Book Review: Journalism and Revolution - By David Ost
Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life - by Artur Domosławski
...Ryszard Kapuściński entered western letters as something of an outside-our-life figure, and then became a rather mysterious one, with questions raised on all sides as to who exactly he was. He surged onto the world stage in 1983 with the English-language publication of The Emperor, his book based on his journalistic investigations in Ethiopia about the collapse of Haile Selassie’s dictatorial regime. And yet, was it really about Ethiopia? Was it really journalism? Made up of a series of vignettes ostensibly told by former members of the emperor’s court, the book reads like a modern version of A Thousand and One Nights, and no less enchanting, too, with its depiction of a regime fearsome, yes, but also megalomaniacal and absurd. Without notes, dates, identified informants, or anything else from the traditional reporter’s toolkit, it was hard to identify as journalism. It read instead as a combination of inspired reportage, moral philosophy, and phantasmagorical storytelling, offering us a glimpse into the depravity of power and the spark of individuality that is able, despite all odds, to resist it. The razor-sharp observations on everyday complicity and self-serving sycophancy, within a dream-like narrative not clearly bounded to any particular terrain, seemed to suggest it was a play, a ploy, a ruse.
...Ryszard Kapuściński entered western letters as something of an outside-our-life figure, and then became a rather mysterious one, with questions raised on all sides as to who exactly he was. He surged onto the world stage in 1983 with the English-language publication of The Emperor, his book based on his journalistic investigations in Ethiopia about the collapse of Haile Selassie’s dictatorial regime. And yet, was it really about Ethiopia? Was it really journalism? Made up of a series of vignettes ostensibly told by former members of the emperor’s court, the book reads like a modern version of A Thousand and One Nights, and no less enchanting, too, with its depiction of a regime fearsome, yes, but also megalomaniacal and absurd. Without notes, dates, identified informants, or anything else from the traditional reporter’s toolkit, it was hard to identify as journalism. It read instead as a combination of inspired reportage, moral philosophy, and phantasmagorical storytelling, offering us a glimpse into the depravity of power and the spark of individuality that is able, despite all odds, to resist it. The razor-sharp observations on everyday complicity and self-serving sycophancy, within a dream-like narrative not clearly bounded to any particular terrain, seemed to suggest it was a play, a ploy, a ruse.
“Silly me,” wrote New York Times reviewer Xan Smiley. “I set out to review a book about Haile Selassie called The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, foolishly thinking it would be all about…well, Haile Selassie and Ethiopia.” Who was this author, wondered the reviewer? When calls to the publisher revealed that Kapuściński came from Poland—a country much in the news in 1983, still reeling from martial law imposed by the communist government to repress the Solidarity movement—and that the book had oddly enjoyed considerable success at home, the reviewer decided the book was little more than fantastic allegory.
But where Smiley condescended, others were enthralled. Salmon Rushdie waxed lyrical, John Updike found it “stunning,” Susan Sontag hosted him at parties. Gabriel García Márquez dubbed him, simply, “the Master”—high praise from the founder of magical realism, but Kapuściński seemed to one-up García Márquez by injecting magic into real politics, and elucidating thereby the human tension and bewilderment connected to power that traditional journalism left hidden.
Three years later came his book about the fall of the shah of Iran, perhaps his masterpiece. Once again the story is told obliquely, in this case through vignettes about, and ostensibly related by, people not directly connected to the book’s subject. Some of the deepest insights of the book come through reflections on photographs, interpretations of what’s there and what’s missing. It’s as if we have instant social history here, in which the big political events become clear through the side stories of regular people, their normal lives somehow reflecting the power and politics that prevail.
The publication of the second book demanded a rethinking of the consensus that Kapuściński was “really” just writing about Poland. Poland couldn’t carry all the weight of these far-reaching accounts. He obviously brought to his understanding of other countries reflections on authoritarian power that he had gathered at home—and which he wrote about earlier with acuity while reporting from provincial Poland, creating in the process a new style that transformed journalism at home before it traveled abroad. But the breadth of insight and the level of specificity made it clear this was more than allegory. Just what it was, however, remained unclear.
Domosławski takes us through all the debates about Kapuściński’s work, and the barrage of challenges he encountered once the initial fascination wore off. In the West, criticism ran along three main lines: that his stories weren’t true, that what he wrote wasn’t journalism, and that his obvious deep empathy with the third world was infused with an unwitting orientalism...
Read more: http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/journalism-and-revolution
