The autobiographical “self” in Ryszard Kapuściński´s empathetic journalism

Autobiographism of reportage: Theoretical remarks

Researchers of reportage largely agree that what constitutes this genre is not only the “factographic pact” between the sender and the receiver, that is, the assumption they make about the truthfulness of the message, but also the “autobiographical pact” (Bauer, 2000; Woźniakiewicz-Dziadosz, 2004, p. 101; Wojnach, 2004, p. 104^[2]), equated with an illocutionary component ‘concerning the events the author has witnessed or participated in’ (Głowiński, 2008, p. 471; Rejter, 2000, p. 28; Wojtak, 2004, pp. 268–269; Wolny– Zmorzyński, 2011, p. 110). Of course, the term “autobiographical pact” can be understood more broadly as the recipient’s awareness that the reality presented in a piece of reportage has been interpreted by the reporter through the prism of his or her experiences and knowledge of the world. Although there is also room in this genre for other people’s remarks and opinions (Mikołajczuk, 2004) ^[3] —provided that they have been obtained from reliable informants and the indirect nature of those testimonies is revealed—it is the superior sender of the text, the author, who chooses whose voice to quote or rephrase. In this sense, a work of reportage is an objectifying text that is, at the same time, subjectivized.

Subjectification, understood here as a textual manifestation of the subject, recognizable to the reader and identifiable with the author of the text, is a graded feature which is associated with literature rather than journalism. Regardless of the type of text, however, the author’s “self” usually has to be tracked down by following various “traces” (linguistic and narrative):

The traces of the “self” in a text are (...) phenomena from various levels: views expressed directly or only intimated, but also the concealing of significant things, the choice of topic, the way the material is organized, (...) stylistic preferences. These scattered traces also have the nature of a cipher, the key to which can be found in the personality of the writer and in his or her existence, along with the social and historical context, so that only part of the key to the cipher is available to the reader–researcher. (Czermińska, 2005, p. 221, transl. mine)

The autobiographism of a text, the presence of the author’s story about him- or herself conveyed by explicit linguistic means (deictic, in particular), can be considered a special case of subjectification, as in: “Ego is he who says ego” (Benveniste,1958, p. 224). Interest in the subjective aspects of speech, inspired by Emil Benveniste’s classic concept of subjectivity in language, is a distinguishing feature of poststructuralist and postgenerativist linguistics. The current fashion for focusing on a human interpretation of the world, which is contained within language and communicated through language, can be observed in anthropological and cultural linguistics (Bartmiński, 2004, pp. 9–13), including in studies on the linguistic worldview (Tokarski, 2013, pp. 306–323; Głaz, 2019) and style:

Contemporary linguistics (...) recognizes, following Emil Benveniste, that (...) language is always an expression of someone’s subjective interpretation of the world: a reflection not of the world as it is, but as it seems. (...) The intersubjective frame of reference (in the English-language literature referred to as the sharing of social worlds, or common cultural background) provides a specific compromise between the reflection and the interpretation of reality: the subject becomes the bearer of the image of the world (Tabakowska, 2008, p. 112, transl. mine).

In stylistics—a subdiscipline that lies on the boundary between linguistics and literary studies —the shift in the paradigm towards subjectivity is evolutionary. However, under the influence of new methodological inspirations, the key category—style—has been redefined to include so-called style values, which determine the choice of the linguistic means of expression. These values include “knowledge about the world, a specific type of rationality, a system of values adopted by the subject, a specific image of the world, communicative intentions, and the attitude to the Other” (Witosz, 2008, pp. 125–126, transl. mine). As a consequence, “self-reflection and self-interpretation” realized “within the intersubjective space of values” (Witosz, 2008, p. 135, transl. mine) now play an important role in stylistic research. For this reason, determining the “narrative identity” of the sender is an important research objective (Nycz, 2013; Czermińska, 2005).

Autobiographism in Ryszard Kapuściński’s reportage

The fact that modern linguistics restores the subjective aspects of a message to their proper place opens up new, interdisciplinary research prospects for studies of both fiction and nonfiction texts. Establishing the journalist’s “narrative identity”, which is both socio-culturally and individually determined, is an intriguing, but not easy task. Investigations of this type certainly cannot be limited to one text, but require a broader knowledge of the author’s works and selected aspects of his or her biography. For this reason, the present study, which is devoted to the work (and life) of one of Poland’s most highly regarded reporters, Ryszard Kapuściński ^[4], is based on all the books he published in his writing career. A distinguishing feature of his writing is that his works of reportage, representative of the subgenre of literary reports, often contain strictly autobiographical passages of a certain kind, in which the author refers to events carefully selected ^[5] from his past – usually a past that is very distant in time and space from the events he is describing. These self-narratives play an important role in the textual creation of “self” not so much as an individual, but as a representative of this and no other nation and, more broadly, this and no other cultural circle. These passages, which reveal the specificity of the subject cognizing the reality, provide the reader with important context for interpreting the events presented in the piece of reportage and, importantly, they guide the interpretation along the path designated by the author.

