Polish Your Tributes While Taking The Sheen Off Others
Mar 23rd, 2007 by Donagh
So many things have passed me by this week.
Firstly, within the Irish blog-o-sphere there’s the impressive news that Twenty Major has secured a two book deal with Hodder Headline Ireland. It’s only after you hear the news that it makes perfect sense and you can’t help telling yourself that it was only a matter of time. The little I know about book publishing would indicate that Irish publishers are hungry for new writers with any sort of an edge or profile to tap into that 20-35 urban and (considering how many of them still live with their parents) suburban hip demographic. Those airport bookshop shelves and the new areas in Tescos dedicated to cut-price ‘chart’ CDs and garishly coloured tomes won’t fill themselves, you know.
Still, it’s a great achievement, so well done to the labia-fixated nonce.
Secondly is the response of Brian Boyd to Kevin Breathnach’s analysis of his Irish Times obit of that boul’ postmodernist, Jean Baudrillard.
Kevin has Boyd’s card marked and no mistake.
After pointing out two distinct, and I’d say irrefutable similarities, between Boyd’s and the Patricia Cohen’s New York Times obit, Kevin says:
“When I worked, briefly, with a local newspaper as part of a work-experience programme, I was charged with editing press releases - changing the words around, but always maintain the message of the respective company, institute or political party. It was hackery, sure. But then, what’s a 16 year old to do? The Irish Times is not the North County Leader; the New York Times is not a press release; Baudrillard is not a new local furniture company; and Brian Boyd certainly isn’t 16 years old. Not that his article suggests otherwise; its forgery is so casual, the cover-up so lazy: it’s exactly like those hackneyed book reviews (of unread books) we did as 16 year olds for English, with which the teacher was at first impressed, later suspicious, and soon outraged, and eventually disappointed.â€
Boyd’s response was to address each charge in turn, pointing out that if both obits mentioned Baudrillard’s influence on the Matrix at the same point in both articles, 58% of the way down, that this was a coincidence and didn’t take into account the difference in length of the two articles. ‘Patricia Cohen’s obit is 740 words long, mine [Boyd’s] is 1,250’.
On the point that both obits end using the same quote Boyd says:
“We did both end our articles with the same quote. For my part, I took one of Baudrillard’s most famous quotes which dealt directly with what he considered his own contribution to be. Appropriate for the end of an obit/commentary piece I thought.â€
Indeed. But while I haven’t examined every Baudrillard newpaper obituary even a cursory exam of Stephen Poole’s obit in the Guardian indicates by its marked difference to both the New York Times article and Boyd’s work that there is an awful lot that could have been said differently.
Boyd forwarded the email he’d originally sent to Kevin on to Bloggarah after they mentioned the spat and they put it up on their site yesterday. He might have come across the original post when it was mentioned in the Sunday Tribune.
Cian at Blurred Key’s provides an excellent article with all the details.
Finally, and continuing on the theme of obits and the legacy of celebrity writers, I only found out today via Elegant Variation that Polish travel writer extraordinaire Ryszard Kapuscinski has died at the age of 74. The NYT’s obit provides a handy phonetic pronunciation of his last name - ka-poos-CHIN-ski – if you’re having trouble conveying this important information to your intellectual peers.
The Obit is dated 24th of January 2007, so I’m late once again. Binyavanga Wainaina, writing in the online South African newspaper Mail & Guardian complains that profiles of Kapuscinski since his death are nothing short of unthinking hagiographies. Wainaina says that the Polish writer, best known for his books on Africa The Shadow of the Sun and The Soccer War, is a racist.
Once he managed to gatecrash a party held for Kapuscinski in the New York apartment of Salman Rushdie’s friend, Diane von Furstenberg. The ‘mournful-looking Eastern European writer’ didn’t appear so the charges couldn’t be made to him personally, unfortunately. However, Wainaina did manage to get a short audience with Salman Rushdie.
“I stood in front of The Rushdie, somewhat nervously. Then, I asked him why he had invited the racist writer Kapuscinski to come to the PEN conference.
