| Ryszard Kapuscinski is a journalist. But he turns his stories into unique books that transcend reportage. He spoke to Larry Schwartz. HE WAVED away a waitress and drank his cafe latte to the dregs. That night he would stay in a plush Melbourne hotel. But Ryszard Kapuscinski is equally, if not more, at home beneath the stars. “I don’t like the situation,” the famed chronicler of the Third World said when asked how he took to being courted at a writers’ festival. “I prefer to work in the field.” The Polish author, who has witnessed at least 27 revolutions and coups in 50 countries in Africa and Latin America, says that he is more comfortable when he is incognito. As he was recently when working on a book on Africa and living in Senegal and Mali “in places where there is no press, no electricity, no television, no radio even”. Kapuscinski’s latest book, `Imperium’, is an extraordinary account of the Soviet Union. It begins with memories of dislocation after the arrival of Soviet troops in his hometown, Pinsk, just as he and his classmates were being taught about Lenin from a book by Stalin, and trading the pictures of Soviet leaders they were supposed to wear on their lapels as if they were basketball cards. He later describes a 1960s expedition across Siberia to Transcaucasia and the republics of Central Asia before taking readers on his wanderings across a union in decline between 1989 and 1991. Balding, with bushy grey-white hair, Kapuscinski seems almost inconspicuous: a compact man in bifocals, blue shirt and jeans. On his first visit to Australia, he had a quiet composure at odds with the kind of reputation that might go with some of his exploits. At the outbreak of the Biafran War in the mid-’60s, he was doused with benzene by young men with machetes who threatened to burn him alive. “I was driving along a road where they say no white man can come back alive,” he wrote. “I was driving to see if a white man could, because I had to experience everything for myself. I know that a man shudders in the forest when he passes close to a lion. I got close to a lion so that I would know how it feels.” In `Imperium’ he writes how the excessive fear of a Russian woman who fled Baku, because she feared Armenians, reminded him of scenes in the ’60s at the airports of Algiers and Leopoldville; and in the ’70s at Luanda and Lourenco Marques. There he had seen exhausted white refugees, “yesterday’s colonisers”, preparing to flee. You see him there nonplussed, against the tide. “People are just fearing in advance something which probably never happens. You see people rushing away for no reason at all. You see, there is a lot of terrible irrationality in the feeling. And you try to ask them: `What is happening? What is going on here?’ But they look at you as if you are crazy. ” Now 63, Kapuscinski studied history at the University of Warsaw in the 1950s but was never content to observe the world from afar. An investigative reporter, he was dismissed from one of his early jobs after revealing the atrocious working conditions at a steel factory in southern Poland. Though he was forced into hiding, a Government taskforce later confirmed the accuracy of his report. Later acclaim enabled him to persuade his editor to send him overseas. Still later, he would become the only foreign correspondent covering the Third World for the Polish Press Agency. He is conversant in English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and his Russian was good enough to enable him to go off the beaten track for his latest book. He visited remote regions of Africa, Asia, the Middle and Far East and Latin America, and come to know figures such as the Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara, the former Chilean president Salvador Allende and the Congolese revolutionary Patrice Lumumba. “You can deal with a subject as a historian at university, reading books, lecturing, studying and things like that,” he says. “This doesn’t interest me. I am fascinated to see history in the making. I’m jealous not to have lived in times of, for example, the French Revolution. To see how it was. ” Kapuscinski’s books have been described as second versions of the 100-word press reports he sent. He keeps no notes, saying that they hinder his storytelling and that he is able to remember the essential elements of dialogue and events. He grew up in extreme poverty in rural Poland during World War II. He once told Bill Buford, editor of the British literary magazine `Granta’: “I’m made uneasy by technology, I don’t trust it, I’m uncomfortable around it. But I am not uncomfortable in the Third World. I have always rediscovered my home, rediscovered Pinsk in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America . . . Amid poverty I am at home. I know what the life means. ” HOW was he able to win the confidence of people who might be suspicious of visiting journalists? Modesty and humility helped, he confided without a hint of immodesty or hubris. “I was born and educated in a small provincial town. People with such a background are generally modest people and they do not see any reason to be arrogant or something like that. In your work, in your travels, you are always dependent on other people, on their goodwill, on their help, on their assistance, on their understanding. “You can’t do this kind of job on your own. Never. Sometimes you have to get to the front line; it can only be at the goodwill of some commander. Sometimes you need food in the desert; it is the goodwill of the desert people. “To be respectful to these people, I think, is fundamental . . . it is something that comes very naturally to me.” His work first came to the attention of the West in the early ’80s with the publication of an English translation of `The Emperor’, his chronicle of the reign of Haile Selassie. His writing won the praise of the likes of Salman Rushdie and John Updike, and critics have said that his best work recalls such diverse influences as the spare prose of Ernest Hemingway and the lyrical writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Bill Buford has called him “a storyteller of the most traditional sort: a voyager returning with the stories of his voyage”. He sees himself creating a new genre somewhat akin to the ideals espoused by proponents of the American New Journalism, a non-fiction using literary conventions to transcend the limitations of newspaper reportage. Others may see in his quiet courage a kind of contemporary heroism, in pursuit of worlds and experiences and new ways to get through to those of us who might otherwise remain oblivious. THE SUNDAY AGE, 29-Oct-1995 |
Larry Schwartz Writer