Books

Kapuscinski Is Dead?

Brilliant journalist took no notes, conveyed the truth.

By Shefa Siegel, 24 Jan 2007, TheTyee.ca

Ryszard Kapuscinski

Ryszard Kapuscinski: Man with a mission

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Last month I was travelling Nicaragua with two Polish friends. As new friends do, we were fumbling for things to talk about, points of commonality, shared interests. "Shefa loves Kapuscinski," one told the other. An approving look. "But Kapuscinski," the friend asked, "he is dead?" I shook my head vigorously no, insisting he had a new book waiting to be published in English. Later, when I returned to Vancouver, I opened talks with the owner of a bookstore to bring the Polish travel writer for a signing once the book was published. "I must meet him," I told the storeowner.

Now the press agencies are reporting that in fact it is true, that Ryszard Kapuscinski has died at the age of 74, supposedly after a long illness. I gather there is much afoot in the world at the moment. Bombs in Baghdad, nukes in Tehran, the Democrats on the march; all the front page stories to which I have become immune in six long years of global insanity; six years in which I feel like I have been holding my breath, waiting to live. But the death of Kapuscinski makes me cry out to the walls of my empty apartment. This is news. This is sadness. This is a loss, a man I knew only from the six or seven books of his that are translated to English, and somebody who clearly never waited to live, nor for his life to begin.

For Kapuscinski was no mere travel writer, no mundane reporter. He revived the sagging, inert genre of traveloguing -- a form that had the vitality sapped from it a century ago when the British and American readership commercialized imperialism. Kapuscinski combined two rare attributes: courage and poetry. The obituaries will all record the same impressive resume: that as a reporter he witnessed 27 coups, reported from all over post-colonial Africa in the 1960s, put himself in mortal danger and later wrote books that were well received. But this will explain nothing. For any knee-twitching journalist in Addis Ababa can salivate over the prospects of an imminent war in Somalia, and work over his editor at Reuters to get him on the last flight in before the bombs drop. There is an endless reservoir of humans who derive pleasure from seeing other people cast into man's deepest darkness, and finance this need by reporting the facts from the interior of hotel rooms in war zones.

Risked all

Kapuscinski definitely had the daredevil gene. For no good reason, he would drive sacked roads in war-torn Nigeria to find out exactly who was controlling what areas, and be beaten and have gasoline poured over him before escaping with his life (a story for which his editors berated him by writing him with the curt message, "Ryszard, we must request you stop doing such things"). He definitely had stones. When he was temporarily positioned behind a desk and war broke out in Congo, he finagled a posting to Nigeria, changed the ticket to Cairo, flew to southern Sudan, bought a car, and drove to the Congo without permission, protection or pleasure. (Indeed from this experience he wound up imprisoned and hours from execution.)

For what defined Kapuscinski was not his ability to manage his heart rate, but his reflection, and the poetic attention to words, to understanding people and situations, which no longer exists in any mainstream literary medium. The proof of his genius is simply the weight of his books. For example, there are countless sources to read about Ethiopia and Haile Selassie. But look at the footnotes to Michael Ignatieff's reportage from Africa in The Warrior's Honour, and you will see that at the end of it all, he says something to the effect of nothing else claims the mantle of Kapuscinski's rendering of the fall of Selassie in The Emperor. Because in this book about majesty, Kapuscinski took the reader back through the ages, all the way to biblical stories of court intrigues chronicled by the Book of Esther or the feud between David and Saul narrated in the Book of Kings. And the technique was so simple, it is a miracle nobody did it before. He found the former courtiers of Selassie's last days (not a simple task of reporting), then recorded their monologues in their own voices. He let the places and the people he was experiencing and interviewing speak for themselves. Kapuscinski did what journalists were invented to do, which is give humanity to those who are different from ourselves. He was, in the most subtle form possible, an emissary for peace and for justice in the world.

Portrait maker

For his techniques, there are some who called Kapuscinski a liar (as a journalist from National Geographic told me colleagues of his believed). Indeed, he willingly admitted he did not take notes, that he believed any form of recording changed what people said. But, he explained, in the words that each person delivers, there is a unifying theme, a core idea, a trope to which Kapuscinski honed his attention. And it was this essence he later recorded from the relative quiet of his hotel room. But this is simply where Kapuscinski transformed reportage from a mediocre professional skill to a fine art. His goal was truth, not facts; he drew portraits rather than assessments; in many cases, his canvas was himself.

