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.
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