To begin with, I would like to focus on self-narrative which is highly characteristic of Kapuściński’s writing and forms a basis for the author’s socio-economic self-identification.

“I gave my voice to the poor”: Socioeconomic self-identification This autobiographical thread, which appears most often in Kapuściński’s reports, is found in Travels with Herodotus, for example, where it was relayed as:

(I’m a bit crazy about shoes ^[6]). It started during the war, under German occupation. I remember that the winter of 1942 was approaching and I had no shoes. My old ones had fallen apart, and my mother had no money for a new pair. The shoes available to Poles cost 400 złoty, had tops of a thick denim coated with a black, water-repellent paste and soles made of a pale linden wood. Where could one get 400 złoty? (...) Cold autumn weather arrived, the cold nipped the soles of my feet, and because of the pain I had to stop selling (little bars of soap on the railway platform). I had 300 złoty, but Mr. Skupiewski generously threw in another hundred. I went with my mother to buy shoes. If one wrapped one’s leg with a piece of flannel and tied newspaper on top of that, one could wear them even in the worst frosts of winter. (Now, when I saw that in India millions do not have shoes, I had a feeling of fellowship, kinship with these people, and sometimes I was even overwhelmed by the mood we experience when we return to the childhood home.). (Kapuściński, 2007d, p. 34; Kapuściński, 2004, pp. 37–38)

The same autobiographical theme appears in Busz po polsku [The bush, Polish-style] (Kapuściński, 1962/1990, pp. 12–13) ^[7] and in a more allusive form in Autoportret reportera [ Reporter’s self-portrait]:

I like that world very much. The world of Africa and Latin America and Asia. I feel good there. (…) When I see them walking without shoes, I know what it means, because I also walked without shoes; they have nothing to put in the pot, and I remember that sometimes I also went hungry (…) When they invite me to the Ritz, I get lost there, I feel bad, I can’t quite fit into all of this. And there, in the Third World, I fit in right away on the next day. (Kapuściński, 2003/2008, p. 56; transl. mine)

The self-narrative about the author’s struggle to get proper shoes, once known to the reader, sheds new light on the strictly documentary passages in which this motif appears – a metonymy of life on a decent economic level. Let us take the example of Kapuściński’s reports from Iran on the brink of the Khomeini revolution (Shah of Shahs):

The cameramen overuse the long shot. As a result, they lose sight of details. And yet it is through details that everything can be shown. (...) That man marching in the demonstration, how full of hopes he is! He is marching because he is counting on something. He is marching because he believes he can get something done. He is sure that he will be better off. He is marching, thinking: So, if we win, nobody’s going to treat me like a dog anymore. He’s thinking of shoes. He’ll buy decent shoes for the whole family. (Kapuściński, 2006a, p. 126)

An analogous way of showing people’s efforts to improve their living situation can be found – in the significant context of an allegory of abundance taken from the New Testament – in a passage from The Shadow of the Sun, concerning the hopes of Africans at the turn of the 1950s and 1960s:

The first phase was a rapid decolonization, the gaining of independence. It was characterized by a universal optimism, enthusiasm, euphoria. People were convinced that freedom meant a better roof over their heads, a larger bowl of rice, a first pair of shoes. A miracle would take a place – the multiplying of loaves, fishes, and wine. (Kapuściński, 2002b, p. 104, emphasis mine)

This dream of having one’s first pair of shoes in life, attributed in the reportage pieces to the African characters, also features in an ironic statement about what the Ethiopians asked their emperor for (The Emperor):

Wherever His Majesty went, the people showed their uncontrolled, insatiable greed. They asked now for bread, now for shoes, now for cattle, now for funds to build a road. (Kapuściński, 2006b, p. 39, emphasis mine)

Interestingly, the same motif recurs in Kapuściński’s wartime reports, in which he portrays soldiers through the prism of the poverty they are experiencing. Concretized as the lack of appropriate shoes for the soldiers or their loved ones, poverty is an important motivating force that drives the characters’ actions:

This year, Farrusco shouted to me through the wind, I’ve had a son born to me. He’s in Lubango and I want to see him. (...) My father didn’t have any land and there were eight of us, the commander shouted through the wind. All without shoes. I don’t know if you’re aware that we have mountains and it’s cold up there. (Kapuściński, 2001, p. 75, emphasis mine)