And much of the time he was so bang on it hurts as an aspiring writer to see how good somebody can be. When I was travelling parts of Africa as a UN consultant, and struggling with the feeling of having somehow been separated from reality, it was Kapuscinski who illuminated for me why I felt this way. "People from the United Nations form a club unto themselves," he commented in The Soccer War. "Many of them are pretentious: they look on everything and everyone from a global perspective, which means, simply, that they look down. They repeat the word 'global' in every sentence, which makes it difficult to settle everyday human problems with them."

Kapuscinski seemed to look down on no one, and was at his best with everyday problems, like when the truck he was being transported by broke down in the middle of Mauritania's desert. Africa was his first and only love. This is so clear from his collection of essays Shadow of the Sun, and a book of war reportage from Angola called Another Day of Life. Maybe it was the times, those early post-colonial days when a coup or revolution could break out at any moment, but Kapuscinski also clearly loved something about the contradictions of a continent at once so broken and so whole. He loved its austerity and its joy just beneath the surface. He did not care so much for Latin America, where he reported for five years, satirizing its "baroque" sensibilities. Everything in Latin America has to be the biggest, he wrote. If it has a river it is the longest, a mountain it is the tallest (he never did seem to report from Asia!), the plains the widest, a forest the biggest. He was not afraid to criticize or to love, all of which opened Kapuscinski to criticism, and even a certain kind of obscurity.

For although those who know him really know him, even my Polish friends knew him only because he had become something of a Polish celebrity by that point, coming as the special guest of an event where a statue was unveiled for a Polish traveller who cycled around Africa. This is to say, they were not terribly familiar with his books, much less his mission. And this is the key point about Kapuscinski, with whom I am obviously in love, passionate and partial: he possessed a profound sense of mission.

Towards peace through understanding

He admitted as much in an interview given to Charlie Rose some years ago, saying he had made a conscious decision to concentrate on history in the making rather than the history of the past, and that he felt a compulsive need to explain things to people with the hope that the deeper we know each other, the more peaceful humans will be.

This mission was more delicately wrapped in an essay he wrote years ago for Granta, which was later republished and used as the fulcrum for The Soccer War, called in various forms something like "High time I started writing the next book." In this essay, he highlights all the things he means to write about -- a form which serves as the file I now keep called, simply, "The Book I Mean to Write" -- if only he had time. "I would write a dictionary describing how different words take on different meanings depending on where they are spoken in the world," Kapuscinski writes. "I would write about the time I was sent to Latin America, but didn't really like it. I would write about how hard it is for a northerner to survive in the tropics, or what it feels like to hide in a hotel room when all white men are being rounded up on the streets, or the experience of being in motion so often, flying, stewardesses, passports, hotels, typewriters, loneliness. I would write about all this, if only things didn't keep coming up. If only the world would calm down for a moment. If only I could take a break from my deepest sense of mission."

A conviction so deep it becomes a mission is so rare for non-ideologues, zealots or fanatics, that Kapuscinski deserves praise, and respect, memorializing and dedications for holding so stoically to his own purpose throughout his life. His words alone will survive him. That is something. But more than his words a writer wants to be remembered for his ideas, which have a way of seeping into the world, and becoming part of the collective unconscious long after, in fact only after their bodies have passed and just their lines remain. To feel such gratitude and warmth for a person I only think I know, when in fact all I know are his words, is a testament to the righteousness of Kapuscinski's core idea, that the more the lives of others are explained to us, the less likely we are to fight. This is to say, the more likely we are to love. This is a tribute not only to Kapuscinski himself, but also to everyone who feels the inexplicable humanistic drive to put thought to order, apply meaning to language, give life to words.

"You must choose your words carefully," Kapuscinski said, "because there are so many of them in the world." It is a reassurance that the humanistic will is still alive in humanity, no matter how troubled, corrupt, or infuriating; no matter how desperately we need the world to become calmer, so that we can release our clenched teeth, and remember what it is like to breathe again. [Tyee]

Shefa Siegel is a writer, environmental consultant for the United Nations Industrial Development Organization and doctoral student at the University of British Columbia. He lives in Victoria.

