OPINIÓN

Can A Poet Be More Accurate Than A Journalist?

The author is a Romanian poet, essayist and novelist, living in the United States since 1965. He learned journalism on the road, working for some of the major US radio and television networks. As a result of his journalistic endeavours, he published two books: “Aye, Cuba: A Socio-Erotic Journey” and “The Hole in The Flag: an Exile’s Story of Return & Revolution.” He is currently working on a book aout Dadaism and its founder, the Romanian Tristan Tzara. Codrescu is founder and editor of the online journal Exquisite Corpse y writes a column for Gambit Weekly. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University.

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I.- Romania

I’m a poet, or worse, a commentator/essayist, but I have, on occasion, had to perform what people mistook for journalism, so I noticed a few things. The first time was when NPR and ABC’s Nightline thought that it would be a good idea to send me to Romania at the end of December 1989 to witness the collapse of the communist dictatorship in my native country. There were a lot of reporters in Bucharest on December 28, 1989, the whole world’s press corps, it seemed, and we all stayed at the Intercontinental Hotel, famous during the Ceausescu era, for having bugged rooms and even bugged ashtrays in the bar. NPR and ABC had real reporters there, of course, not just a poet going home after more than a quarter century in exile, so I thought that this was perfectly understood. My NPR producer, Michael Sullivan, didn’t really much care for the distinction, though. He needed everybody to cover stories, and when I told him that my intention for the next day, December 29, was to walk without a plan around the city in order to smell things, he gave that idea about a half a second’s thought.
        “SMELL THINGS? I need somebody who speaks this slavic dialect, or whatever the hell it is, to be with Robert at the new Prime Minister’s office, or whatever the hell he is, to have a conversation and a translator!”

Now, I didn’t even know where to start objecting. In the first place, the guy who had been installed by the coup that was still passing for a “revolution” in those days, was Petre Roman, who spoke English or so he said, and in the second place, I had been dreaming so long of returning to the country I’d left in 1965 at age 19, my FIRST priority was to make contact with it at an animal level. Bucharest, like all cities, has its own unique smell, a mixture of historical funk that I not only remembered, but I was VITALLY interested in because the decades when I’d been absent had surely added their layers of funk.

For the same reason, I couldn’t wait to return to my hometown of Sibiu to do some serious sniffing. On the Sundays of the early 1960s  Sibiu smelled like strudel because all the German hausfraus cooked it. The 14th century buildings in the town square smelled of old brick, rot, burning witches, the fresh ink of the literary newspapers I bought eagerly every Wendesday at the corner kiosk, rain on cobblestones, and fresh mountain air and snow in the winter. I knew that most ethnic Germans like most Jews had emigrated to the West, so what did Sibiu smell like now? Like Marcel Proust, I needed my madeleine to open up the past to figure out what life here had been like without me. I knew plnty of facts and figures, of course, but until I put my nose to work, it was all so much dry information.

It wasn’t an argument to be made during a “revolution,” even one between quotes. Bullets were still flying, though no one was sure who fired them or who they were amed at. We went to the palace comandeered by the “revolutionaries.” We interviewed Roman, who was slick as a seal, and, on the way out, poked our heads into the office of General Stanculescu, who asked us in. Now, this was interesting. The General wasn’t slick and it was clear from his first utterance that the “revolution” had been a coup, and that he was interested, more than anything, in setting the record straight about the role of the military in the shootings of unarmed civilians in a number of Romanian cities. His concern was with the trials sure to come, and he wanted to let the world know that the army had nothing to do with the shootings, that it was all the fault of specially trained Securitate forces loyal to Ceausescu. This turned out to be a big lie, but the General wasn’t tried and the army wasn’t held accountable. The General DID get immensely rich when Iliescu’s first post-Ceausescu government started dividing the corpse of the state among his loyalists.

When we left Stanculescu’s office, Michael said: “He’s the real honcho! Roman is just a figurehead!”
        “How did you know?”
        “I counted his telephones. He had 27. Roman had only three.”

Journalist. I had been paying such close attention to the General’s syntax and twitches, I could have been a lie detector. But I hadn’t counted the phones. OK. That was Sullivan one, Proust zero.

Next day, we went to see a family that was living in one of the apartment buildings built shabbily a few years back. The walls were peeling, there wasn’t any hot water, and there were about 12 people living in two bedrooms. They did their expected complaining in the form that became very popular with journalists in those days, which was to blame everything bad that ever happened to them on the Ceausescu couple personally. When the lament was over and we were packing up the gear, it occured to me to ask the oldest and quietest grampa there if he missed his country village. He missed it a lot, he said, and he’d go back any time if he could. He couldn’t because the village had been bulldozed to make room for the expansion of the airport.
“Can you take us there?” I said

My producer looked doubtful, but I could see that I was starting to get some respect. The old man was game, but it was two hours’ driving there. I wasn’t so sure anymore. It was freezing out and there were three feet of snow on top of ice everywhere. If there was nothing left of the village, there was nothing to be seen. But this was radio. We didn’t care about seeing anything. Well, but there was nothing to hear either, because if there was no village there were no people and if there were no people there was nobody to talk to.
“Let’s go there,” Michael said.

The crew wasn’t amused. Romanian roads were notoriously bad (they still are) and the cabdriver who’d brought us this far was already drunk and driving his crappy Dacia like a devil. Someone said mildly that maybe we could just tape the old guy’s story and get some ambient sound outside in the snow. To my inexperienced mind that sounded sort of right. I mean, silence is silence, and the old guy’s story wasn’t going to change after two hours’ drive on ice in a maniac’s taxi. Michael would have none of it.

