A Reflection On Ryszard Kapuściński’s 'Shah of Shahs'
- Isabel Orlik
- 8 minutes ago
- 6 min read
Months after Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, in a habitat completely at odds with his home, a Polish journalist plays cards in his Tehran hotel room. He observes the disconcerting cycle of photographs and names of both missing people and ‘criminals’ on his hotel television screen whilst relying solely on the slightly cryptic translations from his fellow Iranian card players. “I expect suddenly to see my card players' faces on the screen, then my own, and hear the announcer reading our names.” (p. 12) And thus begins Ryszard Kapuściński’s tale of the Iranian revolution in Shah of Shahs.
I use the word ‘tale’ deliberately to refer to Kapuściński’s account of this piece of history: his voice crafts a (journalistically) unconventional visual journey through the historical context responsible, his own perception of politics and the human condition, and his experience in Iran during the 1970s. Published in 1982, Shah of Shahs is rebellious by nature. Kapuściński was working as a foreign correspondent for the Polish Press Agency for whom he was hired to report on the rising tensions, climax, and aftermath of the Iranian Revolution during the late 1970s. Shah of Shahs was born from his own reporting notes, experiences, and reflections during this time.
Kapuściński’s collection of ideas and memoirs together formulate three distinctive sections; ‘CARDS, FACES, FIELDS OF FLOWERS’, ‘DAGUERREOTYPES’, and ‘THE DEAD FLAME’. The fusion of poetic and visual language, notable initially in the section titles, makes Kapuściński’s text hard to define as it subverts traditional journalistic standards whilst still incorporating some of its traditional features. Many refer to this style as a personal analysis or a type of literary reportage, but a new genre was suggested by historian Adam Hochschild, ‘a kind of magic journalism’.
The three sections consist of Kapuściński’s thoughts and personal analysis regarding the Iranian Revolution. In the second section, ‘DAGUERREOTYPES’, Kapuściński offers notes, transcripts of cassette interviews, and images. A sample of his revealing commentary is when he introduces a seemingly simple and unextraordinary photograph of people standing at a bus stop on a Tehran street. But in true Kapuściński form, he shows how these moments can be far more informative and significant than we may realise. In this case, he uses the photograph to discuss the silently frightening presence of the Savak (the Iranian intelligence agency under the Shah’s regime, pre-1979 revolution) highlighting the forced repression and surveillance hidden to the naked eye:
“The man who gave me the photograph, whenever that was, asked me if I noticed anything strange in it… I thought it over and said no, I couldn’t spot anything. He replied that the picture had been taken under cover, from a window across the street…he said the guy (with the anonymous face of a lower-level bureaucrat)… was from Savak and he was always on duty at the bus stop, eavesdropping.” (pp. 43 - 44)
Kapuściński consistently proposes visual angles to his readers that offer a new lens in which to peer into history. Instead of continuously discussing the most notable events in the last Shah’s life, for instance, he talks of a childhood photograph of the Shah with his father:
“Whoever scrutinises this photo of father and son, taken in 1926, will understand a lot… The contrast between them is striking in every respect: The huge, powerful Shah-father stands sulkily, peremptorily, hands on his hips, and beside him the small pale boy, frail, nervous… he will try at all costs to resemble his despotic, ruthless father.” (pp. 21-22)
Kapuściński attempts to humanise the concept of the Shah and, in turn, shows how his position was always vulnerable despite his powerful title. This humanisation of those whom we deem so powerful that they seem otherworldly can be applied on a broader scale to some of those in power today, as we forget, often at our own peril, that they were once fragile children, not absolute or omnipotent creatures.