22 Comments:

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  • Clawman

    5 years ago

    truth in reporting

    Indeed, he willingly admitted he did not take notes, that he believed any form of recording changed what people said. But, he explained, in the words that each person delivers, there is a unifying theme, a core idea, a trope to which Kapuscinski honed his attention. And it was this essence he later recorded from the relative quiet of his hotel room. But this is simply where Kapuscinski transformed reportage from a mediocre professional skill to a fine art. His goal was truth, not facts; he drew portraits rather than assessments; in many cases, his canvas was himself.

    This all sounds very nice, but please explain to me how "any form of recording changed what people said." This is sophistry. When people speak, they use words and grammar and syntax for very specific reasons, and quoting them verbatim, in context, is not a "mediocre" professional skill. It's an integral part of the job, and it's how journalists keep faith with their readers, as well as the people they write about.

    When, in the comfort of his hotel room, K later recast people's utterances on the canvas of "himself," was this done in the service of an honest representation of events, or in the service of Kapuscinski's very literary and idiosyncratic view of the world? I like lyricism as much as anybody, but let's not confuse this kind of writing with journalism.

    I've been a journalist for nearly four decades; I make no apology for my belief that it is arrogant, and yes, hishonest, to superimpose oneself and one's words on the experiences and the words of others.

  • G West

    5 years ago

    Recording changes people

    The act of asking people 'How does that make you feel' - which is the central, and often the only question in the modern journalist's bag of tricks is, by its very nature, an invitation to reflect and analyze - to put things in context.

    The best reporting seldom or never does this; being, as it were, more concerned with recording events and describing conditions for the reader who will then have an understanding - albeit an incomplete one - about what went on. Too many journalists today are unconcerned with description, which Kapuscinski mastered, and spend all their efforts trying to 'create' emotionalism in their readers.
    Good writing never forces it. Kapuscinski was a very GOOD writer.
    He will be missed.

  • cjtenove

    5 years ago

    The greatness of Kapuscinski

    Shefa, thank you for your thoughts on Kapuscinski, a writer who has been a great influence on me. Just yesterday I was talking to a friend about Kapuscinski's description of the dangers of silence...whether the silence of the gulags or, in yesterday's conversation, the streets of the downtown eastside in Vancouver as women were going missing during the 1990s. Here it is in Kapuscinski's words, from his book "The Soccer Wars":

    People who write history devote too much attention to so-called events heard round the world, while neglecting the periods of silence. This neglect reveals the absence of that infallible intuition that every mother has when her child falls suddenly silent in its room. A mother knows that this silence signifies something bad. That the silence is hiding something. She runs to intervene because she can feel evil hanging in the air. Silence fulfills the same role in history and in politics. Silence is a signal of unhappiness and, often, of crime. It is the same sort of political instrument as the clatter of weapons or a speech at a rally. Silence is necessary to tyrants and occupiers, who take pains to have their actions accompanied by quiet. Look at how colonialism has always fostered silence: at how discreetly the Holy Inquisition functioned; at the way Leonidas Trujillo avoided publicity.

    What silence emanates from countries wiht overflowing prisons! In Somoza's Nicaragua -- silence; in Duvalier's Haiti -- silence. Each dictator makes a calculated effort to maintain the ideal state of silence, even though somebody is continually trying to violate it! How many victims of silence there are, and at what cost! Silence has its laws and its demands. Silence demands that concentration camps be built in uninhabited areas. Silence demands an enormous police apparatus with an army of informers. Silence demands that its enemies disappear suddenly and without a trace. Silence prefers that no voice -- of complaint or protest or indignation -- disturb its calm. And where such a voice is heard, silence strikes with all its might to restore the status quo ante -- the state of silence...

    Today one hears about noise pollution, but silence pollution is worse. Noise pollution affects the nerves; silence pollution is a matter of human lives. No one defends the maker of a loud noise, whereas those who establish silence in their own states are protected by an apparatus of repression. That is why the battle against silence is so difficult.

    It would be interesting to research the media systems of the world to see how many service information and how many service silence and quiet. Is there more of what is said or of what is not said? One could calculate the number of people working in the publicity industry. What if you could calculate the number of people working in the silence industry? Which number would be greater?

  • shefa

    5 years ago

    Silence

    Dear cjtenove,

    Thank you for recording this passage. That piece is from the geographical dictionary I mentioned in the artcle, but I had just lent the Soccer War to a friend not two nights ago, begrudgingly (since I finally have the whole collection), and was trying to recollect from memory. That bit on silence is extraordinary, as is that whole section.

    If you have the book there, would you please remind me of some of the other words he describes?

