Hannah Swithinbank

In which I talk fuzzily about Ryszard Kapuściński

The Shadow of the Sun, by Ryszard Kapuściński

I’m having a moment of interested consideration about the new biography of Ryszard Kapuściński which claims that much of his reporting was heavily fictionalised and about some of the outrage about this.  As outrage goes, it’s fairly mild and seems mostly confined to those working in journalism (for example in Jon Snow’s latest blog post)  – but then Kapuściński is hardly a household name in the UK, and I’d be prepared to bet that the majority of people here who have read his work have come to it as travel literature, where the line between ‘truth’ and ‘atmosphere’ is more easily, and perhaps more legitimately, blurred than in journalistic reportage.    I came to him through his collection of essays/reportage, The Shadow of the Sun, which I thought sounded interesting based on a review I read and which I then bought with some Christmas money and enjoyed immensely.  It’s been a while since I read it, but I’m still inclined to think that it’s one of the best collections of writing about Africa that I’ve read – not necessarily factually, but in terms of painting a picture and capturing an atmosphere.

So, assuming that this biography is right about the level of fiction in Kapuściński’s work, I want to ask how much it matters.   And I want to suggest that how much it matters depends on two things – what the audience is reading it for, and what Kapuściński sold it as.   With regard to the second point, if you were a reader of Kapuściński’s work in newspapers in which it was presented (by him, or by the paper) as news reporting then yes, you’re right to be concerned about the level of fiction involved.  The standard convention now is that journalism represents accurately what is going on, and you can be challenged on your sources and evidence.  I’m ok with that.  However, if you’re coming Kapuściński’s work as travel literature, then the level of importance of absolute fact in telling the story is, arguably, less important.  It’s important to emphasise that this does depend upon what you, as an individual member of the audience, want from your travel writing, but I want to suggest that you as a reader shouldn’t just assume that a travel writer is just ‘telling the truth’ in some abstract, definable sense.   A writer is always going to shape the narrative they’re presenting, it’s going to involve subjective choices, and yes, it may deviate from what some people will say is true of the place being written about (and yes, you should probably go and read some Hayden White now).     The ‘rules’ of journalism might be said, to steal from Captain Barbossa, “More like guidelines.”  They’re conventions – just like the rules of historical writing or travel writing – and your understanding of them does depend, frankly, on what you’re used to.   I would argue that Kapuściński’s work isn’t journalism like BBC’s ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ is journalism, or like Fergal Keane’s Season of Blood, about the Rwandan genocide, is journalism, and yes, I would argue that his work doesn’t belong in the ‘news’ section of the newspapers. I would argue that his books are travel writing and that yes, the reader should probably be aware that the writer has shaped his narrative to tell a story that might not be absolutely ‘true’ under the modern, western demands of factual reportage.    But I don’t feel like Kapuściński sold me down the river by not fulfilling these demands.    I like my travel writing to bring me a sense of time and of a place, and I accept that such work may not be 100% accurate, or even as accurate as it’s possible for it to be, and that if I want to start talking factually about the times/places/events I’ve read about in such work, I’m going to need to do some more research.

Here’s the thing.  People writing non-fiction narratives about things they have experienced have always shaped these narratives to work as stories. People always will.  Even historians do this. Within the rules of modern, ‘scientific’ history, with its demands for evidence and proofs, historians still have to interpret evidence and shape an argument, a narrative of cause and effect, and any historian who says their personal perspective on the world doesn’t influence the way they do this isn’t thinking self-reflexively enough.  I’m not going to start arguing that all historians insert a declaration at the front of their work stating their personal background and subjective positions, if only because I think their readers ought to be smart enough or get smart enough to think about these things for themselves.      I’m an ancient historian, and from the beginning of my education as such, I’ve been taught that you have to ask questions of your sources, and I’ve learnt that you stand a much better chance of getting somewhere close to an objective understanding of what went on by understanding what conventions story the writer was trying to tell – and this goes for ancient historians (whose conventions, btw, were nothing like those of modern historians).  If you want to ‘know’ what happened in, say, in Iran around the time of the fall of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, which Kapuściński wrote about in Shah of Shahs, you’re going to need to compare it to other sources and be aware that it is one writer’s take on it.  I don’t think it invalidates Kapuściński’s book as a perspective on those events – it’s just not the only perspective.

