BANZEIRO ÒKÒTÓ

A Brazilian reporter offers a “destructured” portrait of the Amazon’s collapse in terms of biosphere and Indigenous culture.

In her second book, following The Collector of Leftover Souls: Field Notes on Brazil’s Everyday Insurrections, Brum adopts an unconventional form to her work as a way of shedding the uncomfortable colonial connotations of her own Whiteness. The author, who lives in Altamira, in the Amazon jungle, writes with enormous empathy about the Indigenous people who, over the centuries, have learned to regard the rapacious Whites as “enemies” who have largely destroyed the Amazon rainforest. Brum describes her work with other researchers in Altamira, where she has studied historical ecology, “the field of study that explores how humans have interacted with the environment across space and time….Part of the Amazon is a cultural forest, meaning it has been sculpted over the course of thousands of years, mainly by humans, but also by nonhumans, the ones we call ‘animals,’ through their interactions with the environment.” As the author shows, most of the Indigenous people of the rainforest have been decimated by disease and violence. Brum is keenly aware of the disconnect between the White rhetoric about “ecology” and the Indigenous practice of being one with the forest, and she writes fervently about the massive deforestation that has been ongoing for decades. The author excoriates the right-wing administration of Jair Bolsonaro, elected in 2018, as having brought the country to a “climate emergency.” While connecting “with the forest and the women of the forest,” she writes, “deforestation, the destruction of nature, the contamination of rivers with mercury and pesticides—this became a lived experience of violence within my own body as well.” A relentless critic, she asserts that “exploitation by white people in the name of ‘progress’ is a political operation meant to erase everything that existed before.”

A bleak, formidable chronicle of the increasingly deforested world of the Amazon.