    Thank you,
    shefa

  • Clawman

    5 years ago

    "How does that make you feel?"

    G. West, to call this the central and often the "only question in the modern journalist's bag of tricks," is not only untrue, but it insults an entire profession. One of the first things a reporter learns is to ask as assortment of questions (often including this one), to engage the interviewee and to initiate an information-rich dialogue. It's not a trick, it's a communicative device with a purpose, to open up a subject for futher questioning.

    As for description, the best journalists know enough not to overwrite; instead, they stimulate the reader's own imagination in helping him/her re-create an event, with a few salient word images and quotes, and perhaps photographs. Thus, the reader becomes a kind of co-author in the story. I believe that if you read Kapuscinski carefully, you'll find this is a "trick" he himself employed to good effect.

  • Truman Green

    5 years ago

    very interesting

    I think we need to know what people said, if possible, and in their own words.

    I did a creative non-fiction piece once, about some friends who had died. The best thing was that I remembered exactly what they had said, and had it memorized, verbatim. Without remembering their words I wouldn't have bothered.

  • Tieleman

    5 years ago

    Kapuscinski was a great writer

    Sad news and a great piece. Ryszard Kapuscinski was without doubt one of the world's greatest journalists and the only one to cover so many revolutions and coups.

    His book on Haile Selassie's fall is a masterpiece and images of it still stick in my head years and years later.

  • G West

    5 years ago

    Clawman

    I disagree.

    Listen to any news program on Television and/or radio.

    That question: 'How did you feel when ........(fill in blank)?' is the central theme of virtually ever single story of any kind these days and it's at the centre of most print reporting too.

    Kapuscinski provides information through description. Read his account of his time in Liberia, or his own story about the snake beneath his cot, or his account of the sun in Ethiopia. Such descriptions induce emotion in the reader because he has described events and placed them in an appropriate context and in a way that touches some aspect of a reader's own experience. Unlike most journalism today, Kapuscinsky doesn't need tricks.

    Decent writers have known, at a minimum since the First World War, that language cannot generate emotion directly except in a phony way. That certainly doesn't stop today's students of journalism from trying. And that question should be written on a sheet of paper and burned at the first class in every journalism course in the country.

    Here's what he says about his method on his website;

    ''I wanted to describe the people, their mentality, their way of seeing the world. And experience taught me that from each spot in the world one sees the planet differently. A person who lives in Europe sees the world differently than a person who lives in Africa. Without trying to enter into these other ways of looking and perceiving and describing, we won't understand anything of this world"

  • Clawman

    5 years ago

    G West--generating emotion

    "Decent writers have known, at a minimum since the First World War, that language cannot generate emotion directly except in a phony way."

    This is absurd. I assume by language you mean quotation, the spoken word, the human voice. Read the oral histories of Studs Terkel. Read Shakespeare, which is all dialogue. (Henry V and St. Crispin's Day!) Read any great film screenplay. Nothing evokes emotion like the human voice, people speaking from their souls. How is this phony, for heaven's sake?

    As for that infernal question you keep talking about, exactly what is wrong with asking people how they felt when they experienced something traumatic.? I have taught journalism, and I would never presume to tell any student that there are "right" and "wrong" questions, any more than I would tell anyone that there is a "right" and a "wrong" way to communicate. What I DO ask them, is to quote people accurately and in context, and NOT to reconstruct quotes to suit their particular narrative or ideology.

  • G West

    5 years ago

    No I don't mean quotation

    The fact you may have taught some of the current 'practitioners' of journalism does little to recommend your opinion. Even the words you choose to employ in the discussion we're having indicate exactly what you're all about. Rather than attempting to understand what I'm getting at and trying to discuss it, you decide, as most journalists do, what's 'absurd' and what's not.

    I mean the impossible task of trying to evoke emotion directly - language isn't up to the task. Never has been, never will be. That's why all such attempts end up in some kind of evocative, metaphorical nonsense: Perfectly okay in a novel or in poetry but nonsensical as reportage.

    The best journalism follows Orwell's lead and it's not a question of asking people how they feel, or what emotions went through their mind, or what they were thinking.

    Those questions all ask the interviewed party to make judgments and are the wrong questions, in my view.

    I have no problem at all with quotations and admire Terkel's work a great deal - precisely because he records what people say - not how they answer his questions. That is what Kapuscinsky does at best. He describes the conditions, sets them in some geographical and temporal context, and then lets events - and the very few words of dialogue he actually records, tell the story for him.

