Ambassador of Nowhere: A Latin American Pilgrimage, Richard Gwyn, 2024, Seren
In the many words within this book lies a single key, the search for which has exercised a million writers.
And it is this: the journeys we take in this material world traced by maps and symbols have a spiritual destination—to find ourselves.
Richard Gwyn’s book is a reminder of why Latin America fascinates so may creative minds, a canvas offering the adventurer limitless creative scope.
Ambassador of Nowhere is a memoir and travelogue about the author’s visits to this region, but it is also the eloquent chronicle of a personal journey.
While Gwyn tells us about his encounters as a poet visiting this conflicted hemisphere, he also reveals his own battles—with alcohol, bereavement, and to find where he belongs. His Latin American travels clearly comprised a formative phase in his life that left an indelible mark.
Gwyn recounts his forays into the region to encounter poems and meet poets for his critically received anthology, The Other Tiger (2016), a poetry collection which he selected and translated.
This is a reflection on frailty, loss and love whose coming conclusion is prefaced with the moving observations that only a poet can provide about the final days, then death, of his father in Crickhowell, Wales, in May 2015.
Gwyn writes: “When he is finally still, the presence of a living being disintegrates abruptly, and vanishes like a wisp of smoke, and a palpable absence descends upon the room in which the three of us remain. A wave of inexpressible sorrow washes over us, temporarily submerging all other emotions, and I experience the almost cinematic sense of unreality that accompanies those moments one recognises as life-defining.”
He approaches every situation with the zeal of a writer taking notes for scenes to include in a poem or novel—the minutiae of the ordinary become meaningful moments, lessons learnt.
His initial flight from Cardiff on a journey to a poetry festival in Nicaragua, for example, becomes an entertaining short story about the passengers on a plane, Slavs, pogroms, inebriation and a lack of self-control.
His political commentary is candid and concise, revisiting some of the worst excesses of a violent region and their origins in US interventionism, such as the massacre at El Mozote in El Salvador. He compares the cynical Daniel Ortega with the dreams of original Sandinista poets such as Ernesto Cardenal and Gioconda Belli.
Visiting a festival in Argentina and rubbing shoulders with the literary elite, he nips out to a shanty town, stricken by the social contrast he encounters, then returns to the puffed chests and hyperbole of the event with sarcastic swipes about its esteemed speakers.
In Colombia, it is fascinating to learn that President Juan Manuel Santos and Tony Blair co-authored a book, La Tercera Via (“The Third Way”), seeking to adapt—God forbid—Blairite political philosophy to a Colombian context. Will we see a similar collaboration in the future between Keir Starmer and a restored Alvaro Uribe, perhaps?
Gwyn visits Argentine Patagonia where he dips into the Welsh heritage of the windswept south, initially regarding the affiliations of those there for the distant motherland as a nostalgic fantasy.
He writes how he “was confused and slightly ashamed by my ambivalence towards the Welsh Patagonians: they were, by and large, kind and generous people without great financial resources, trying to get on with their lives, and I had no right to make uninformed judgements about them. To compound my discomfort, my spoken Welsh was rusty, to say the least, never having acquired fluency, and neglecting to speak the language for some years; consequently I was more at ease speaking Spanish with the locals.”
The second part of the book is dedicated to his visits to Mexico which offers much room for reflection on pre-Columbian myth and history, a poet’s feast, alongside thoughts on the works of greats such as Juan Rulfo, especially his beautiful stories suffused with disillusionment.
Gwyn’s mind is like Latin America, adventurous, endless, immersed in the addictive warmth of those he encounters. As he recognises, publication is a waystation, and such a journey in the map of his mind is never really completed.
He writes: “Bringing the project to a close, it seemed to me that it could never be concluded, any more than poetry itself, or a single poem, truly ends.”
That is because the writer’s life is spent in search of something unattainable—at our travels’ end we cannot be the same person who set out—and that is, ultimately, to know himself.
Gwyn acknowledges this: “I have almost no identification with or understanding of the nineteen-year old I offered up at the outset of this chronicle. I do not consider the self that I inhabit now to be the same self I was then, nor any of the innumerable selves that emerged between.”
We seek to escape those selves through voyages that detach us from everything that has hitherto made us who we are in the hope of returning to a better place of understanding, a year zero, a reinvention.
The poet concludes: “It attracts and repels me in equal measure, this idea that we might lack an essential, identifiable self, and yet at the same time its absence does not seem to be an obstacle to contentment, or even serenity.”
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Categories: Argentina, Central America, Colombia, El Salvador, Mexico, Nicaragua, North America, South America