Author: Zbigniew Bauer
Source: Nowe Książki no. 3, 1982

When writing once about Kapuściński’s The Emperor, I drew out a motif that was almost marginal in that book, appearing almost unnoticed in the story of the nature of empire: Ishmael from Melville’s Moby Dick sails on after the star of his destiny, seeking in the oceans of the Earth the legendary monster that appears in the dreams of whalers. However vast the earthly ocean — Ishmael will traverse it. However cruel the truth about human illusions — Ishmael will sail towards it. The Emperor announced in Kapuściński’s writing what today proves most important in it: the experience of the world, ever broader, ever more dramatic, becoming slowly the experience of oneself in the sea surrounding the Earth — of people, of human mouths, eyes, hands reaching out for alms or for power, human legs shackled by fear or trampling human bodies and human monuments.

The Emperor appeared at a particular moment. People said: “This is exactly what it’s about.” People were accustomed to writing and speaking “instead of” and “alongside.” Kapuściński was for them someone who tells them the truth about themselves, about their own situation — in the only language that seemed possible. In the cruel, grotesque death of a distant empire, and in the man who was the emperor — an old man dying alone, expelled from his palace and from the memory of his former subjects and former flatterers — another figure appeared, another empire, another solitary dying.

And that was the most important thing in everything Kapuściński told people.

Shah of Shahs reached the hands of people who were the same and yet different. They had behind them above all the experience of a different language, the experience of speaking and writing not “alongside” and “instead of.” What at the moment The Emperor appeared had seemed still impossible had already been lived through, touched, was within reach. But it had been. It endured in people, in human memory. People were occupied with their own memory. Outside the windows snow was falling, though winter seemed to be ending.

Shah of Shahs, which again proved to be an outstanding book, was outstanding in a different way from The Emperor. Perhaps that is why it did not awaken in people the same thing as The Emperor had.

Shah of Shahs is not a book about Iran, just as The Emperor was not a book only about Abyssinia. It is not a “key” narrative, a story with a hidden Polish referent, either — for such a reading would be too reductive. It is the most autobiographical of Kapuściński’s books. The autobiographical character manifests itself in an almost transparent form, yet dominates over the factual account and the journalistic diagnoses. What is autobiographical is the sense of exhaustion; what is autobiographical is the calm, almost cold distance from what one sees and hears; what is autobiographical is ultimately the conviction that nothing will happen that could not have been predicted.

Revolution is a flash, a shout, a stamping of feet, gunfire. But revolution is embedded in the perspective of long historical duration; it is a point on a slowly turning wheel. And if one looks at it that way, one can see everything that no decree of a revolutionary committee and no group of young bearded men with knives and automatic pistols will change.

The book of Kapuściński is a book about the birth and death — of both tyranny and revolution. It is a psychological study of the individual and the crowd, the ruler and the ruled, the policeman and the demonstrator. And it closes with a haunting question: what language will the universal dialogue of humanity be conducted in?

Shah of Shahs is a book written from the perspective of humanity, of history, of what is human — not of the history of the citizen of a certain state. Kapuściński speaks of laws, mechanisms, and rules that are or may be universal at every point on the planet. He speaks as someone from the human family, as someone who feels how this great human family is slowly breaking apart into billions of individual existences and ceasing to want or hate anything as a whole.

“Nowe Książki” no. 3, 1982

source: kapuscinski.info