    If modern journalism education isn't a matter of teaching students to ask those specific questions - about feelings, emotions and state of mind - then why is it that they form the armature of virtually every interview on television and the radio?

    Since you're a self-proclaimed expert, I have another question for you. Why do most news anchors and their seatmates persistently engage in banter about their personal lives? Did they learn that at Ryerson too?

    Most people want the news and that's it. They could care less about the phony folksiness of the kind that seems to persist between the people who happen to work together on an news operation.

    I'm actually familiar with the pettiness and jealousy, not to mention envy and downright dislike which actually obtain in most newsrooms. Not only is this false bonhomie cloying, it's usually the exact opposite of the actual conditions on the ground and behind the camera.

  • Clawman

    5 years ago

    help!

    What do we have, if we don't have language? You're losing me. Kapusicinki doesn't "let events tell the story for him." On the contrary, he frames events that he has witnessed and he takes his recollections and puts them together with his reconstruction of interviews to tell a story. With LANGUAGE!!! His own unique language. There isn't anything else!!!

    What is "Orwell's lead," anyway? I've read Orwell and he uses language, this language that you feel is so inadequate to transmit emotion.

    As for your other question about banter between TV news anchors, what does that have to do with anything? Of course it's stupid. No disagreement. But that has nothing to do with journalism; that's showbiz. I'm not defending that; that has absolutely nothing to do with what we're discussing here, which is the accurate representation of news, current affairs and human interest.

  • Truman Green

    5 years ago

    Is this stuff sensible?

    I think I can help you on this, Clawman. G.West is pulling a G.West.

    What do these sentences and phrases mean, G. West?

    "I mean the impossible task of trying to evoke emotion directly--language isn't up to the task."

    NOT UP TO THE TASK? What else is there--mime, charades?

    "Those questions all ask the interviewed to make judgements and are the wrong questions..."

    "...language cannot generate emotion, except in a phony way."

    No sarcastic intent here, G. West, but what are you talking about.?

    Don't you think writers should use language?

    Don't you think the interviewed should be making judgements?

    So no language and just photos, then?

    Two possibilities here, I think. Either dementia has crept up on me so slowly that I haven't noticed it, or none of West's comments make any sense at all.

    And what does the "banter in their personal lives" have to do with this issue?

  • G West

    5 years ago

    Language is unequal to the task

    People shouldn't be 'asked' to express their emotions and yet that's exactly what journalism is all about these days. It’s not about facts. It’s not about background and detail and context. It’s about getting someone to cry, urging someone to get angry – all more or less on cue. And it’s about a dishonest exercise on the part of journalists – folks who’re doing ‘show business’ all the time – not just when they play nudge-nudge, wink-wink with their seatmates at the ‘decision desk’.

    You started this little discussion with this:

    Quote:
    This all sounds very nice, but please explain to me how "any form of recording changed what people said." This is sophistry

    Remember? Simply asking people to express themselves in such an unnatural way does change what people feel and express. Journalists should do what Kapuscinski did and what Orwell did – they should tell the story of an event, describe its circumstances and let the ‘emotion’ if such arises – grow out of the story itself and not out of a pathetic recitation of how one feels.

    My point is that the actual words - especially as evoked through the sort of facile interview techniques we hear in the media are not representative of anything except a false 'emotionalism' and sentimentality. Moreover, furthermore are these folks not journalists?

    Truman, here’s a little bit of what I mean, only the simplest and most direct of words is appropriate to describe the horror of war. This is from a book called Gallipoli to the Somme, by Alexander Aitken. It was written in 1916:

    Quote:
    “The road here and the ground to either side were strewn with bodies, some motionless, some not. Cries and groans, prayers, imprecations, reached me. I leave it to the sensitive imagination: I wrote it all down, only to discover that horror, truthfully described, weakens to the merely clinical.”

    What’s needed is the MERELY CLINICAL – the simple straightforward Orwellian words – not the ‘literary’ and cloying language of ‘feelings’. Tell of an event simply and truly, honestly and in plain language – not the phony evocation of ‘how it makes you feel’ and the ‘feelings’ will take care of themselves.

    We have to get real words back up and into use and get rid of the evocative crap that covers most journalism with its empty rhetoric; in my view, that’s what Kapuscinski was all about. In my view.

  • Clawman

    5 years ago

    Aitken at Gallipoli

    I think you're right, Truman, G. West is pulling our leg here.

    I imagine Aitken striding across the battlefield, listening to the cries and groans of the dying. Then, as he sits amid the gore to scribble a few paragraphs, he decides not to over-stimulate our "sensitive imaginations" with the actual words of the wounded because that would be an indulgence in phony, cloying, unclinical "feelings."

    "I'll summarize the pathos and emotions in a few brisk descriptive sentences," he says, " and spare my readers the agony of real voice." Then he heads to the officers' tent for a glass of sherry.

    G. West, you might try reading Michael Herr's Dispatches, the definitive 20-century book on war. Herr talks to soldiers. They tell him things. He tells us what they tell him, and we learn.

  • G West

    5 years ago

    Aitken was a soldier

    Clawman:
    Anyone who says they've written - or anyone who says anyone else has written 'the definitive book on war' isn't worth discussing either 'war' or journalism with.

    You clearly don't know much about either. I wonder if you've even read Kapuscinski.

    You might consider doing so.

    You could also have taken the trouble to find out something about Aitken before you decided to pronounce on his 'take' about what he saw and what he wrote.

    Quote:
    Aitken was a man of great and disparate talents. He was devoted to music and was regarded as a fine violinist and viola player, as well as being an occasional composer. He was a poet and writer. His memoir, Gallipoli to the Somme: Recollections of a New Zealand Infantryman (Oxford University Press, 1963), is regarded as one of the most moving accounts of the appalling reality of life in the trenches during the Great War.

  • the madwoman

    5 years ago

    Lived textuality transforms lived experience

    Interesting discussion here. Too bad G West is getting personal rather than opening to the possibilities of discovery. The discovery that happens in dialogue when real people talk and listen to real people - it is the site for emergent learning.

    I would suggest the journalist with integrity is the journalist who gives voice to other people's stories. That is, the journalist who creates a social text. Social texts are dialogical - the sites where multiple voices comingle. The voices of the "other" and the voice of the journalist come alive and interact with each other to produce something that didn't exist prior to the dialogue. This accomplishment has a life in context - the context within which the story is produced.

    If "language is unequal to the task" as G West has suggested, then voice is lost. Without voice, there is no dialogue, no story. Absurd idea.

    In the context of being human, let me say this: Language IS the creator of experience.

  • Truman Green

    5 years ago

    Now cut that out, G.West

    G., this is neither ad hominem nor sarcastic but...here's what I think.

    I think you get into some of these discussions merely to test your hypothesis that you should be able to defeat any argument by using some of your--probably patented--techniques and your really quite excellent intellect.

    As, for instance, this: In your last post you call Clawman, not only a fool, but dishonest, in that he's probably never even read Kapuscinski. (highly doubtful that he hasn't, btw)

    Then with Clawman suitable taken down (I guess), you merely quote something from a biographical piece on Aitken--unless I missed it--unattributed, which I guess is supposed to support your argument about voice in journalism.

    And, I should add, if I was doing an article on you, and your Tyee commenting style, for instance, I'd want to know exactly what you think of my suspicions--in your own words, even in spite of the fact (apparently) that 'language cannot evoke emotions,' or something or other.

  • the madwoman

    5 years ago

    Lived textuality transforms lived experience

    Good discussion happening here. Too bad G West is getting personal with Clawman rather than staying open to the possibilities of dialogue - dialogue being both the site of emergent learning and the site of story birthing.

    Dialogue happens when real people speak and listen to real people, and through the process of dialogue we create social texts. The journalist with integrity is the journalist who gives voice to other people's stories - the voice of the "other" and the voice of the journalist come alive and interact with each other and what is produced is a social text. The social text is dialogical and the site where multiple voices comingle.

    If "language is unequal to the task," as G West suggests, then without language voice is lost. And without voice there is no dialogue. And without dialogue there is no story.

    In the context of being human, let me say this: Language IS the creator of experience. And it is absurd to suggest that "language is unequal to the task" - it IS the task. We language our lives to communicate, investigate, and navigate our experience - is this not the very heart of journalism?

  • Clawman

    5 years ago

    Kapuscinski and Reality

    G. West, I have read Kapuscinski, and I have also read critiques of his “journalism,” including John Ryle’s review of The Shadow of the Sun in the Times Literary Supplement, which I urge you to read at http://www.richardwebster.net/johnryle.html

    This is only one of several articles, easily retrievable on the Web, that question Kapuscinski’s reliability as an eyewitness to history.