“Not Ryszard? Oh, Ryszard is not racist! He is a beeeewutiful soul!â€
I quoted to him some Kapuscinski lines. Rushdie looked at me compassionately, and said: “Those must have come from his older works.†I was about to refute this, when he turned to his wife and forgot about me. I headed for the bar to find a martini.â€
Wainaina also quotes John Ryle’s review of The Shadow of the Sun, in the Times Literary Supplement:
“His writing about Africa is a variety of latter-day literary colonialism, a kind of gonzo orientalism … conducted in the name of humane concern, that sacrifices truth and accuracy, and homogenises and misrepresents Africans even as it aspires to speak for them.â€
What do I know? I really enjoyed the book, although there were a good few episodes in it when the adventurism of the tenacious journalists had the hyperbolic speed and excess of Len Deighton (not that I’ve read Len, but it’s the sort of stuff I’d imagine he’d write – pheww, credibility intact).
But Wainaina quotes some of Kapuscinski’s more telling lines:
• “Let us remember that fear of revenge is deeply rooted in the African mentality.â€
• “In Africa, drivers avoid travelling at night — darkness unnerves them, they may flatly refuse to drive after sunset.â€
• “Africans eat only once a day, in the evening.â€
• “In Africa, the notion of abstract evil — evil in and of itself — does not exist.â€
• “Africans believe that a mysterious energy circulates through the world.â€
• “… in Africa, a cousin on your mother’s side is more important than a husband.â€
It was Kapuscinski, more than any other single writer, who inspired me to write the satirical essay “How to Write about Africaâ€.
I’ve no idea if the Irish Times did an obit for Kapuscinski, so I can’t tell if there are any similarities with the New York Times one.
I think Salman Rushdie is a bit of an arse. Good writer, but an arse.
I’ve never read anything by Kapuscinski, but I guess I’d better add him to the list of ‘racist authors I would like to read if I had the time’.
I think you’re right about Rushdie. Who said that a good writer should be a good person? Classic examples are Céline, who was a total facist, and Hamsun.
But there’s loads of others. I remember this point, how great art is not necessarily produced by great people, being made by Woody Allen on a Radio 4 interview around the time he dumped Mia Farrow and made off with her adopted daughter from the Previn marriage and was enjoying his new image as the world’s worst dirty old man. Woody cited Dostoevsky’s gambling as a personal downfall and then went on to make Sweet Low Down, where Sean Penn plays a gifted guitarist who is a total arse in his personal life.
Of course, Woody is a huge admirer of Ingmar Bergman, who has specialised in portraying great but world weary artists, who are shits to women, unbearably egotistical and all round arses, usually within the suffocating confines of a floundering middle class marriage.
I was surprised at the suggestion that Kapuscinski was a racist. But then, any European writer writing about Africa is going to be, I suppose. I guess I should stick to Frantz Fanon.
I recently invested in a copy of Rushdie’s collected non-fiction, and while you’re probably aware of my fondness for the Hitchens-Amis-Rushdie axis of quasi-Islamaphobia, it’s really quite annoying to have Rushdie remind the reader - in just about every essay - that, you know, he’s been through some shit.
Still, good writer, nice beard and devilish eyebrows.
I still can’t forgive Rushdie for appearing on stage at a U2 concert - this happened around about the time I was reading Midnight’s Children and I had real problems reconciling the two. Sure, he has gone through some shit, as you say, but that sort of crapulance cheapens everyone.
There is a difference between the writer and the political and media icon he’s working so hard on at the moment. The former is glorious while the latter is dross.
And those hooded eyes, suggesting that he’s permanantly relaxed. Its a medical condition of course and its funny that they hide the panic in his eyes as each day his eye slit gets small…until he went for the operation of course.
Unlike most of those who post around here, I have my youth. You must not write in such an assuming tone, like a teacher who prefixes every obscure historical fact with “of course…”. It does nothing but demoralise us.
I knew nothing about Rushdie’s malady yesterday. Now I know that, because of the surgery, Rushdie can’t actually close his eyes.
As I said, I am oh so youthful, and my body works just nimbly. Blink, blink, blink - so easy!
Youth, but not ignorance. Sorry for my assuming ‘of course’. I was fearful that I would come across of being the first one to tell the world about it. If I knew about it I presumed it was common knowledge. The sort of thing you find out in the local newsagent come post office from the two ol’ dears queuing for their pension. ‘I believe Salman Rushdie had to have an operation to stop his eyes from permantly closing’. ‘Really, Nelly, is that so…’
“But then, any European writer writing about Africa is going to be, I suppose.”
Good Lord. Deer in headlights? General numbness? Refusal to see? Or examine? Easy Platitides? Frustrated correctednesses? File all such under “General Race issues: avoid and make the right noises”?
Please do not try to box my actual opinions of Kapuscinki’s work. It is not so much that Kapuscinski’s stuff was racist or not, it is more that on the subject of Africans, it was stupid (characterized by or proceeding from mental dullness; foolish; senseless: a stupid question.)
Maybe because he is read in some places, as “edgy” and “different” - maybe “cult” and “edgy” has become a whole landscape of its own that requires few sharp questions. And certainly my piece was more about how and why Kapu’s stuff managed to attract a cult following when his theories on the general State of Africanness could not get past a Social Darwinism class in a 19th century Anglo-Indian drawing room. What was he reading? What was he thinking? Was he ‘alternative’ because he was Polish (not Imperium) and a subaltern foreign-correspondenty type, khaki jacket without guilt? I don’t know.
What were his readers and reviewers seeing? That is the mystery to me. Maybe they had simply abandoned their common sense tools for a generalised and “safe” stupidity (in a state of stupor; stupefied: stupid from fatigue) because, “any European writer writing about Africa is going to be, I suppose.”
This terrain is so barbed and defended and defensive, I guess it ends up being a waste of time.
I certainly think Naipaul is racist, and love much of what he has written. He may not like black africans, but he is never stupid. I think, next time I want to write a piece like this, I will call myself John Flaxen - if only to avoid the blinding and blinded race-stupor of it all.
First of all, Binyavanga, thanks for commenting. Indeed, I’m honoured that you should do so. I think you’re the only commenter so far who has a Wikipedia entry.
You are completely right that I didn’t do any justice to your article on Kapuscinki. For example, you end it with the point that his legacy has “more to do with lingering superstitions about the continent held by editors and foreign correspondent types, who built him up, entranced by his Polish-flavoured, left-leaning, Rider Haggard world of strange, voiceless, dark peoples doing strange, voiceless, dark thingsâ€.
You were also right to pick up on my glib comment that any European writer writing about Africa is going to be racist – which suggests that its impossible for non-Africans to write accurately about the realities of Africa and its people without reverting to ad hominem Eurocentric stereotypes, which you lampoon so effectively in your essay “ “How to Write About Africaâ€. And I understand your point that your problem with Kapuscinki is not that he is racist but his point of view is stupid.
I wasn’t aware of Kapuscinki’s status before I read one of his books, Shadows of the Sun, by chance and because I enjoyed it I only discovered his legendary status after. However, the opportunity for me to get hoodwinked by the faux exotica of “Africa†was wide open as I have no real knowledge about the real Africa and in a sense, that is one reason why I picked up his book – to find out more. Another reason is because I was completely sucked in by the first page, which provided such a compelling description of a place that I was completely unfamiliar that I simply had to read on (I’ll return to this by the way).
So, you are completely right, I realize now, that the appeal of Kapuscinki is in part based on notions of “Africa†that are already vaguely in place among his readership – a kind of unthink positive prejudice. However, there are many (lets call them Western) writers who have written about Africa. What is it that has made Kapuscinki top of the pile in the minds of those paying tribute? For my part I presumed it was based on his willingness to spend so much time in Africa, to live in apartments in the towns and cities rather than hotels and to become part of the fabric of everyday life – that he loved Africa (I now realize that his is Cliché no 4 in your essay: “establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her.â€).
I accepted his books as reportage, describing the myriad politics and culture as he saw it. I missed the significance of the epigrams such as “Africans believe that a mysterious energy circulates through the world†that suggest that he considered himself as a thinker about Africa, an anthropologist observing and synthesizing information about a wide and complex continent containing, as you say in your essay, fifty-four countries and 900 million people, and reducing it all into a readable 5000 word article for the New Yorker magazine.
I had no idea about the issue over accuracy that is work has generated, apart from the quote by Ryle that you provide in your M&G article. His response to the criticism is interesting:
“You know, sometimes the critical response to my books is amusing. There are so many complaints: Kapuscinski never mentions dates, Kapuscinski never gives us the name of the minister, he has forgotten the order of events. All that, of course, is exactly what I avoid. If those are the questions you want answered, you can visit your local library, where you will find everything you need: the newspapers of the time, the reference books, a dictionary.â€
Favourable commentators have said that he is writing metaphorically but to do so – using a kind of loose poetry – leads you back to using old metaphorical tropes. I plan to write more about this.
Thanks again for your comment Binyavanga.