I’ve contributed English translations of articles about the ongoing Amazonian debacle from Brazilian media sources like ISA (Instituto Socioambiental) and Folha de São Paulo to People’s World since 2020. One of the first articles I translated was written by Eliane Brum, whose newest book, under review here, is Banzeiro Òkòtó: The Amazon as the Center of the World. Headlined “Coronavirus report from Brazil: Yanomami mothers beg for their babies’ bodies,” that article’s ostensible subject was the interment of the bodies of three Yanomami infants who were flown with their mothers from their village with “pneumonia-like symptoms,” died of what was still called coronavirus contracted at the CASAI (Indigenous Health Post) in Boa Vista, Roraima, where they were taken from their mothers, none of whom spoke Portuguese, and most likely disappeared in hastily dug holes in Boa Vista’s municipal cemetery. Brum’s heart-rending report, first published in the Brazilian edition of El País, and then in People’s World, merits a second reading.
In that article on the appearance of COVID among the Yamomami, Brum interpolated an earlier interview with a recognized authority, the French anthropologist Bruce Albert, who compared “the secret and compulsory (‘bio-secure!’)” interment of the Yanomami victims of COVID-19 to the “disappearance” of the bodies of the victims of the torturers during the military dictatorship. Albert collaborated with Davi Kopenawa on The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomami Shaman (Harvard University Press, 2013). His mention of the military dictatorship (1964-1985) gives me an opportunity to recommend Walter Salles’ latest film, Ainda estou aqui (I’m Still Here) which tells the story of Rubens Paiva, an architect and former congressman who was permanently “disappeared,” and his wife, Eunice Facciolla Paiva, portrayed from her late 30s to her late 80s by the amazing Fernanda Torres and Fernanda Montenegro, who after surviving two weeks of solitary confinement, returns to her five children (four girls and a boy, Mário, who wrote the biography upon which the film is based); and when she finally discovers that her husband has been murdered by his captors, she sells their properties in Rio, moves to São Paulo, gets a law degree and becomes a stalwart defender of the Indigenous Territories and peoples until a few years after the dictatorship ends. She dies of Alzheimers disease in 2018 at the age of 89.
I start with my translation of Eliane Brum’s article because Banzeiro Òkòtó, her second full-length work of nonfiction (The Collector of Leftover Souls: Fieldnotes on Brazil’s Everyday Insurrections, translated by Diane Whitty and published by Graywolf Press in 2018, is the first) is an autobiographical tour de force with which I had some difficulties. In an article I translated from the Folha de São Paulo for PW (March 23, 2022), the headline reads, “The entire village had Covid: Testimony of a Xingu woman.”
Born into an Italian immigrant family in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil’s southernmost, most temperate and Europeanized state, Brum’s Banzeiro is the testimony of an adopted “Xingu woman” who struggles and learns to survive by “giving up hope” and living with those she calls the “forestpeoples.” These consist of three factions: 1) Indigenous peoples who have been both masters and servants of the forest since time immemorial and numbered in the millions before European explorers arrived and made their World “New” and extremely perilous. They have “more than human” beliefs and experiences that the descendants of the Europeans do not comprehend so they turn them out of the forest and into the cities where they become the faceless “poor”; 2) beiradeiros, transplanted northeasterners, many of them refugees from the rain-starved backlands who began to emigrate to greener parts after the 4000-kilometer Trans-Amazon Highway (BR-230) was inaugurated in 1972; and 3) quilombolas, the descendants of enslaved Africans brought to Brazil by the millions between the 16th and late 19th centuries and abandoned when Princess Isabel, Dom Pedro II’s daughter, declared Abolition in 1888, shortly followed by the collapse of the monarchy. The quilombolas are so called because they live on quilombos, many of them built on the same land their “masters” abandoned after Abolition. Eliane Brum, journalist extraordinaire who has won international recognition and many awards along the way, moved her base of operations from São Paulo to Altamira, Pará, in 2017. See Wikipedia for a description of Altamira, deep in Amazonia. Here is Brum’s account of her Altamira epiphany:
I was escorting a friend, the psychoanalyst Ilana Katz, and a small group of people who were meeting with folks from socio-environmental movements in Altamira. We wanted to create a clinical experience centered on listening to the suffering of the refugees of Belo Monte, the hydro dam project that killed part of the Xingu River’s body. Ever since the dam imprisoned the river, the Xingu carries dead pieces along with it. In some stretches, it painfully drags its motionless arms and legs, the ones people call reservoirs or artificial lakes. In other spots, as in the region of Volta Grande do Xingu, its body dries up and whole universes are asphyxiated. The fish try to swim and spawn but they end up dying, joining the other corpses there. Death doesn’t like to die alone. It dies in a chain. It likes all peoples––fish, mosquitoes, trees, us humans. There among the ruins of the most violent city in the Amazon, the sun weighing down on my head like a lead crown, I told my friend: “I’m going to move to Altamira.” Not even I knew where that voice was coming from. But the words were said. And what is said comes into being (p. 5).