    Ryle demonstrates that, whatever his strengths as a writer , Kapuscinski had the unfortunate habit of making things up. It’s what “magic realists” do for the sake of a story. It gins up a narrative, spices an anecdote, grabs a reader and sells books. But it’s not really journalism.

    I’ll give just a few examples. In The Shadow of the Sun, K writes that the Emperor Haile Selassie did not read books. “Everything had to be relayed by word of mouth,” he maintains. In fact, it’s been well documented that Selassie had a large palace library where he spent a lot of time. He read copiously in both Amharic and French. K also says he came into the possession of an English translation of Selassie’s autobiography in 1974. However, this book did not appear until two years later.

    For a man who prided himself as a careful observer, K made some curious mistakes about African manners and customs. One example: The Dinka and Nuer tribesmen in Southern Sudan, he wrote, lived “almost exclusively on milk” and women were forbidden to even touch cattle. Both of these assertions are wrong, as any anthropologist can attest.

    These errors, while not damning in themselves (and there are many others in the literature), collectively might prompt one to question the rigor of K’s research and, indeed, how much he cared about telling the truth of Africa. Were his stories journalism, or allegory? Everything points to the latter.

    Ryle concludes:

    “Despite Kapuściński’s vigorously anti-colonialist stance, his writing about Africa is a variety of latter-day literary colonialism, a kind of gonzo orientalism, a highly selective imposition of form, conducted in the name of humane concern, that sacrifices truth and accuracy, and homogenises and misrepresents Africans even as it aspires to speak for them.

    “What this account of African history does reveal is a telling indication of Kapuściński’s own narrative aspirations. Here in the domain of myth, in a realm untouched by literacy, where the subject never answers back, a reporter is freed from the constraint of dates and data, the tedium of checking and cross-checking, the tyranny of documents and records. Here facts are no longer sacred; we are at play in the bush of ghosts, free to opine and to generalise about “Africa” and “the African” – and invent - without criticism from scholars, or indigenes, or self-appointed guardians of facticity. For Ryszard Kapuściński, it seems, this is the heart of the continent. Here, in place of fact, there is mutability; in place of reportage, relativism. From this place, deep in an imaginary Africa, the writer may return with any tale he pleases.”

  • G West

    5 years ago

    I've read it.

    Some of it I agree with; some of it I don't.

    I have a nephew who did his graduate work in Nigeria and now teaches African history at the University of Vermont.

    He says Kapuscinski captures the time, and much of Shadow of the Sun was written decades ago, and the place better than any other contemporary European writer.

    I've already told you I don't much care for writers who spend their time trying to evoke feelings by quoting the ephemera they record coming out of individuals' mouths.

    Here's what Kapuscinski says about his own writing:

    Quote:
    You know, sometimes the critical response to my books is amusing. There are so many complaints: Kapuscinski never mentions dates, Kapuscinski never gives us the name of the minister, he has forgotten the order of events. All that, of course, is exactly what I avoid. If those are the questions you want answered, you can visit your local library, where you will find everything you need: the newspapers of the time, the reference books, a dictionary.

    I think that pretty well covers it.

  • Clawman

    5 years ago

    Pretty well covers it???

    Oh, c'mon.that's the oldest copout in the game: Don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.

    How about this? You may have contempt for the "facts," for accuracy, but give them to me, the reader, anyway, just in case I don 't share your blithe disregard for the details. Then I can decide.

    The arrogance of the position you're defending is breathtaking. It's the same kind of recklessness that motivated the apologists for Stalin and Mao in the past century. Let's pump up the myth and the hagiography; it's so much sexier than the truth . . . That road leads to mayhem.

  • G West

    5 years ago

    I think you're the one calling people names

    That post just above isn't worth a detailed response. The state journalism is in today is not in any sense a result of the writing of people like Kapuscinski. To suggest he has anything to do with promoting avatars like either Mao or Stalin or that he has been reckless in his career is absurd.

    I don't believe you actually have read the man - he's not into hagiography in the least - if you had read him, you couldn't possibly write what you've just posted. Unlike so many of our current excuses for newsmen who certainly are into their own cult of celebrity.

    The fact I read and appreciate Kapuscinski says nothing whatever about my regard for the facts; that should be obvious to anyone. There is no definitive truth. Not now, not ever.

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