Shah of Shahs is, however, just as much a commentary on wider twentieth-century history and a reflection of corrupt power dynamics found in Western societies as it is an inside reportage of the Iranian Revolution. ‘DAGUERREOTYPES’, therefore, delves into this broader commentary. In the widely sold ‘Penguin Modern Classics’ edition of the book, the photographs of which Kapuściński is describing are not available but his descriptions are more than accommodating. In fact, their absence gives weight to his narrative tone. Kapuściński describes famous photographs such as Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill from the Tehran Conference in 1943, which he pairs with a brief summary of each of those nations’ interests in Iranian Oil and the trans-Iranian railroad. He comments on Britain's influence in Iran, “Empire giveth, Empire taketh away.” (p. 25) In the notes sections of this chapter, Kapuściński continues his daring commentary:
“Oil kindles extraordinary emotions and hopes, since oil is above all a great temptation…It is a filthy, foul-smelling liquid that squirts obligingly up into the air and falls back to earth as a rustling shower of money…Look at ministers from oil countries, how high they hold their heads, what a sense of power they have, they, the lords of energy, who decide whether we will be driving cars tomorrow or walking.” (pp. 34-35)
In presenting figures like Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin beside commentary on oil and empire, Kapuściński appears to pose an uncomfortable question: who truly authored the revolution’s conditions?
Kapuściński‘s audacious tone continues to pierce through an arguably sanitized history with his profound conclusion, ‘THE DEAD FLAME’. Kapuściński dissects the act of revolution and rebellion in societies and the fragile nature of dictatorships. He delves into the very core of why and when revolutions take place:
“They keep a detailed account of the wrongs, which at one particular moment are to be added up. The choice of that moment is the greatest riddle known to history. Why did it happen on that day, and not on another?” (p. 106)
Kapuściński fascinatingly argues that there is often a cyclical nature to the act of rebellion. He attempts to draw his own conclusions about the Iranian people’s revolution against the Shah regime and the new regime in which they replaced it with:
“A nation trampled by despotism, degraded, forced into the role of an object, seeks shelter, seeks a place where it can dig itself in, wall itself off, be itself…Some voices call this a regressive return to the Middle Ages. So it may be. But more often, this is the way that people vent their opposition. Since authority claims to represent progress and modernity, we will show that our values are different.” (p.113)
Though, it is Kapuściński’s final paragraph that leaves his readers with not only many of his gripping ideas but with more questions. Breaking away from his political and cultural analysis, he stages a visually symbolic moment. He describes an interaction with an Iranian carpet seller. The merchant tells Kapuściński how one can escape through the beauty of the patterns on Iranian carpets:
“Then you can continue imagining the fragrance of the garden, you can listen to the murmur of the stream and the song of the birds. And you feel whole, you feel eminent, you are near paradise, you are a poet.” (p.152)
To end the text on this note raises a deeper ambiguity. It questions whether Kapuściński is honouring the Iranian people’s hope, still defiantly alive, post-1979 Revolution and sustained through memory and culture. Or perhaps how survival itself, even by means of a glimmer of escapism, inside the political regimes that we exist within, is all that can be savoured whilst our nations change, collapse, and rise again.
Shah of Shahs is deceptively compact at just 152 pages. Every paragraph carries heavy historical, political, and cultural commentary. Kapuściński grapples with controversial yet timeless themes; imperialism, revolution, and authoritarian rule in its many forms. Despite being published in the 1980s, Shah of Shahs compels us to question our present systems and leaders. The book is not simply a collection of reports on the Iranian Revolution, it is a mirror. It is not a literary fossil constrained to the century that it depicts, it is a piece of journalism that keeps breathing, provoking urgent questions about the present. What does a dictatorship look like? Who creates a dictatorial system? When do we react? As a foreign stranger to this world, Kapuściński moves through Iran, and through history itself, offering a rare and reviving sense of transparency with a detached clarity to the outsider looking in. Kapuściński transcends reportage, instead creating a profound commentary on the nature of power and the human condition. As author and journalist Christopher de Bellaigue notes about Kapuściński in the introduction, “In that way, he is a journalist’s writer, an example of what so many of us would love to be - if only we had the nerve.”
Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs, trans. William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand (Penguin Modern Classics, London, 2006)
Edited by Roxy-Moon Dahal Hodson