Banzeiro Òkòtó’s 35 chapters are kaleidoscopic, repetitive and challenging, especially for people who know little about Brazil. The chapter numbers are whimsical. Bibliography and index are lacking. The glossary of Brazilian acronyms and Portuguese, Yoruba, Munduruku and Yanomami words is skeletal (29 entries in a just under 400-page book, none of them linked to endnotes in the body of the text). The book is defiantly non–academic. Diane Whitty’s “Translator’s Note” is appended in both of Brum’s nonfictional books. If it were placed before the body of the text, as is Flora Thomson-DeVeaux’s introduction to her 2020 translation of Machado de Assis’s The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, readers might recoil.
“Banzeiro Òkòtó? What language is that? What does it mean?” Perhaps you asked yourself that when you spotted this book on display. The answer to the first question is straightforward: Portuguese. And Yoruba. As to the second, on page one you’ll begin learning the meaning of banzeiro, but it will probably take you the whole book to have a real feel for this three-syllable word, which is unfamiliar and undefinable even for many Brazilians. And you’ll only learn the meaning of òkòtó toward the end of the journey. Yes, this book does not give up its secrets easily; it demands patience. You are entering foreign territory, and from the book’s very title, you have been forewarned.
It took me more than a month to get through this book. I kept at it because I have an abiding interest in Brazil. That said, I sometimes felt I was picking my way through a mosquito- and snake-infested forest guided by an impetuous Amazon warrior who opened her breast to share her pain with her readers:
Moving to the Amazon destructured me, and I went to pieces. Most people think of going to pieces as a kind of personal catastrophe, but I think that’s a very limited way of looking at life. When this happens to someone, it’s because the structure that held them grew unbearable, and sometimes they don’t even know why. Every effort will be made so the person goes back to belonging, to their own, on track. They’ll try everything possible to return to their old form, conform their bodies, conform themselves. But their body––and body is what they are–-will rebel. They’ll think they have a mind and a body, because Descartes was terribly convincing and very convenient for modernity. And who knows what was happening with his testicles when he invented this partitioned human. But there are no partitions, because there are no parts. This––what people are––screams, hurts, and loves all mixed together (p. 7).
Brum’s canvas encompasses four and a half centuries of New World adventuring on the part of avaricious mainly “white” male Europeans who never refrained from creating havoc. A lyrical, 21-page account (Chapter 2018) of an enchanted night spent with a girlfriend she calls “Turtle Cris” watching and helping a newborn giant Arrau turtle they christen “Alice”—one whose putative mother they call “Gumercinda”—find her way from a hole on Embaubal Nesting Beach Gumercinda laboriously digs in the sand of Juncal Island in the Xingu to deposit hundreds of eggs, and from one of which Alice must extract herself and make her way to the river. In the midst of this nightlong reverie, Brum cannot resist importing a jarring memory two decades old:
I remember my first appearance in the rainforest, in 1998, when I traveled the Transamazonian. The first ground I stepped on with my gaucho boots was Itaituba, on the banks of the Tapajós River. I was received by a high-ranking military officer––if I remember right, an army colonel––who was keen to know exactly what I was doing and to “help” me however I needed. As I’ve mentioned before, it seems that soldiers stationed in the Amazon have never been informed that the dictatorship ended, so they march about city and forest clad in military boots and arrogance, certain of their supremacy over civilians. Later, in 2019, when Jair Bolsonaro reached the presidency of Brazil, I had a clearer understanding that, to some extent, the dictatorship never did end and a spangled portion of those in uniform still want more power. This is a legacy of many distortions, including a republic that began with a military coup.
On that particular night, a truly giant South American river turtle was the main dish. Placed in the middle of the table, the turtle was the banquet. I took a bite but couldn’t keep eating. At one point, the colonel came over to “ask” me not to mention that the soldiers were eating a forest creature whose hunting and sale were prohibited. I replied neither yes nor no, something I excel at when necessary. But I felt sick to my stomach all night. When I wrote the article, I ended up not “mentioning” the fact because the colonel was a colleague’s source. But I’ve never shed my sense of shame. I recall this low moment as I observe Gumercinda digging to survive (pp. 280-281).
