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New Books

By John Leonard

When he wasn’t covering Third World coups, civil wars, and revolutions as a nomadic correspondent for the Polish Press Agency, the late Ryszard Kapuściński was publishing such wonderful books as The Emperor, about Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie, and Shah of Shahs, still the best account of the Islamic revolution in Iran. Not even a shortening of his leash by the Warsaw authorities after he supported Solidarity in 1981 kept him from the Congo and Honduras, Mexico and Mozambique. Clearly, like his hero Herodotus, Kapuściński was happiest on the road, with the scorpions, hyenas, and hallucinations. But it seems to me that he also harbored a secret, domestic agenda—that his soccer wars and harvest festivals, his autocrats and ancient mariners, his borders and bloody baroque, add up to a kind of metafiction, speaking in code about Communist Poland. In the way that such postmodernists as Borges, Calvino, and Stanisl-aw Lem wrote reviews of imaginary books to make subversive points, so Kapuściński left town to write about his squalid homeland, as if he were as alien and disinterested as an anthropologist from Mars.

THE OTHER (Verso, $16.95), a series of lectures that were delivered, for the most part, in the five years before his death in 2007, doesn’t exactly confirm my suspicion, or invalidate it either. Beginning with a literature of discovery that includes the Upanishads, the I Ching, Homer, Hesiod, Gilgamesh, the Old Testament, the Koran, and Popol Vuh, he swiftly narrows his focus to the confrontation of the arrogant white European with the stigmatized African, Asian, and Latin American Other (“a looking glass in which I see myself and in which I am observed”). See this Stranger through the eyes of Alexander the Great, or the Crusades, or the Spanish Conquest, or the slave trade, from the genocidal point of view of the imperialist, the exotic-story point of view of the journalist, the ethical angle of such priestly theologians as Solidarity’s Krakow chaplain, Józef Tischner, the phenomenological perspective of such philosophers as the Lithuanian Emmanuel Levinas, and the relativistic open-mindedness of such anthropologists as Bronisl-aw Malinowski (“to judge something, you have to be there”).

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SEE ALSO: Everett, Daniel Leonard; Shulman, David Dean; Don't sleep, there are snakes: life and language in the Amazonian jungle (Book); Kapuscinski, Ryszard; Khemir, Sabiha; Spring, heat, rains: a South Indian diary (Book); The blue manuscript (Book); The other (Book)

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