The Shadow of the Sun

"Once you discover Kapuściński, it’s a love affair for life. He’s such a beautiful writer. What I take from Kapuściński is that he made a genuinely sincere attempt at discovering the truth of a place, or of a subject matter, or of a person. With lots of authors or journalists who go on these real life adventures, you get a sense that they’ve got a strong idea of what they want to get and the ‘journey’ is simply them going out and getting it. It’s not a sincere attempt at finding the truth, even with some of the very big name nonfiction writers. Whereas because Kapuściński is a writer with a genuine interest in finding out the truth, he often upends your preconceptions, which I think is what the greats often do. “Once you discover Kapuściński, it’s a love affair for life” I’ve always tried very hard to do this in my work, up to and including going on holiday with neo-Nazis, getting to know them in an empathetic way, trying to understand the reasons behind their Holocaust denial. I think the temptation of being any kind of storyteller, but especially a storyteller who deals in nonfiction, is to stick with a straightforward, crowd pleasing narrative of heroes and villains. If you write that narrative, it works. Telling people what they want to hear is a good way of getting famous and selling tens of thousands of books. It’s much harder to not write that book, in my view. You risk not doing so well in your career, and you risk upsetting people – which is not something to be done lightly these days, when it can often feel as if everyone is viewing the world through a dangerous and simplistic heroes-and-villains mindset. The notion that we should try and understand people like neo-Nazis is sometimes seen as suspect. I find this position reductive, thuggish and poisonous. What is writing for, if not to try to understand the human condition a little better? How will we solve anything, in the world of people, if all we can do is point, sneer and ostracise? “How will we solve anything, in the world of people, if all we can do is point, sneer and ostracise?” I think my favourite moment in The Shadow of the Sun is when Kapuściński writes about how he keeps getting robbed in Lagos. Every time he leaves his house, he comes back to find it’s been ransacked. Obviously, he’s furious about this. Finally, he makes friends with an influential figure from the slum he’s living in. He sits down with him and says, ‘What am I going to do? I’m furious, they keep robbing from me.’ The other man says, ‘No, no, you should be happy that you’re being robbed from. At the moment, you’re useful to the people around you. You should see it as a form of acceptance. You’re being a valuable member of this community. When you stop being robbed – that’s when you should be scared.’ I’ve worked in Africa, and I’ve had droplets of what Kapuściński experienced. And some of the things that he says have a real ring of truth to them. He said once that when you’re in a place that has the potential to kick off, it’s when things go silent – those are the dangerous moments. It’s not when there are bombs and bullets, and shouting, and running around. It’s observations like that I find unforgettable. I don’t think so. I suppose it takes a certain amount of courage. But not necessarily. Anna Funder, the author of Stasiland , didn’t risk her life and yet she produced an extraordinary, beautiful, and important piece of work in Stasiland . So I don’t think you need to necessarily go out and risk everything. I suppose you’ve got to have a level of curiosity about the world that overwhelms any fears you might have. I think ‘extraordinary individual’ is probably wrong. But I think you’ve got to have a kind of naïve courage."