Books
Review 10: The Soccer War: Ryszard Kapuscinski
03/07/07 10:22 Filed in: Books
--Remarking that the most pivotal writers in several stages of my life have been K writers -- Kipling as a child, Kazantzakis in university, and now it seems, Kerouac and Kapuscinski.
--Starting with the current assault on reporting and investigative journalism as newspapers become merely parts of media empires trying to make a buck.
--Pointing out weird synchronicity - as I sat drinking tea in Kyoto, learning about Kapuscinski and his life for the first time, he lay dying in Poland, his Africa battered body to succumb that day.
Kipling, Kazantzakis, Kerouac (to an extent) and Kapuscinski all share something other than a letter - each writer is an explorer and evokes a sense of wonder for the places they trace. Kipling, my favourite childhood writer, was an Englishman born in Bombay, and most of his life’s work deal with the strange and fantastic, the jungle and Indian culture (the Jungle Book, Just So Stories, and Kim being the most famous).
Kazantzakis, my favourite writer period, wrote the ur-voyage poem - over the course of 12 years he penned a sequel to The Odyssey that is twice the length of The Iliad and the Odyssey combined, all in verse. The poem (which I am still reading, but nearly finished) follows Odysseus’s journey to the ends of the world and the philosophical limit of human being, transcending vice and virtue, God and hope.
Kerouac is another famous traveller - both geographically and psychedelically. Although I have only read On the Road, I enjoyed his pursuit of something elusive across the American landscape and the new cultural ground the beats were breaking.
And then there is Kapuscinski. Investigative journalism ain’t what it used to be, as large newspapers shed subscriptions left and right while the successor to print media, so-called citizen journalism on the net, often merely amounts to armchair commentary on what has been read in the Associated Press. But Kapuscinski! In the 1960s and early 1970s he was the only foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency under communism. So, if Poland wanted it’s own reporting, rather than buying it from another country, Kapuscinski was the man. You may see on the news — “and now let’s turn to our London correspondent”. Kapuscinski covered Africa. All of it. Not only that, but his book, The Soccer War, is a refreshing take on journalism: while Western journalism strives for objectivity, apparently the tone of Eastern Europe is more personal and more poetic license is permitted. Kapuscinski has been criticized for taking poetic license but that same license to bend facts creates a better sense of narrative and moreover, allows poetry to enter into the otherwise dry reportage of conflict in the faceless continent of Africa.
After reading The Soccer War, I couldn’t believe that the bleachblond bimbos and this crazy Pole are in the same field of work. The various chapters cover a handful of the 25 different coups, wars or revolutions that he was present for. He shows you the bars of Leopoldville in Congo where Lumumba first spoke, the foreigners’ hotel stormed by gangs of furious men after Lumumba’s assassination, the airplane from the UN whisking them into the apparent safety of Burundi, the jail cell and deadline to execution he faced when he arrived there. Kapuscinski crosses the road that no white man could cross, beaten, robbed, doused in benzene and nearly immolated. He crawls along the uncertain border between Honduras and El Salvador with a soldier that only wants to take boots off of corpses back to his family.
All of his episodes stun the reader at both the barbarity of man and the insanity of the author, driven to go where the action is and avoid life behind a desk at all costs. Most importantly, they helped put a face and character to the vastly diverse nations of Africa, and did so far better than the latest report on Sudan.
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