Fact, fiction, and Ryszard Kapuściński

Over at Three Percent, Chad Post has some complaints about a review of The Rebels’ Hour, by Lieve Joris. The book is categorized as history, but includes an unusual note: “the facts in this book have all been researched in minute detail, but in order to paint a realistic picture of my characters I’ve had to fill in some parts of their lives from my own imagination. It was the only way to make the story both particular and general.”

Which got me thinking, once again, about Ryszard Kapuściński—who, as I mentioned before, looms large in PEN America 8. (As a participant in the first World Voices festival, in 2005, he also appears in PEN America 7, which is devoted to that event). Following his death, on January 23, 2007, a tribute was organized for the World Voices festival that April. Lawrence Weschler moderated the event, which also included Breyten Breytenbach, Carolin Emcke, Philip Gourevitch, Adam Michnik, and Salman Rushdie.

After we had settled on “Making Histories” as the theme, we knew that some of these tributes would end up in the issue (ultimately, the ones by Rushdie, Gourevitch, and Emcke). Kapuściński’s last book to appear in English, after all, was Travels with Herodotus, a meditation on the “father of history” and on Kapuściński’s own experiences traveling the world, recording what he saw. PEN America 8 ended up featuring an excerpt from that book, in which Kapuściński considers the stated purpose of Herodotus’s Histories: “to prevent the traces of human events from being erased by time.”

He pops up elsewhere in the issue, too: In “Voyage and Voyeur,” Paul Holdengräber quotes Kapuściński, leading to this exchange between Ilija Trojanow and Alain de Botton. In “Imaginary Geographies,” Daniel Alarcón cites The Emperor as one of the most imaginatively constructed books he’s ever read. Perhaps his then-recent death had sent everyone back to his books, but for whatever reason, Kapuściński kept inspiring conversations.

Which brings me back to Joris. For one aspect of Kapuściński’s work that has long inspired conversation is the occasional fiction in his otherwise nonfiction books. Rushdie mentions this in his piece, and he and Lawrence Wechsler expanded on the subject for VQR. (Neither of them gets nearly as angry about it as Jack Shafer did.) Kapuściński’s books are presented as reportage, and we expect facts in that genre. But it seems crazy (and, perhaps, distinctly American) to damn his work generally on this account. Perhaps some of his books—like The Emperor, which famously re-imagines Hailie Selassie’s death—should carry a note not unlike that in the Joris book?

(See also: Nick Owchar heralds the otherwise unheralded collection of poems by Kapuściński just published in English. The photo above, by the way, is yet another of the entries in the Public Lives/Private Lives mixed media project.)

Blind, or just grumpy?-- on Paul Theroux's travel writing

Paul Theroux had an essay about travel writing in the Guardian recently, as noted by the Complete Review. He's been in the news elsewhere, too, thanks to Patrick French's new biography of V.S. Naipaul (noted by Amitava Kumar), and just yesterday C. Max Magee wrote about The Old Patagonian Express. (The picture of Theroux to the left, with V.S. Naipaul in 1986, is from The Telegraph.)

I haven't read any of his books, but seeing Theroux's name out there reminded me of a spirited exchange between Ilija Trojanow and Alain de Botton from one of my favorite conversations in PEN America 8, "Voyage and Voyeur," which occurred at the New York Public Library in 2007 and also featured Ma Jian and Paul Holdengräber. Trojanow deplores Theroux's style (and champions Naipaul), while de Botton defends it.

The full text isn't available online, but the relevant passage is below. (Ryszard Kapuściński, also mentioned below, looms large in PEN America 8-- the subject of a future post.)

TROJANOW: Travel writing must involve a journey which overcomes the ego, a journey where you become an instrument to capture testimonies and voices of “the Other”—voices that usually are not heard. That’s one of the beauties of Kapuściński’s writing—you hear people talk that you normally never hear.

DE BOTTON: Part of what’s nice about Kapuściński is he’s intensely neurotic. He’s always going on about how he hates mosquitoes, how he’s frightened of the dark, he can’t sleep—

TROJANOW: I completely disagree. I think those are exactly the sections of Kapuściński where he’s weak. Because it sounds like Paul Theroux, and if I want to read Paul Theroux—

DE BOTTON: What’s wrong with Paul Theroux?

TROJANOW: Oh, I’m sorry—is he a compatriot of yours?

DE BOTTON: No, no. I’m asking a purely innocent question.

TROJANOW: Well, Paul Theroux is the kind of guy who travels to Malawi in a train and looks out the window and then writes about how the people outside all look very dumb and bored and unhappy and Malawi is an unhappy country... I think it’s utterly uninspiring, both as language and as perception... Günter Grass wrote a book about India, for example. I actually went through the book and counted how often he described shit. There are 289 mentions of shit in this small book. If you’re so obsessed with shit, there’s no need to go to India, just describe your own latrine—that would be just as representative of your neurosis. But if you are claiming to describe something out in the world, that’s another matter.

If the people described by Paul Theroux were to read what he’s written about them, they would be absolutely shocked. Because he does violence to them in not showing the diverse dignity of their existence, and in not even trying to understand the way they look at the world.

DE BOTTON: But simply because someone’s rude doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

TROJANOW: It’s not simply rudeness. Blindness is worse than rudeness.

DE BOTTON: But there is the tradition of the travel writer who a) talks about himself and b) is quite grumpy about the countries and people he sees, or she sees, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing... It’s refreshing to read a first-person account that admits there are a lot of awful things—the place might be ugly and limited, et cetera... When people try to write “objective” travel writing, then we’re really in trouble, because what does “objective” even mean?

TROJANOW: It’s not about objectivity, but about disrespecting the culture or the people that they are describing. And how often—just take the body of work of Western travel writing—how often do local people actually speak in their own voices? There’s a beautiful passage in Naipaul’s India: A Million Mutinies Now, where Naipaul goes into the Dharavi slum in Bombay and asks one of the people living there, “Can you please describe this lane to me?” He has already described the lane himself, but then the person living there describes it, and his description is completely different. This person sees wealth, he sees social mobility, he sees success, he sees a different world than what the Theroux-type of author would have seen—who would have simply said, “There’s dirt and shit and all these people are useless and can’t get their act together.”

Inappropriate Appropriation

The new Believer has just appeared, providing us the opportunity to remember “Inappropriate Appropriation,” a “nighttime event” put together by the Believer in concert with PEN American Center for the first annual PEN World Voices Festival, held in New York in the spring of 2005. The event was recorded, and a carefully edited transcript appeared in PEN America 7, which was devoted to that festival.

The event convened several writers to consider “the rules of cross-cultural appropriation,” as moderator Rick Moody puts it, noting that these rules seemed lately to have “loosened up a bit.” But Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie suggests that, while literature should have no “rules,” great “sensitivity” is still required to write about others. She recalls “a little blurb on the cover” of a book by Ryszard Kapuscinski “that described it as the greatest intelligence to bear on Africa since Conrad. And I really was insulted by that,” she says, “because it isn’t the greatest intelligence to bear on Africa, and I didn’t think, by the way, that Conrad was particularly writing Africa as Africa was.”

Read the rest.