“Gringo” by Dennis Greunding

In this collection of poems and journal entries which chronicle an eight month odyssey through Latin America, we are presented with an unassuming, matter-of-fact observer who, in spite of strong moral and political views, is always ready to admit, as he does in the following excerpt from “Guatemala City”, that he is a “gringo”, an outsider, even though he has bothered to learn Spanish; even though he admires and feels deep sympathy for those oppressed peoples whose lives he has glimpsed and sometimes briefly touched.

“After I file my story tomorrow I’m going to fly to San Jose. This is a vicious place. I know nothing about survival in this environment. I’m a fool to be here.”

That kind of honesty is refreshing. But it is not enough. The book is well researched, there are a number of successful poems, an occasional journal entry flickers unsteadily to life, and yet, in spite of my sympathy with its intentions and my admiration for anyone who would undertake such a “journey of discovery”, I found Gringo dull and oddly pretentious.

The problem, of course, is Greunding’s language. It just doesn’t communicate whatever intensities, whatever “incredible cultural diversity”, he may have experienced. I think there are two reasons for this. One of them has to do with a widespread assumption among young Canadian writers, especially those from the prairie provinces. According to this view, if one is clever enough not to attempt very much, and therefore manages to avoid disaster, then one can expect to be treated as a writer of consequence. Which may sound reasonable, until you compare it to a similar claim made by an athlete of consequence, who can do five push ups and run a sixteen minute mile. It’s true that the subject and format are perhaps too demanding for a beginning writer in his first book. Writers like D.H. Lawrence, Henri Michaux, Patrick Lane and Carolyn Forché, to mention only a very few, have already travelled the same terrain with stunning results. But that is ambition, not pretension, and one can hardly fault a writer for that. What I find pretentious in this book, and many others like it, is the assumption that modesty and sincere mediocrity should be bought, read, and praised.

If Gringo suffers from an absurd assumption about writing, it also suffers from Greunding’s experience as a TV reporter. It may not be fair to judge a book by its cover, especially its back cover, on which most publishers indulge a secret ambition to be ad men, but in this case the ‘blurb’ is instructive. In it we are informed that Gringo is “told with the reporter’s careful eye for detail”. And that is exactly what is wrong with it, because, as everyone knows who ever sat in a journalism class, detail, the kind one expects from a novelist or narrative poet, is exactly what a reporter is trained to abstract and classify into the who, what, where, when and how of that tyrannical lead paragraph. The following passage is an extreme but characteristic example of this tendency to abstract and evade:

“I’ve returned from a five-day trip to the south. The first day I got to Cillan, on the second to Temuco in rain, where Pablo Neruda grew up in the barrio behind the railroad station. The fourth day I returned to Concepcion on the coast, then back to Santiago. It was expensive, and the weather this time of year is bad.”

But his journalistic training has had, it seems, an even more profound and inhibitive effect on this book. It seems to have shaped his conception of reality:

“All you have to do is ride buses around Santiago, especially the outskirts, to see the poverty. But I’ve not been able to penetrate the reality here in the usual way—reading a critical press.”

I wish he had been more able to trust the evidence of his sense, his conversations with people, his ability to analyse and integrate what he experienced. There is too much news and information, stuff we can get at the library or in a TV special. And that is not what one hopes for in a book of this kind. Even when he does describe for us his first hand experience, it is numbed by a style that adheres to the grade six level of reading comprehension set by the country’s leading newspapers and popular magazines. There is a severe distaste for elaboration, for thoroughness, and we rarely learn, in detail, exactly what went on, what was thought or felt, what it looked, smelled, tasted like, or what it might be said to mean. Often the simplicity of the language makes Greunding’s political morality sound positively smug. Sometimes it even carries implications which I’m sure he would find extremely unpleasant. When he writes “hopelessness is not acceptable in friends”, for instance, does he realize he is telling us not to waste our time befriending those who are lost in despair?

Which is not to say that Gringo is a complete flop. Oh, there are the usual minor fiascos one expects to find in a first book—obtuseness, too many words, too few words, clumsy syntax, nonsequiturs, clichés, and so on. But Greunding is capable of great subtlety, as in these lines where the tranquility of evening is shadowed by traces of historic plunder and the loss of an ancient civilization:

“The sun sinks amid its pink flotilla of clouds and there is no light in the valley.”
(italics mine)

Or he can use a rather deft line break to drive home the brutal, dehumanizing effects of chronic poverty:

“A man with wounds for eyes plays his accordion at my table
lives for the music
of my coins in his cup.”

If these passages, and others like them, are not mere accidents, it seems that Dennis Greunding can write with clarity and strength. I hope he will shed his pretentious modesties and give us a second book in which the instinct which prompted his travels, that need to put himself “at risk”, will have led him beyond the narcoleptic restraints of popular journalism and the nearly inaudible voice of his tradition. ♦

George Amabile is a Winnipeg poet, writer and musician. An interview with him appeared in Arts Manitoba, vol.2, no.3.