the Portuguese have already fled, a liberated town. Now the two of them bake bread for the soldiers fighting for Angola’s independence.

There are many such people on the pages of Kapuściński’s book, tragically and sometimes tragicomically entangled in great events. There is the beautiful girl who will never be anyone’s girl, because she has to die. There is the terrified diamond dealer who will not, or cannot, leave his mortally ill wife. There are the swaggering commanders who never once come near the front line, and the exhausted soldiers who cannot leave it. For this is a book about reality, not about a revolution and not about a war of liberation, but about people who do not feel the breath of history at all, and who simply feel fear, exhaustion, hunger, drowsiness, pain and homesickness. They have no clear sense that out of their suffering something new will sprout tomorrow, there in Angola and across the whole of southern Africa and in the world at large. We readers know all this. The author does not mention it with a single word. That future — and it is not far off from the days described — lies only in the subtext.

A writer of lesser rank than Kapuściński could not have resisted the temptation. He could not have refrained from mentioning that tomorrow, the victory, the aims of the war. He could not have refrained from giving his characters at least a pinch of pathos. He would not have passed up the chance to campaign, to demonstrate the rightness of a cause for which one must suffer, fight and die. Kapuściński knew that all this would be superfluous words, intrusive sentences and inflated paragraphs. His talent, his knowledge and his experience had taught him that in such intrusiveness — an unerring symptom of smallness and uncertainty — what is great must shrink; and he had seen and lived through things in Angola too great and too beautiful to be diminished.

And he diminished nothing. He showed us the Angolan war on the scale on which it was fought. He showed it tragic and great, tangled and lost, and in sum victorious. Another Day of Life is a great deal more than reportage. It is a realistic and truthful and at the same time artistic vision of a war of liberation. This book — or rather, given its dimensions, this little book — cannot be read without emotion, and it is hard to say whether we are moved by the fate of its characters, by the sincerity of the narrator, or by the beauty of the language; though I suspect all three together are what make us pause and think.

There is no need to dwell on an author like Kapuściński, whose fame is widespread and firmly established enough. That would incline me to end this piece — less a review than a set of reflections, jotted down the moment I put the book down — and I would do so were it not for one further element that the ordinary reader will not sense as easily as I do, as a professional and a correspondent of many years. I mean those passages in which Kapuściński describes waiting at the teleprinter for a connection with Warsaw, with the PAP head office; exchanging remarks with somebody sitting at a similar teleprinter in far-off Europe; pressing for a few words, a few comments, fighting for some instruction or permission. Obviously, for a narrative devoted to a war this matter is of small, entirely secondary importance. The fate of the fighting around Luanda will hardly depend on a teleprinter link with a distant European city. And yet without these “insertions” the book would not have its inimitable atmosphere. For Kapuściński writes about himself too, about his longing, his fear and his commitment. The whole book is what it is — that is, superb — precisely because the author is one of the actors in the events he describes. I said earlier that he is not a eulogist, and I can now add that he is one of them, one of those fighting and suffering. And in that light one can say, calmly and with full responsibility, that this is a book genuinely committed in the full sense of the word. That is worth stressing in particular, because among us the word has been badly devalued in relation to literature and journalism. To all those who use it so often and so eagerly I would recommend a careful reading of Kapuściński’s book.

As I write these words, Rysio Kapuściński is back in Africa gathering material for new reportage and further books. I do not doubt they will be just as superb and just as genuinely committed as everything he has written so far. But is he not writing too much? Is he not committing himself too ardently? How long can a man burn with so bright, so living a flame? I should like him to read these words, since I myself will be too far away in the coming years to pass them on in person. It would be good if he understood that he is the only one who leads the dance this way, and if he drew from that singular and exceptional position the conclusions so well known to everyone in his circle of friends.