Banzeiro Òkòtó
The Amazon as the Center of the World
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
A confrontation with the destruction of the Amazon by a writer who moved her life into the heart of the forest.
In lyrical, impassioned prose, Eliane Brum recounts her move from São Paulo to Altamira, a city along the Xingu River that has been devastated by the construction of one of the largest dams in the world. In community with the human and more-than-human world of the Amazon, Brum seeks to “reforest” herself while building relationships with forest peoples who carry both the scars and the resistance of the forest in their bodies. Weaving together the lived stories of the region and its history of violent corruption and destruction, Banzeiro Òkòtó is a call for radical change, for the creation of a new kind of human being capable of facing the potential extinction of our species. In it, Brum reveals the direct links between structural inequities rooted in gender, race, class, and even species, and the suffering that capitalism and climate breakdown wreak on those who are least responsible for them.
The title Banzeiro Òkòtó features words from two cultural and linguistic traditions: banzeiro is what the Amazon people call the place where the river turns into a fearsome vortex, and òkòtó is the Yoruba word for a shell that spirals outward into infinity. Like the Xingu River, turning as it flows, this book is a fierce document of transformation arguing for the centrality of the Amazon to all our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this uneven polemic, Brazilian journalist Brum (The Collector of Leftover Souls) makes an impassioned plea to save the Amazon rainforest and its peoples. "The only effective way to reforest the Amazon," she contends, "is to reforest the forestpeoples," meditating on the need to center Indigenous people in efforts to repair the rainforest. Anthropological research, she reports, suggests that precolonial Indigenous communities planted and tended swaths of the Amazon, making their descendants valuable sources of knowledge for how to restore it. Highlighting the activism of Indigenous individuals, she tells how Munduruku leader Maria Leusa breastfeeds while speaking out against invasive mining at public events because she sees both activities as driven by her commitment to a better future. Brum is a spirited advocate for her subjects, but frequent abstract digressions prove more suggestive than edifying (she dedicates a chapter to musings on using the word virgin to describe the rainforest, but never arrives at a thesis). Abstruse prose further muddies her points ("I have laid my body down in this river's language, rubbed my skin on its skin... and I know the Xingu is a woman"). The elliptical delivery drags down an otherwise stirring account of the Indigenous fight for justice in the Amazon.