We crowded into the one taxi and called another one that came unusually fast. The driver of the second cab was just as drunk as the first guy, and when they met, they started arguing about politics – and would have come to blows if we hadn’t gotten going. On the way to the nonexistent village, the two drivers raced over the ice like two bad clones of Mario Andretti, and when they came to rest in the middle of a snowy emptiness, I was drenched in sweat – and terror. We got out and the old man started pointing at nothing in various directions and said, “That was my house. There was the cultural center. There was the guy whose goat I killed by mistake with a slingshot when I was a kid...’ and so on, an amazingly moving description of a place that was no more, that existed only in the his memory. The silence Michael recorded when the old man finished talking had tears streaking through it. There was no way he could have told his story anywhere else, and no silence is like any other silence. Even the cabdrivers were somewhat abashed by this event, and, on the way back, they drove more thoughtfully – though just as fast.

I’m not sure if what we had just done was journalism or poetry, but  as far as I’m concerned it was both, though Michael and I arrived at it in different ways. For me, the idea that not all silence is the same, and that stories differ radically depending on the context, is poetry. For Michael, it was just good radio journalism: he’d never cheat on a sound by pretending that it was recorded where it wasn’t.

That kind of integrity is rare among poets or among lazy journalists for this matter. There were plenty of lazy journalists from reputable media at the Intercontinental who spent most of their time picking up gossip and standing in line for phones in the lobby to dictate their stories. This was before the internet, so getting a phone line was a top priority. THE top priority for some. This may be the reason why most of the world’s media, the creme de creme of it, missed the major story of Romania in 1989.

The last “red domino” in Eastern Europe didn’t fall in a “revolution,” it was pushed down in a deliberate manner. Almost all the reporters got it wrong: they reported a civil war where there wasn’t any, they quoted figures like 60,000 dead when, in the end, there’d beenn just a thousand, they hallucinated street fights where there only crude little simulations, and they broadcast far and wide the Ceausescu “tribunal” and execution without checking the crudely edited tape they were handed by Romanian television. On top of all that misreporting of facts, many reporters were caught up in the lyricism of a symbol dear to the French: the Romanian “revolution” with its soldiers on tanks being handed flowers and kissed by girls, and its tricolor flag with a hole in the middle, coincided with the 200th anniversary of the French revolution being celebrated simultaneously in France with eerily smilar re-enactments. All that lyricism was the opposite of poetry, and some of us knew it right away, but it took a while to figure out that everybody was wrong. SIXTY THOUSAND DEAD IN ROMANIA is a headline, SIXTY THOUSAND NOT DEAD IN ROMANIA is not.

 Laziness is bad enough, delusion can be contagious, but coruption, no mattter how miniscule, can be deadly, too. Just how bad tiny coruption can be was brought home to me a few years later when I interviewed Vadim Tudor, Romania’s Jean LePen or Zirinovski, a fascist clown who pulls a consistent 10-14 percent in every presidential election in Romania. I interviewed Vadim for PBS’s Frontline International, in the so-called “Dracula castle” at Bran, near Brasov, in Transylvania. The idea was that I’d identify him subtly with Dracula, a cheap trick that didn’t escape Vadim, who’s a consummate showman. He showed up at Bran dressed in a nylon jogging suit printed with the American flag, all stars and stripes, surrounded by a gang of his boys with Uzis and what looked like half the town’s police force. There followed a variously absurd and surreal conversation, consisting mainly of Vadim declaring his unconditional love for the U.S. and Israel (and denying that he’d ever suggested that Jews were the root of all evil, along with Gypsies and his old friend Muammar Khaddafi) while fending off the attacks of a tiny woman determined to tell the “true” story of Dracula, instead of the tourist pap. When it was over, Vadim said that he’d phoned ahead to a Chinese restaurant in Brasov because he knew that the crew would be hungry, and that he’d send his chief operative with us to show us to the restaurant.

OK. I was already to say no thanks, no, which is difficult, as all of you who’d had dealings with Latin hospitality know, but I wasn’t going to take any favors from Vadim. The crew WAS hungry and Vadim insisted and insisted, so I said OK, and my erstwhile PBS producer had no problems with it, so we drove to Brasov with the operative. The Chinese restaurant in Brasov was an empty, echoing hall built for communist functionaries in the heydays of Ceausescu, and there was a huge feast, beginning with appetisers, all ready for us on a festively set table. The operative said bon appetit and excused himself to talk to a party official he had a meeting with about ten tables away. So we ate and we dissected the interview and did a lively post-mortem that got livelier as more and more beer was drunk. When we were finished I called for the check, but Vadim’s man came over to say that it was all taken care of, please don’t insult us. Then he told me – his English was perfect—that he’d worked for Agerpress, the communist news agency, and that his job had been to stay about ten feet from Ceausescu when he met with foreign dignitaries, and to report everything that was said. I instantly measured the distance he’d been from us: about ten feet. Ok, I said, so you heard us. What can I say? “Did you change any of your preconceived ideas about Vadim?” he asked me. I said, “Not really.” He wrote something on a piece of paper and said, “This is Vadim’s personal cell-phone number. If you need anything in Bucharest, anything at all...”

You don’t have to be Romanian to get a chill. We had broken a basic rule of reporting and there was plenty of damage. In this case, my embarasssment caused me to be even more severe with Vadim than I might normally have, though it’s hard to see how. A poet would probably see nothing wrong with accepting free food from an interview subject, because poets are always hungry. You might say that poets are GENERICALLY hungry. But journalists, well, you guys should eat dirt before digging into the somosas.

See also from this series:

• Construir un medio con valores, no modas
  By Patrice Schneider
• El Faro and the Challenges of Journalism
  By Jim Bettinger

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