As a definably white, male, polyglot traveler from the mid-20th century whose introduction to Brazil was flavored by adolescent exposure to the 1958 award-winning film Black Orpheus, followed by two life-changing years (1966-68) as a Peace Corpsman in a mangrove swamp favela in Olinda, followed by a pivotal year (1969-70) as a high school English teacher at the American School of Rio de Janeiro, followed by 20 years of life-imposed exile in NYC and L.A. made bearable by my crescent immersion into Brazilian music, cinema and literature, culminating in the production of a doctoral dissertation as a UCLA “Brazilianist,” I qualify as someone on the short list of those not to be trusted by Eliane Brum.
I had a ball in the Latin American Studies program at the same university which I entered in my mid-fifties, sufficiently fluent in New World Portuguese and Spanish to graduate in two years. Along the way, I read Nancy Scheper-Hughes’ Death Without Weeping: The Violence of Everyday Life in Brazil (Berkeley: U. of Cal. Press, 1992). At 614 pages, it’s a landmark work of late 20th-century anthropology, in many ways as personal as Brum’s books but much less irreverent when it comes to scholarly requirements. In terms of subject matter, there is considerable overlap. Ironically, Scheper-Hughes calls the sugarcane workers’ favela, where she lived and worked as a Peace Corps Health and Community Development Volunteer, “Alto do Cruzeiro” (Height of the Cross), while Brum’s Altamira (Highview) is her Golgotha. Both authors reflect the tenor of their times, more than 30 years apart.
First, a taste of Dr. Scheper-Hughes :
As a “critical medical anthropologist,” I may be seen as something of a pathologist of human nature who is drawn to illness, both individual and collective, as these shed light on culture, society, and their discontents. The view through this lens is skewed, for I am slicing, dissecting, and holding up to the light the diseased tissues of the social body gone awry. The anthropologist-diviner names ills and speaks of taboos broken, of deadly words spoken, of human passions and weaknesses, of distortions in human relations, all of which can produce suffering, sickness, and death. I share the faith with the people of the Alto and Bom Jesus da Mata in all its richness, complexity, contradiction, and absurdity…. With an eye toward social healing, I conclude the book with a search for the paths of resistance, healing and liberation…. In the sugar plantation zone near the coast where the history of Brazil begins, a doomed plantation economy…, the tropics are also “sad.” But in the passing of this tropical world, what is there to lament, save what might come next, the fire next time?
…As a woman and a feminist, although not a conventional one, I am drawn (but I won’t say “naturally”) to the experiences of women, and their lives were initially more open to me than the private worlds of Brazilian men of the Alto. This ethnography, then, is woman centered, as is everyday life in a shantytown marginalized by poverty and set on edge by what I describe in chapter 5 as “nervous hunger.” Mothers and children dominate these pages, even as they dominate numerically and symbolically, Alto life (a feature of the shantytown recognized ruefully by Alto men). I turn to the fragility and “dangerousness” of the mother-infant relationship as the most immediate and visible index of scarcity and unmet needs.
Then, a final quitute (morsel) from the linguistic banquet table of Eliane Brum:
In the war between humans, the fight in Amazon Center of the World will grow more heated in the coming years and decades of the climate collapse. And each one of us will have to decide which side we are on. Not with our words but with our bodies.
As the forestpeoples have pointed out, this is also a war between those who espouse development and those who espouse involvement. Between those who have uninvolved themselves from nature, placing themselves outside of it, turning nature into a commodity-producing commodity—and those who know they are deeply involved because they are an organic part of the planet.
I have become an inhabitant of the between-worlds. This book tells the story of how I came to be in-between through a singular process, of which I only recently gained full awareness. My home is this place between places, perpetually traversing, perpetually journeying. Before, I understood myself as a displaced no-where, a misfit. Today, my long journey into the rainforest has shown me that between-places is also a place, that displacement allows me to escape all the boxes they’d like to fit and imprison me in. When I feel like I’m suffocating, I simply displace my limbs, dislocate my bones, and disappear like a snake.
Between-places is my place of speech. Between-languages and between language is how I exist. I am gradually becoming trans-world, translingual, and translanguage. I am the movement of action. Bit by bit, I am leaving the banzeiro to ®evolutionize into òkòtó.
I resist to exist to resist…. (p. 362).
Eliane Brum
Banzeiro Òkòtó: The Amazon as the Center of the World
Translated from Portuguese by Diane Whitty
Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2023
Paperback, 408 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-64445-219-6
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