"Tourism makes no sense" — a review of "Travels with Herodotus"

Author: Maja Mozga-Górecka source: Przekrój 2004, no. 41 date: 2004-09-30 ——————————————————————–

From his first expeditions onward, Kapuściński was accompanied by Herodotus’s Histories. Hence the idea of Travels with Herodotus.

In his latest book Kapuściński glosses the accounts of his own journeys with stories drawn from the old master, and it is to this that the book owes its great colour and sweep.

Some passages of Herodotus’s Histories (fifth century BC) jar with their cruelty, the intricacy of their intrigues, the pointlessness of the murders committed. And Kapuściński examines this like a reporter, counts the litres of blood, asks with an accountant’s scrupulousness: were they impaled one after another? Three thousand people, one by one, so that each could get a good look at death — or was there a whole forest of stakes?

Yet the book begins with an engaging youthful insouciance. In 1956 Kapuściński lands in India knowing nothing about the country. Apart from the volume of Herodotus he was given for the road. Travels describes the reporter’s trade, and so foreignness appears here at the least obvious moments. It is caught in miniature in the scene of an Armstrong concert in Sudan: “He played the trumpet, he laughed his infectious laugh. But the audience was silent. I was shaken. I had heard that Armstrong’s concerts induced ecstasy. There was nothing of that at the stadium in Khartoum.”

Tourism makes no sense, Kapuściński seems to be saying. The laborious dismantling of one layer of foreignness after another, in one country after another, is a lifetime’s work. Coming to know the world requires, at the outset, an awareness of one’s own limitations. Kapuściński renders the thought of the ancient Greeks into a contemporary language, calling up the classical images of the pride that blinds, that takes away clarity of judgement, and then condemns the proud man irrevocably to ruin.

Kapuściński also identifies to a great degree with the Greek historian. He offers the reader the similarities from the start — for instance the fact that both are men of the borderlands. But he asks abrasive questions. The author of the Histories did not ask them. For him, in his inheritance from Homer, crime was a necessary element of the order of things. Here begins the space that separates the two masters of reportage, and the theme of foreignness takes on a new dimension. And then there is no sense in resisting any longer. Unconditionally and categorically, one has to read the Histories.