He was a recruit, a dirt farmer; he had been called up a week ago and he didn’t know the army; the war meant nothing to him. He was trying to figure out how to survive it. (...) Señor, mire cuantos zapatos!’ (‘Look at all those shoes!’) He kept looking at the shoes of the other members of his company as they crawled forward. He blinked, weighted something in his mind and at last said hopelessly, Toda mi familia anda descalzada’ (‘My whole family goes barefoot’). (...) In a hushed voice he told me to wait where I was because he was going back to where his company had been fighting. He said that the living had certainly moved forward – their orders were to pursue the enemy to the very border – but the dead would remain on the battlefield and, for them, their boots were now superfluous. He would strip a few of the dead of their boots, hide them under a bush and mark the place. When the war was over, he would return and have enough boots for his whole family. He had already calculated that he could trade one pair of army boots for three pair of children’s shoes (...) The clouds have parted above his head and the heavens are raining manna – he will return to the village, dump a sackful of boots on the floor and watch his children jump for joy. (Kapuściński, 2007c, pp. 177–179)

The two passages above come from war reports: the first one from Africa and the second one from South America (Another Day of Life and Soccer War). In keeping with the factographic pact, readers assume that they are reading about true events – some of the many the correspondent experienced during the two wars. The reporter’s choice of these, rather than any other scenes, which in the narrative of the reportage take on a symbolic, universalizing meaning, is highly likely motivated by his autobiographical experiences overlapping with the conventional script (Mandler, 2004) of poverty entrenched in the Polish culture and language. In Polish tradition, a lack of shoes (jokingly described in phraseology as chodzić w samorodnych trzewikach ‘walking in boots one has been born in’; Krzyżanowski, 1969) or worn-out shoes (e.g. buty, które pić proszą ‘shoes that are asking to drink’, i.e. with the sole ripped at the front; Markiewicz & Romanowski, 1990, p. 250) are a sign of a poor financial situation, quite common before the Second World War and in the early post-war years ^[8]; hence, the proverb: Starych butów nie wyrzucaj, póki nowych nie masz ‘don’t throw away old shoes until you have new ones’ (Krzyżanowski, 1969) and the habit of carefully protecting shoes from wear and tear by using them only when it was absolutely necessary, which Kapuściński mentioned in his Lapidarium:

Shoes – a treasure everywhere, a symbol of standing and prestige. Also in Poland, people in villages went to Sunday mass barefoot and put on their shoes only when they were approaching the church. It was similar in Russia. And in the Balkans. (Kapuściński, 2002a, p. 116; transl. mine)

Words from the semantic field of ‘shoe’ ^[9] may operate in the texts as triggers activating the intersubjective narrative (common cultural background) and, for the initiated reader familiar with Kapuściński’s writing, the autobiographical one. The passages can therefore be read at a deeper or a shallower level, also by people with a cultural background different from that shared by the author and his native readers, who are familiar with the same intersubjective scripts. This is possible owing to the mundane nature of the motifs found in those passages: the overwhelming majority of contemporary people know what a shoe is, at least as an everyday item, although not everyone recognizes its symbolic dimension. Nevertheless, it remains true that the better one’s knowledge of the culture in which the author grew up, his works, and his biography, the more one can get out of his writing.

“Europe’s Third World”: Self-narratives about cultural identity

Identification with protagonists from so-called developing countries is one of the textual ways in which Kapuściński delineates “circles of community and strangeness” (Pajdzińska, 2001, pp. 38–39; Bartmiński, 2012, p. 144). These circles sometimes divide geographical and cultural space in most surprising ways. One such non-stereotypical division can be found in the following excerpt from Lapidarium:

Europe’s Third World. Let us treat the Third World as a cultural concept rather than a geographic or a racial one. (...) In many respects, for me, Poland is a country that I count in the great, diverse, colorful family of Third World countries. (Kapuściński, 1997, pp. 118–119; transl. mine)

Kapuściński coined the term Europe’s Third World to express the feeling and belief that there is a particular kinship between Poles and people from Africa, Asia or South America – as opposed to citizens of the West – which has two main dimensions: an economic and a historical one.

