The Amazon is a notoriously difficult part of the world to write about – and I’ve tried. Travelling the river’s slow length, it can be hard to make sense of any changes beneath the forest canopy or to link its disparate communities.
The Brazilian writer Eliane Brum succeeds triumphantly. Acclaimed for her previous ‘despatches from Brazil’, appealingly titled The Collector of Leftover Souls, she moved from São Paulo, one of the largest cities of the Americas, to the isolated Xingu tributary to embed herself completely. Or, as she might put it, to lose herself.
When asked their age, tribal people just make up a number to be helpful – and then repeatedly change it
As a journalist, she is used to asking people their age. She finds that tribal people only give their real age if they have started to ‘deforest themselves’. Those who still have their ‘true spirit’ will just make up a number to be helpful, and vary it each time she asks, but have no proper concept of years passing.
A historical sense of time has always been elusive here. Only recently have archaeologists realised how extensive – and advanced – the civilisations that predated the arrival of Europeans were, since their substantial wooden buildings melted back into the jungle, unlike the Inca stone cities in the Andes. The book suggests that, as a result, indigenous people are better equipped to deal with climate catastrophe, since they have already experienced European invasion and virtual annihilation by disease – a disaster so monumental it will never be forgotten.
We like to think of the Amazon as the original virgin forest, but much of it has been sculpted over millennia, as evidenced by the phenomenon of small areas of Terra Preta, the ‘black earth’ enriched by past civilisations so that crops could grow on the surprisingly thin topsoil.
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