Writer, Vocation, Mission
Ryszard Kapuscinski: A World's Reporter
By David Dastych
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
"Why am I a writer? Why have I risked my life so many times, come so close to dying? Is it to report the weirdness? To earn my salary? Mine is not a vocation, it's a mission. I wouldn't subject myself to these dangers if I didn't feel that there was something overwhelmingly important--about history, about ourselves--that I felt compelled to get across. This is more than journalism."
--Ryszard Kapuscinski interview by Bill Bufford ("Granta Magazine").
Rick, why did you have to die yesterday, only 74, while Augusto Pinochet could die at 91? Do you know he died on December 10, 2006: on Human Rights Day? We don't miss him at all, but we all shall miss you. Your loving wife, Alina, who was so kind and wrote letters to me in prison in the 1980s, your daughter (whom I never met)--she lives in Canada, hundreds of your friends, of whom I am a humble friend of yours and an admirer of your unique personality and of your books for 45 years, since your first collection of journalist reports with a very strange title "Busz po polsku" (The bush, Poland's style) published in 1962, when I was in America. But, first of all, poor people in the whole world, in Africa, Latin America and Asia, people of all human races will miss you, as you were their best advocate, who took them out of the negligence and oblivion, the man, who told the 20 percent of the world's well-to-do nations that there was still 80 percent of the poor, sometimes sick and hungry human beings to be considered and helped. Yes--humans, not just statistical 'units'.
Do you remember how we were discussing about China, twenty years ago (now you remember all, in heaven!)?. Then I told you about my strange encounter with a million of poor, badly smelling and all dressed in grey dungarees young Chinese, shouting in support of Mao Zedong in the Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and about hundreds of corpses scattered in Wuhan after a military charge. In 1967, China was a 'chaos under Heaven' and in 1986, when we were talking, it was emerging from poverty and dictatorship to be hit again by a massacre of students and passers-by in the same huge Beijing square on June 4, 1989. At that time I was still in a communist prison, but already happy and rejoicing the victory of Solidarity in the first Polish half-free elections held on the same day. Twenty years ago, you told me that China would become one of the leading world powers. And there it is.
Rick, you have told a Polish reporter (I don't recall when): "My main ambition is to show Europeans that our mentality is highly Euro-centric, and that Europe, or rather part of it, is not unique in the world, but that it is surrounded by an immense, ever increasing diversity of cultures, societies, religions and civilizations. Life on this planet, where there are more and more interconnections, demands awareness of this fact and adjustment to radically new global conditions." And on some other occasion you said: "I write 'from on the move'. I am not an 'inventor'. I don't describe any imagined or purely personal world. I describe the world that really exists."
This world, you described for almost 50 years, was not a safe place. Our journalist colleagues and also your friend, well known to me--Professor Wiktor Osiatynski - remembered in a TV chat yesterday that you had witnessed 27 revolutions in many parts of the world, and you had personally reported on 12 wars. I also know, from you, that four times you were captured and walked to death. Polish Radio remembered your description of how a person feels being brought to be shot. You told how one's body becomes 'detached' and 'impersonal', like a piece of wood. Did I tell you how some mafia thugs wanted to shoot me in the woods, in the early 1990s? I went with them (there was no choice but to obey them) and I thought of my whole life, I was calm and stiff, I couldn't speak and my reactions were like in a dream. You have known this, haven't you?
But there are things that survive beyond the human life. Your books and other writings, recordings of your voice and face in lectures and interviews, also your thoughts, which are body-less but circulate freely among people. You once said: "any kind of creative work requires concentration and solitude. People who write poetry [and you did that too, Rick] or paint pictures [you preferred to take photos] do it alone. And if that's how we understand getting to know the world, then while traveling you also have to be alone." "Who goes with you on your journeys"--somebody asked. "My thoughts and no one else"--you answered.
Rick, the good thoughts and remembrances of all of us will accompany you on your last journey. Mine and Sophie's, too. So leave this Earth in peace, leaving to us your noble thoughts, perfect writings and noble deeds. Excuse me, if I wouldn't come to your funeral. You know I broke my back twelve years ago and hardly can walk. Other friends will throw lumps of dirt into your open grave, in my name. But when the sun will melt snow, I shall go to this lovely graveyard and I shall put flowers and little stones on the place of your rest. Adios, Rick!
David
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Profiles: Literature Ryszard Kapuscinski
Born in Pinsk, now in Belarus, in 1932, Kapuscinski is the pre-eminent writer among Polish reporters. After honing his skills on domestic stories, he traveled throughout the world and reported on several dozen wars, coups and revolutions in America, Asia, and especially in Africa, where he witnessed the liberation from colonialism. He has devoted several books to Africa, including the HEBAN / EBONY.
After earning a reputation as an insightful reporter, Kapuscinski amazed his readers in the 1970s with a series of books of increasing literary craftsmanship in which the narrative technique, psychological portraits of the characters, wealth of stylization and metaphor, and the unusual imagery served as means of interpreting the perceived world. Kapuscinski's best-known book is just such a reportage-novel of the decline of Haile Selassie's anachronistic regime in Ethiopia - CESARZ / THE EMPEROR, which has been translated into many languages. SZACHINSZACH / SHAH OF SHAHS, about the last Shah of Iran, and IMPERIUM, about the last days of the Soviet Union, have enjoyed similar success.
Kapuscinski is fascinated not only by exotic worlds and people, but also by books: he approaches foreign countries first through the gate of literature, spending many months reading before each trip. He knows how to listen to the people he meets, but he is also capable of "reading" the hidden sense of the scenes he encounters: the way that the Europeans move out of Angola, a discussion about alimony in the Tanganyikan parliament, the reconstruction of frescoes in the new Russia - he turns each of these vignettes into a metaphor of historical transformation. This tendency to process private adventures into a synthesis has made Kapuscinski an eminent thinker, and the volumes of his LAPIDARIUM are a fascinating record of the shaping of a reporter's observations into philosophical reflections on the world and people.
"One of the things that caught my attention as I wandered through the territory of the Imperium was the way that, even in abandoned and derelict little towns, even in almost empty bookstores, there were on sale, as a rule, maps of this country. On those maps, the rest of the world was somehow in the background, in the margins, in the shadows.
For Russians, a map is a kind of visual compensation, a special emotional sublimation, and also an object of unconcealed pride. It also serves to elucidate and excuse all shortcomings, mistakes, poverty and stagnation. Too big a country to be reformable! - explains an opponent of reform. Too big a country to be able to clean it up! - janitors shrug their shoulders from Brest to Vladivostok. Too big a country to be able to ship merchandise everywhere! - grumble the assistants in empty shops". ("Imperium")
Source: www.polska2000.pl
Copyright: Stowarzyszenie Willa Decjusza
Selected Bibliography:
Selected translations:
English:
French:
German:
Finnish:
IMPERIUMI, Helsinki: Like, 1993.Spanish:
EL SHA O LA DESMESURA DEL PODER, Barcelona: Anagrama, 1987. EL EMPERADOR (CESARZ), Barcelona: Anagrama, 1989. LA GUERRA DEL FUTBOL (WOJNA FUTBOLOWA), Barcelona: Anagrama, 1992.Catalan:
EL HOMES DE L'EMPERADOR (CESARZ), Barcelona: Escena, 1990.David Dastych, 2007
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