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January 25, 2007
In Memory of Ryszard Kapuscinski
One of my heroes died this week.
This evening, I read the sad news on Ethan Zuckerman's blog that Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski passed away on Tuesday at age 74. Ethan and Cyrus Farivar have already posted fitting tributes to him. No writer's work affected me more profoundly that his.
I first discovered Kapuscinski by accident in 1994, on a shelf of staff recommendations at Olsson's Books in DC. It was The Soccer War, his collection of essays exploring his decades as a war correspondent. Over a period of more than 30 years, he covered almost every major conflict in the world, from the assassination of Patrice Lumumba to the almost comical Central American war that gives this book its title.
Never before had I read a journalist who captured the absurdities of war as true literature. It was a style that I found thoroughly compelling and absorbing, and soon I was tracking down every English-language translation available of his books. He had a penchant for capturing the death throes of kingdoms and empires with a poeticism lacking among his peers. In The Emperor, he recounts the excesses of Haile Selaissie's regime as it fell to pieces. With Shah of Shahs, we enter a paranoid world in which people say one thing publicly because they know others are watching,
(then switch to a parenthetical whisper to speak the truth about their encounters with SAVAK as Mohammed Reza Pahlevi's regime crashes around him.)
Perhaps his most epic work, in English at least, was Imperium, which just came out around the time I'd started reading The Soccer War. Unlike his other works, which recounted his near-death experiences in so many exotic locales, Imperium hit closer to home for him, dissecting the social putrifaction that was the former Soviet Union in its moribund years. As a Polish reporter, Kapuscinski could never turn his observant eye on the Iron Curtain - at least not publicly, until the curtain came down and he could publish his travel memoirs without fear of retribution.
His last English work published prior to his death was Shadow of the Sun, which I rushed out to buy as a first edition five years ago. Another collection of stories from his travels in Africa, he captures the social stagnation seen in all too many parts of the continent, from AIDS victims in southern Africa to the jaundiced-eyed unemployed souls that haunted his neighborhood while living Nigeria. It was a shattering look at a continent in transition, hurdling towards the 21st century in a torrent of guns, plagues, corruption, youthful optimism and worldwide indifference.
For several years I had been awaiting his next book, which sadly will be published posthumously. I've occupied myself by re-reading his works every couple of years. About 18 months ago while spending part of the summer in Ghana, I would sit each night in the moldy verandah of my guesthouse in Accra reading the surreal, hysterical, horrifying short stories contained in The Soccer War - which were bookended, appropriately, by chapters of him sitting in a moldy verandah in Accra. The book helped me get through a rather traumatic experience of being exposed unexpectedly to images of a mutilated Liberian at a local refugee camp. That night, I spent hours writing a journal entry on my experience at the refugee camp, navigating back and forth between my computer and the book, interconnecting the afterimages of that murdered Liberian with Kapuscinski's own afterimages of war. He was my guide, my muse, my therapist, my rabbi that sleepless night.
For better or for worse, I have only had a handful of Kapuscinskian moments in my life: that day at the Liberian refugee camp; my visit to the killing fields of Cambodia; being assaulted by Turkish police in the Kurdish east; Yitzah Rabin's death during my first trip to the Middle East. During each and every one of those occasions, I turned to Kapuscinski for guidance for preserving the memory in print and online. During both good times and bad, I am profoundly affected by my travel experiences abroad, but in those times of stress, I have found myself with almost a compulsive need to express myself and bear witness.
The words of Ryszard Kapuscinski inspired me like no other, one part documentary and another part confessional. I am forever in his debt. -andy
Posted by acarvin at January 25, 2007 8:47 PM
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