Indian Writing

Ryszard Kapuscinski died in Warsaw this week, aged 74.

Here’s an old interview of his, on writing about suffering. And this, from an interview by Bill Buford:

Why am I a writer? Why have I risked my life so many times, come so close to dying? Is it to report the weirdness? To earn my salary? Mine is not a vocation, it’s a mission. I wouldn’t subject myself to these dangers if I didn’t feel that there was something overwhelmingly important—about history, about ourselves—that I felt compelled to get across. This is more than journalism.

I am supposed to hold my little sister tightly by the hand. We can’t get lost, my mother warns. But I sense, even without her saying it, that the world has suddenly become dangerous, foreign and evil, and that one must be on one’s guard. I walk with my sister next to the horse-drawn wagon; it is a simple wooden cart lined with hay, and high up on the hay, on a linen sheet, lies my grandfather. He is paralysed and cannot move. When an air raid starts, the panicked crowd, until then patiently trudging along, dives for the shelter of the ditches, hides in the bushes, drops down in the potato fields. On the empty, deserted road only the wagon remains, and on it my grandfather. He sees the planes coming towards him, sees them abruptly descending, sees them taking aim at the abandoned wagon, sees the fire of the on-board guns, hears the roar of the machines over his head. When the planes vanish, we return to the wagon and mother wipes my grandfather’s perspiring face. Sometimes there are air raids several times a day. After each one, sweat trickles down my grandfather’s exhausted face.

We find ourselves in an increasingly bleak landscape. There is smoke along the distant horizon, we pass empty settlements, lonely, burned-out houses. We pass battlefields strewn with abandoned implements of war, bombed out railway stations, overturned cars. It smells of gunpowder, of burnt things, of rotting meat. We encounter dead horses everywhere. The horse—a large, defenceless animal—doesn’t know how to hide; during a bombardment it stands motionless, awaiting death. There are dead horses in the roads, in ditches, in the fields a bit further out. They lie there with their legs up in the air, as if shaking their hooves at the world. I don’t see dead people anywhere; they are quickly buried. Only the horses—black, bay, piebald, chestnut—lie where they stood, as if this were not a human war but a war of horses; as if it were they who had waged among themselves a battle to the death and were its only victims…

Should we regard Kapuściński’s end product as journalism? Should we give Kapuściński a bye but castigate Stephen Glass, who defrauded the New Republic and other publications by doing a similar thing on a grosser scale? Do we cut Kapuściński slack because he was better at observing, imagining, and writing than Glass, and had the good sense to write from exotic places? Exactly how is Kapuściński different from James Frey in practice if not in execution?

After all, unlike newspaper stories, literary journalism seeks to make or ‘conjure up’ a broader reality—to bring us into a world. This isn’t news of the who-what-when-how-why variety, but news of the kind that V.S. Naipaul said only the novel can deliver—news that resonates with the potency of its presentation. Strictly segregating fact from fiction hobbles literary journalists unnecessarily.