Just Finished Reading: The Other by Ryszard Kapuscinski (FP: 2006)

Since Man’s earliest existence we have encountered ‘the other’. People not of our tribe, not of our family, not like us. Since our earliest days there has been three responses to the encounter – fight, flight or mutual discovery, trade and with luck, time and effort, co-operation, cultural exchange, growth, friendship. Each and every encounter with strangers, foreigners, others is an echo of these early meetings between disparate tribes. Each is an opportunity to learn or an excuse for a fight. As the world grows smaller in time and more people travel further and more often such encounters proliferate beyond counting. Such a thing is a great opportunity to outgrow our fears in otherness as well as a great danger that we will retreat from the strange, hide behind our walls and reject the chance to grow in unison with people both like and unlike ourselves. Encounters with the other, the author maintains, holds up a cultural mirror so that we can see who we are by seeing how others see us. Only in such meetings can we become rounded individuals as we bump into the barriers that exist between us and between our myriad cultures. It is in the discovery of difference that we find out who we are, what we believe and how we can grow. This is the value of the other and the reason why we should meet them with open arms and not with closed minds.

The author began travelling the world from his native Poland during the Soviet era. Reporting back from countries and cultures steeped in poverty or exploitation, under tyrannies or occupations his travelogues feed into the Soviet idea of Capitalist failures. But the author saw much more than his propaganda value to his Communist masters. He saw the strength of the human spirit under adversity, he saw humour across the cultural divide, he saw the wonder and curiosity in the eyes of a plains tribesman who had never seen a white man before never mind a Pole, he saw the need to communicate despite the inevitable language barriers and he saw, above all, the value of humanities shared experience on this wonderful world. Otherness is everywhere. Never more so than in the present age. We can now live in a city where hundreds of languages are spoken around us. We can meet and form friendships with people who, in an earlier age, we would never have mixed with in a hundred lifetimes. We live in an ‘other’ age and we need more than ever to live well in such a challenging environment. Dealings with others is far from easy. Otherness by its very nature is frightening. Difference is frightening but it is also an opportunity encapsulated in the possibility of dialogue. This is, the author maintains, the driving force behind his and others wandering across the world. While most stay at home rarely travelling more than a few tens of miles away from the place of their births there are those, like the author himself, who travel off the beaten track in order to meet the other face to face and, importantly, bring the fruits of that meeting back to share with those unable or unwilling to make the journey themselves. A must read and a quick read (at a mere 92 pages) for those with itchy feet. 

Translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones