Truth and ... that other stuff

The debate about Ryszard Kapuściński's fabrications looks to have been a dreary affair, at least immediately following his death in 2007, perhaps because I-was-there journalism in which the journalist could not possibly have been there had gained prestige, and perhaps because many of his defenders and attackers did not bother citing examples of  his truth or his lies. The anti-Kapuścińskis found it sufficient to invoke Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, and the pros answered with Tom Wolfe but also John Hersey and Daniel Defoe in a high-toned game of name-calling. 

I don't know where The Emperor, Kapuściński's retrospective look at the downfall of Ethiopia's Haile Selassie, fits in that controversy. It looks to me as if Kapuściński may gradually have abandoned the pretense of reportage over the course of the book. 

Who could possibly believe that anyone really said

"A kind of mania seized this mad and unpredictable world, my friend: a mania for development. Everybody wanted to developed himself! ... Yet our Empire had existed for hundreds, even thousands of years without any noticeable development and all the while its leaders were respected, venerated, worshiped. The Emperors Zera Jakob, Towodros, Johannes all were worshiped. And who would ever have gotten it into his head to press his face in front of the Emperor and beg to  be developed?"

as Kapuściński has an interlocutor say in the book's middle chapter, "It's Coming, It's Coming"? (The first chapter is called "The Throne," the last "The Collapse." That should you give you an idea of how things end.)

Yet the comedy is frequently shot through with acid-tongued reminders that the lives of a country and its people are at stake, and with plausible diagramming of a revolution's progress.

Debates about journalistic ethics in America tend to become shrill, puritanical, and, when the debaters are in the newspaper business, desperately and self-laceratingly so, and I can't stand that sort of thing when I'm out of the office. So, what should readers do if they want to read Kapuściński in good conscience? I'm just one book into my Kapuściński-reading career, but I think one could do worse than to start with an observation from the Economist quoted in Wikipedia's Kapuściński article:

"[Kapuściński] creates an Africa of his own. It is a fascinating place. Whether it ever existed as he tells it is another matter altogether."

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

Funny, you can't hide your lion eyes: When Detectives Beyond Borders met Haile Selassie

Today I cross a border that another border-crosser set up. That crosser recommended Ryszard Kapuściński's The Soccer War in a comment on my recent post about Manuel Vázquez Montalbán's novel Off Side.

I found Kapuściński's The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat instead. While I can't yet comment on the various controversies surrounding Kapuściński's alleged collaboration with Poland's Communist government or his crossing lines between fiction and non-fiction, I smiled when I read this account of the book's subject, Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, passing among petitioners in one of his twenty-seven cars:

“You see, it was known that His Majesty, not using his powers of reading and writing, had a phenomenally developed visual memory. On this gift of nature the owner of the face over which the Imperial gaze had passed could build his hopes. Because he could already count on some passing trace, even an indistinct trace, having imprinted itself in His Highness's memory. Now, you had to maneuver in the crowd with such perseverance and determination, so squeeze yourself and worm through, so push, so jostle, so position your face, dispose and manipulate it in such a way, that the Emperor’s glance, unwillingly and unknowingly, would notice, notice, notice. Then you waited for the moment to come when the Emperor would think, `Just a minute. I know that face, but I don’t know the name.'”

I  smiled because I was part of the crowd that surrounded Haile Selassie upon his visit to Montreal's Expo 67 world's fair. My memory tells me that he was a little guy, that his car was white, that the emperor wasn't smiling, that he sat in the left rear passenger seat, and that I was close enough to the car that I could look right down on him. (Those were different times.)

If Kapuscinski's interlocutor in The Emperor was right, I could have hit His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings (Emperor) of Ethiopia, Elect of God up for a few favors before he was deposed in 1974. But would he really have remembered my youthful face? Haile unlikely, I say.

***

In re Kapuscinski's supposed embellishment of facts, I learned from the Wikipedia article about Kapuscinski that he wrote gawęda szlachecka,

“a traditional Polish anecdotal narrative exercised throughout the literary history of the 17th to the 19th centuries by segments of lower nobility and sometimes referred to by the irreverent as the art of elegant mendacity.”

I must pursue this attractive genre further, maybe even write some gawęda szlachecka beyond borders of my own.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012