As for the economic dimension, the fact that Kapuściński came from a civilization of scarcity had very practical implications for his work as a foreign correspondent, as described in some self-referential passages in his books: having to cope with poor quality equipment (a Zorka camera, Kapuściński 2000b, p. 5) and to constantly save money: for telex messages (“it cost 50 cents a word”: Kapuściński, 1997, pp. 215–216), for accommodation (living in poor neighborhoods: Kapuściński, 2002b, p. 109) and for transport, which often boiled down to using the courtesy of the local people (Kapuściński, 2002b, p. 120) or colleagues from wealthy news agencies: “The correspondent from AP, AFP, or the BBC charters a plane or a ship, or purchases a car he will need for only several hours (...) I stood no chance on such a playing field” (Kapuściński, 2002b, p. 74). What, objectively, was an obstacle, Kapuściński usually pictured as an advantage, a chance to get closer to ordinary citizens of the countries he visited in order to see reality through other people’s eyes. The writer’s efforts to change the perspective from his own to someone else’s and, more broadly, from a Eurocentric point of view to a new one, conditioned by his interactions with representatives of other cultures, can be observed, in embryonic form, in his earliest work, and the product of these efforts can be described, following Magdalena Horodecka, as an “empathetic narrative”:

[I]n Busz po polsku we can already observe a phenomenon characteristic of the writer’s later works, his trademark – a kind of empathetic narrative. (...) This ability to empathize with the characters is so strong in Kapuściński’s work that the reporter often gets to know much more about them than they know about themselves. Thus, empathetic narrative becomes not only an important means of expression, but also one of the most important ways of getting to know the world, it is a type of language with which the author of Heban will carry out his writing mission – to be a translator of cultures (...). (Horodecka, 2010, p. 78, translation mine)

Empathy can be defined here as:

...a complex imaginative process involving both cognition and emotion, so when I empathize with another, I take up his or her psychological perspective and imaginatively experience, to some degree or other, what he or she experiences. [...] however, [...] as I do this, I maintain a clear sense of my own separate identity. (Coplan, 2004, p. 143)

In this view, “a critical feature of empathy” is “self-other differentiation” (Coplan, 2004, p. 141), so an important component of the concept of empathy is the category of the Other, which is variously defined in the humanities. In the works of Kapuściński, Otherness is the key word and it is understood in a very specific, individualized way:

[It] can be described in terms of an interaction between two traditions: postcolonial studies, revising the remnants of colonial mentality, and philosophy of dialogue (M. Buber, F. Ebner, G. Marcel, E. Levinas, J. Tischner), in which the Other can only be defined [...] in opposition to Me, as a unique entity, a human being, capable of recognizing him- or herself only in confrontation, in dialogue with another human being. (Wysocka, 2013, p. 272)

As regards historical kinship, Kapuściński identifies with “his Others” (Kapuściński, 2018b, 51-62) —the inhabitants of so-called Third World countries by making reference to the past of his own nation and, especially, his little homeland of Polesie and his hometown of Pinsk, which, in his eyes, was colonized by the Soviet Union after the Second World War (see the “Preface” to Imperium, Kapuściński 2019, p. IX). Clear elements of this self-narration can be found in the following early report from Africa:

Poland. / They did not know of any such country. / The elders looked at me uncertainly or suspiciously; some of them were interested. (...) Where are your colonies located? the Nana asked. (...) Kofi answered: They don’t have colonies, Nana. Not all white countries have colonies. Not all whites are colonialists. You have to understand that whites often colonized whites. / That sounded shocking. (Kapuściński 2018a, p. 109)

The writing reflects the shape of the author’s “mental map” (Chlebda, 2002) as confronted with the “maps” of his African interlocutors. In the first place, this confrontation brings to the fore the conception of the area occupied by “white countries”, which, in Kapuściński’s case, is a clear manifestation of the cognitive mechanism of looking from a “borrowed perspective”. At the same time, the Pole makes the Others’ aware of the implicit division of the area of “the whites” into two parts: eastern, with which he identifies himself, and western, from which he distances himself. The division between colonized and colonizing Europeans only seemingly follows the logic of the Iron Curtain: although in the early reportage quoted above (1962 book edition) this border is somewhat blurred, it becomes clear-cut in Imperium (1993) – the country to which the title refers is undoubtedly identified as a colonizer ^[10].

The very idea of dividing countries according to the criterion of race is shown here to be “borrowed” from the Others: the text implies that this is not the way the reporter sees the situation ^[11]. His unawareness of his own race, the “color blindness” characteristic of people living in a country (the Poland of that era) where it was really difficult to meet a person with a different skin color in everyday life, falls from his eyes like scales in Africa, where people are judged in these terms. An analogous approach can be found in a much later self-narrative about his first experiences of the African continent (The Shadow of the Sun):

First of all, the issue of skin color suddenly loomed large. (I am white ^[12]). In Poland, in Europe, I never thought about it. Here, in Africa, it was becoming the most important determinant of my identity, and for simple people, the sole one. The white man. White, therefore a colonialist, a pillager, an occupier. (Kapuściński, 2002b, p. 40)

In the light of both of the above narratives from Africa, which complement each other, the experience of being misunderstood and wrongly labeled by the Other is a factor that motivates the reporter to enter into dialogue with representatives of a foreign culture and establish relationships with them to break the harmful heterostereotypes. To reveal and verify stereotypes is an important goal of the “intentional journalism” program, to which Kapuściński devotes much attention in his late work.

