Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Your first choice is Shah of Shahs, by Ryszard Kapuściński. It’s a great story, but is it primarily a book about human rights?
It’s not directly a book about human rights. It’s a political analysis and a portrait of the Islamic revolution in Iran. But, like all of Kapuściński’s works, it makes the connections between the small things and the big things that produce social and political change. It has one fabulous phrase, which I find myself quoting again and again. ‘The zig-zag to the precipice, the moment of the lack of fear, the moment when there is lack of fear, when everything changes. The man has stopped being afraid, and this is precisely the start of the revolution.’ It’s offered as a description of particular moment in the town of Qom. But it goes to the heart of the possibilities of civil society. People think, ‘We can achieve nothing’. But if everyone comes together, they can change a country, and that change can spill over internationally.
Kapuściński’s writing has a poetry to it that I adore. He was a journalist, working for the Polish state news agency, writing a lot of routine stories. Books were his release, a chance to get at the inner truth of what was happening. Some have accused him of imagining too much, but I remain loyal. Fundamentally, he doesn’t distort in the big picture. He lets things speak. It’s like a playwright’s writing, but it’s not fiction. He stands the test of time.
Read full interview
Steve Crawshaw was as a journalist with The Independent, before moving to Human Rights Watch in 2002. He joined Amnesty International in 2010 as director of international advocacy. Last year he and his co-author John Jackson published Small Acts of Resistance: How Courage, Tenacity, and a Bit of Ingenuity Can Change the World , www.smallactsofresistance.com, a collection of inspiring short stories about fighting injustice, written jointly with John Jackson, and with a preface by Václav Havel.
Your first book, Shah of Shahs by Ryszard Kapuscinski, is about the overthrow of the last Shah of Iran.
Kapuscinski is widely regarded as the greatest travel writer of the 20th century. Polish by birth, he witnessed some 40 revolutions and wars during his time as a journalist. He had already built a long and illustrious career when he found his way to Iran on the eve of the 1979 revolution. At that moment it was still a populist revolution rather than an Islamic one – the contours of the revolution were as yet undefined. So it is an interesting moment for him to have found himself on the streets of Tehran.
Like so many of his books, Shah of Shahs completely defies journalistic standards and generic classifications. Rather, it presents an impressionistic portrait of the country at those critical moments before the revolution gelled. With poetic virtuosity, Kapuscinski captures the confusion, the despair and also the flashes of hope that gripped Iran at that moment.
Accounts by so-called outsiders can, I think, sometimes be particularly rich and revealing. Kapuscinski had seen chaos in endless guises, and he offered up uncanny insights into the machinations of tyranny – and not just in the Iranian context. In Shah of Shahs, as in his many other books, he writes of how tyranny seeps into the psyche of a people. And yet there is a purposeful distance he cultivates about his subject. The Iranian characters in the book are held almost at a remove. I believe that that remove signals a concession to the limits of what he can know from his vantage point as an outsider looking in on the revolution.
Read full interview
Jasmin Darznik was born in Tehran and studied at Princeton University. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and The San Francisco Chronicle. She is a professor of English and creative writing at Washington and Lee University, and has also taught Iranian literature at the University of Virginia. She has won honours from Zoetrope: All-Story, The Iowa Review, and The San Francisco Foundation. Her first book, The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother's Hidden Life, was a New York Times bestseller