And here’s a question – should we even be surprised that Kapuściński’s work contains a strong fictional/fabulist element?  This is, after all, a man who wrote a book called Travels with Herodotus and who apparently travelled with a copy of Herodotus’ Histories, which are hardly the most scientific or factually accurate even of ancient historical texts.  Herodotus is a writer who likes to say, ‘Oh I saw this,’ or ‘Oh, this guy told me this,’ and who, alongside his account of the Persian Wars, includes stories of flying snakes and giant ants.  If you put all the Classicist and Ancient Historians in one building and divided them up by subject area, ‘understanding what’s going on in Herodotus’ Histories’ would take up an entire wing.   Why would we be surprised that someone who appears to have enjoyed and felt some connection to Herodotus’ work didn’t hew to strict journalistic conventions in his work?  Surely it’s more interesting to think about what Kapuściński was doing with his work and what its success or otherwise says about our interaction with the world outside our own borders than it is to hold our arms up in the air and wail about how a writer wasn’t really where he claimed to be at a particular time.  That said – it’s also interesting to think about what that particular tendency says about us and our relationship with journalism.   Jon Snow isn’t necessarily wrong to dislike the idea of a journalist being a ‘fake’ – but isn’t it important to be aware that that is a subjective position and think about what we want journalism to be?

Do I think Kapuściński was a ‘journalist’ under the majority of expectations of the term? No.  Do I wish he’d left a nice, helpful little document outlining his position on what he thought journalism was, and what he thought his work was? Yes.  But do I think he should have had to? Not necessarily.  I think he should probably have been aware that it didn’t meet a lot of journalistic convention, and not sold it as journalism – but honestly I don’t know enough about him and his work to know what he did say about it or how he did sell it.  Should we challenge his narratives and discuss them? Absolutely – but not just in terms as polar as ‘true’ and ‘false’ – can we please be a little more nuanced about things?

ETA: This piece in the Guardian is interesting on the subject – drawing a line between Kapuściński’s despatches and his books.

Tears for the Past

Water from melting snow drips down one of the stelae in the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

I think the fact that I don’t really understand the Holocaust Memorial’s artistic/architectural nature and yet was still affected by it speaks to how well done the memorial is.  I don’t get how or why a field of concrete stelae is supposed to or can memorialise the Holocaust – but it *does*.    You walk between the rows of these blocks, which are of various heights – in the middle you are completely dwarfed by them – taking turns as and when you want to turn to find your own way through the field.  If it is a metaphor for history, then it’s almost scarily effective – each turn has its own impact on the trail you leave behind you, and can cause you to end up emerging somewhere else around the edge of the field – and with no distinguishing features on the blocks there is very little to aid you in picking out a very specific path as you go through or reaching a specific destination.  You could walk through in a straight line and miss a lot.  You could very deliberately count your way through, taking certain rows, and still miss a lot.  You could aim for an exit point and wander as vaguely as you liked towards that goal. Or you could wander at will, and end up anywhere, or get completely lost.  It’s dislocating and chilling – especially in the snow.

The day I was there the sun was starting to melt the snow that had settled on top of some of the stelae, with water droplets running down the sides of the blocks like tears.   I wanted to capture some of these drops – but also to give a sense of the memorial as a larger structure that you can get lost in.  It was a little tricky to get both, since the stelae are laid out in straight lines – which means it was hard to get them into the background of a photograph whose focal point was some small drops of water on the face of a block.  In the end, this is what I managed to capture.  Now I have it, I feel like, in a way, the ‘tears’ of the melting snow in focus in front of the bright white snowy, straight path up out of the maze of stelae might say something about the importance of tears, grief and memorialising in finding a way through the maze of history as it impacts upon us.  Which isn’t at all what I was initially aiming for – which was the tears caught in the middle of the field of blocks.  Maybe my camera is smarter than me.