“We painted banners”: Autobiographical sources of “intentional journalism”

According to Kapuściński, “intentional journalism” seeks the truth and fights for something; in other words, it aims not only to describe but also improve reality (To nie jest zawód dla cyników [This is no job for cynics]; Kapuściński 2013, p. 150). The reporter’s microscale personal experiences of the clash of cultures were an important source of inspiration for the idea of “intentional journalism”, but not the only one. The writer had shown his intention to fight for a better world long before his first trip abroad. In 1950, “in the middle of the Stalinist period” (Nowacka & Ziątek, 2008, p. 32), as an eighteen-year-old who had just passed his final high school exams, he started working in the newly established newspaper Sztandar Młodych [ Banner of the Young]. In Czarne gwiazdy [Black stars] (1961) he described it thus:

At the age of sixteen, I joined a youth organization. The banners of this organization bore the slogans of the brotherhood of races and the common fight against colonialism. I was an activist. I held rallies of solidarity with the people of Korea, Vietnam and Algeria, with all the peoples of the world who were oppressed by the boot of imperialism. I spent more than one night painting banners. (Kapuściński, 1963/2013, p. 149, transl. mine)

Shortly after starting work, he took leave from the editorial office to study history at the University of Warsaw, where “despite the domination of official Marxism (...) he listened to great historians” (Milewski, 2011, p. 382). At that time, the young journalist’s worldview began to be influenced by new ideas, different to those instilled by the “youth organization”. Later, his first trips to Africa in the turbulent decolonization period were associated with the “renaissance of faith in the meaningfulness of the fight for a new world” (Nowacka & Ziątek, 2008, p. 59; transl. mine), and then with “the confrontation (of) dreams with reality” (Nowacka & Ziątek, 2008, p. 89; transl. mine). Kapuściński increasingly came to criticize the ideas propagated in the public space and settled accounts with himself as a former follower of those ideas. In Czarne gwiazdy [Black stars] (1963) he portrayed African activists as if he were portraying his past “self”: with understanding, but not without critique ^[13].

Much of his youthful commitment – his attitude to emotional involvement in public affairs and thinking of it in global rather than in national terms – can be felt in his late works as well, but seasoned with anthropological and cultural reflection (repeated references to Bronisław Malinowski) and philosophical thought, in particular the concept of Otherness as perceived by Emmanuel Lévinas and the “philosophy of dialogue” of Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gabriel Marcel and Józef Tischner. In one of his lectures, Kapuściński referred to Tischner’s concept of the creative role of confrontation and dispute, which enriches the “self”: “Only in dialogue, in argument, in opposition, and also in aspiring towards a new community is awareness of my self created, as a self-contained being, separate from another. I know that I am, because I know another is”. (Kapuściński 2018b, pp. 67-68)

Conclusions

In the 21st century, the subjectivization of the journalistic message acquires a special dimension, as emphasized by Kapuściński in one of his last books, not so much a documentary account as a self-thematic volume, to which he gave the apt title To nie jest zawód dla cyników [This is no job for cynics]. In it, he draws attention to the personalized nature of bygone journalism, represented by such eminent figures as Winston Churchill (as Africa correspondent) or Ernest Hemingway: “It was an important profession, playing a vital intellectual and political role. It was practiced by a small group of respected people. A journalist was well-known, admired” (Kapuściński, 2013, p. 15, transl. mine).

The contemporary commercialization of the media and the dominance of the visual message had led, in Kapuściński’s opinion, to a radical change in the status of the journalist, who had become an anonymous “media worker”: “A consequence of this state of affairs is the loss of something terribly important to this profession: the feeling of pride in the personal imprint we leave on our work” (p. 16, transl. mine). In the light of Kapuściński’s self-referential remarks, subjectivization is inevitable if one wants to do journalism seriously, not as a randomly chosen occupation, mainly for pecuniary reasons, but as a life mission and project. When work permeates a reporter’s life, it is almost impossible, albeit highly undesirable, for their personal, biographical experiences not to enter into the narration of their reports: “We always bring them [early experiences of our homeland] with us to foreign countries, all over the world, to other people, and they are the key to our pride and our powerlessness” (Kapuściński, 1962/1990, p. 111, transl. mine).