Solomon Browne

A friend of mine reminded me that it is the anniversary of the Penlee lifeboat disaster today. On 19 December 1981 the Union Star developed an engine fault off the Wolf Rock, the fuel supply became contaminated by sea water and the weather continued to worsen, driving the ship onto the rocks near Penlee Point. The Penlee Lifeboat the Solomon Browne was launched, manned by eight volunteers, and attempted to rescue the eight passengers and crew of tthe Union Star. The weather was so bad that the Royal Navy Sea King helicopter was unable to airlift the crew from the ship, but the Solomon Browne made repeated attempts to pull alongside.

The Solomon Browne’s last message was: “We’ve got four men off, hang on, we have got four at the moment. There’s two left on board…”, at which point the radio went dead and her lights disappeared. Lifeboats from Sennen Cove and St Marys on the Isles of Scilly attempted a search and rescue for survivors, but none were found.

The crew of Solomon Browne were: William Trevelyan Richards (Coxswain), James Madron (2nd Coxswain.), Nigel Brockman, John Blewett, Kevin Smith, Barrie Torrie, Charles Greenhaugh and Gary Wallis. Nigel Brockman’s son, Neil, still serves on the Penlee lifeboat. He volunteered for the 1981 ’shout’ but was sent back by Richards who did not want two members of the same family out in such conditions. Tonight, as every year, the world famous Christmas illuminations of Mousehole will be turned off at 8pm for an hour as an act of remembrance.

Parliamentary Democracy

I was trying to frame some thoughts about the recently emerged situation with the Speaker of the House of Commons and the police raid. And then I realised, I don’t really have any coherent thoughts about this. I know so very little about the emergence of British Parliamentary Democracy, and what I do know is all in bits and pieces. I know I’m interested in it, but I don’t really know anything about it.
So now I know I’m pretty horrified at the teaching of history and civics in British schools – and indeed at university. The survey courses I took before specialising at honours completely skipped the English Civil War, skimmed over the Restoration, featured a bit part by the Glorious Revolution before mostly ignoring the arrival of the Hannoverian monarchs in favour of dealing with the international wars of the eighteenth century. And nineteenth century history was mostly social history – but yet not really featuring the Reform Laws at all.
However, that doesn’t really help me improve my knowledge. So if someone could recommend me a good book or two on the subject for starters I’d be grateful.

But back to the present crisis. ‘Tis interesting – and not just in a ‘last week on The Devil’s Whorethe Speaker told the King to sod off because he wasn’t giving up his MPs’ kind of way (incidentally, I’ve not seen this week’s Devil’s Whore yet, so no spoilers…) But I like the idea of the Speaker as kind of the guardian and guide of the House of Commons.
I was also interested that the cabinet members I’ve heard on the radio are being very careful to avoid criticising the Speaker – and not only in a ‘we don’t really care that the Tory MP got arrested’ way, but also in a ‘don’t want to criticise a key element of the parlimentary system’ way. Which is doubly interesting because Labour have been busily getting rid of the Lord Chancellor, but the Speaker is safe.

But mostly, it’s interesting because you could – if you were careful – criticise the man but not the office: “The Speaker should be doing this [xyz] but Michael Martin did not, and therefore he’s not a good Speaker.” Which would make the man the problem, not the office he holds. I’m not saying that this should be done, or that this is the case now, but that you could. And that Labour aren’t suggests they might not be too concerned about problem with police raiding the palace of Westminster, and making off with documents and MPs belonging to the Tory party. I wonder what their response would have been if they were the opposition? Or what the Tory response would have been if such an action had been carried out during the Cash-for-Honours affair?

the better things in life

I was just listening to last week’s Start the Week, from the Cheltenham Literary Festival. We shall leave aside that nice Robert Fox, who, according to google, writes for the Guardian, and his thoughts about Herodotus and Thucydides being “dashed good reporters”, and the eyewitness nature of Pericles Funeral Oration, because it leads to irateness where there need be none. For the programme featured Simon Schama, the celebrity historian most dear to my heart because he does his own research, writes a dream and does incredibly good analysis-through-narrative, and because his book on the French Revolution is A-Mazing, talking to Andrew Marr, BBC reporter/presenter who would have all my devotion even if I hadn’t seen the clips of him doing the Timewarp in pink fishnet tights and leather shorts for Children in Need, about American history and politics. My brain went to its happy place of nerdiness.