In Amazonia (13 page)

To today's disgruntled residents of Igarapé Guariba who work to circumvent the Macedo family's economic reach through tying themselves to new patrões in Macapá, who remember the Old Man's community as a bustling, vibrant center, and who now characterize the place as a “cemetery,”
³⁰
nature is unappeasable. The chain of ecological effects set in motion in the name of progress is causing houses to fall in the river, fields to turn to swamps, fruit trees to sink into muddy banks, and fish to pick up and move to other rivers.
³¹
Nature is complicit in an ongoing tale of decline, and its recalcitrance is grist to the millstone of political intrigue.

Yet, for those people I have identified as contemporary leaders, the transforming of the land is a foundational epic. As if viewing their critics' history in negative, for them Igarapé Guariba is even now emerging from the darkness of “slavery” to make a place in the light of a modern future. The project of these leaders is to transform past structures of locality through the wrestling of this place onto alternative routes among the networks that tie the retreating circles of intersecting localities one to another. They want to position Igarapé Guariba in a forward-looking Amapá, and move through the resources of Amapá to Brazil the nation-state. They intend to connect via Brazil to the world. From the union office in Macapá, they can jump scale and link by e-mail directly to NGO and academic contacts in the United States and Europe. Through alternative political patrons they can negotiate to reconstruct the electricity grid and health post that collapsed after Viega's departure. Through union-brokered talks in Santana they can strike deals with the new palm-fruit cooperative that is large enough to take all the produce they can ship from Guariba, and promises to send their
fruit to Rio, São Paulo, even Japan, side-stepping the seasonal bottlenecks and sharp practice at the quayside in Macapá.

So, while for some of its interlocutors Igarapé Guariba is a place that has fallen out of locality, for others, it is, for the first time, beginning to locate itself. Whereas for some, Igarapé Guariba surrendered its ties to the modern world when it broke with Viega, for others, it is only through self-location that it can enter within the compass of modernity. While at first blush the material contours of modernity may appear strikingly similar in both narratives—health, education, transport, electricity, TV, refrigerators—for the Macedo family there is also this existential component: modernity and locality (both) are embodied self-determination, underwritten and secured by the transformation of wild nature.

As I have suggested, though, the locality of Igarapé Guariba is both too shared and too contested to be so easily appropriated. The complication for the Macedo family is that the new, remade nature of Igarapé Guariba, although dramatic, inspirational, and, arguably, utilitarian, was fundamentally vitiated at the moment of its coming-into-being. And it seems impossible for its inheritors to construct the foundational story of its transformation as one of renewal. Even when Benedito Macedo tells me that he didn't take “one
centavo
” in payment from old Raimundo Viega for the work of digging canals, he says it with the uncertain vehemence of one who knows the power in blind Dona Rita's bitter charge of
sacanagem
, of betrayal, of getting fucked over by these comrades, these peasants. Such are the wages of slaveholding, Seu Benedito might well say. But even this would not disguise the fact of collaboration and the problem of authorship: the pervasive sense that even now, fifteen years after he died, this landscape and the locality it embodies belong as much to Viega, the pioneer, as they ever will to Macedo; that in the very acts of their making, place and nature were marked by collaboration, dissent, and deceit.

T
HE
M
AJESTIC
A
MAZON

These thoughts have grown slowly out of my troubling meeting with Octávio da Gama that summer afternoon in Macapá. Even though he did not know about the remaking of nature in Igarapé Guariba, Octávio would not have cared much anyway. He saw Guariba as already
on a one-way slide into the estuary mudflats. It was the cynicism in Octávio's erasure of people and place that pushed me to think about the fullness of the existence into which this place came, about what that state of “being Igarapé Guariba” might mean.

As places take shape in the world, not only multiple places, but multiple natures come into view and become implicated in the claims and counterclaims of contemporary politics. Octávio's tale of BRUMASA, for example, describes the production of locality as the technology of extraction passes through the estuary and Igarapé Guariba is pulled and pulls itself into the re-emerging networks of timber transnationalism. Yet, pursuing coherence, Octávio denies both the possible pre-existence and the persistence of rural society. Indeed, such a recognition would require an admission of ribeirinho agency. Nature is subject only to the Company in his telling. Successful intervention both defines and is predicated on a certain level of personhood that he expresses in strict racial-hierarchical terms.

Is this an assumption shared by Edinaldo Gomes—advocate for the legitimacy and integrity of rural culture and connoisseur of all things caboclo—who studies the map of Amapá on the wall of his study in Macapá, shakes his head, and points to where the
pororoca
attacks the coastline and causes rivers to change course? My suggestion of local interventions produces agitation, irritability, and a lecture on the power of the Amazon—“O Amazonas majestoso,” the majestic Amazon, as a friend of mine murmurs with awe and pride every time we turn the corner at the top of the hill in Macapá and see its sluggish brown mass filling the view to the horizon. For Edinaldo, at least, there is a thoroughgoing autonomy inhering in nature, far greater than the petty determinations of race and class.

A few days later and a couple of miles across town, when I raise the same issue with Dona Rita and her daughter Lene in the presence of their two elderly family servants, the response is again uneasy. Dona Rita loved Guariba with that same intense carinho she attributes to her dead husband. Even though it has been more than ten years since she visited, that affective link is simultaneously a territorial claim and a mark of the injustice of her banishment. It is the natural beauty, the wildlife, the river, that she recalls most vividly. Dona Rita is willing to acknowledge fluvial manipulation, but she is also keen to establish its limited character. She too talks about tides and the pororoca. But her language is more guarded: nature is prepared to undergo all kinds of
alterations by all kinds of people, and, yes, she says, she has seen the drastic changes. But, she adds, this is no way to think about my husband and what he built in Igarapé Guariba.
These are not the things that matter
.

Let's pause here, just for a moment. Let's stop momentarily to ask what on earth you do with a statement like this. The blunt declaration that these are not the things that matter. A statement with which it is impossible not to both agree and disagree, fundamentally. We all guard our loved ones' memories, defend them from calumny, resist unjust representation and narrative. Dona Rita was telling me to honor this man, to give respect to someone who still stirred such tangled feelings in all who remembered him. Because Raimundo's remaking of nature had become too compromised—not by its unanticipated radical outcome, but by the transformed context in which it now found meaning. Dona Rita knew full well that in the power-laden geometry of international politics, the triumph of the pioneering will over Amazon nature was no longer a script that sold. Despite our differing locations, we both understood that once it began to travel the story of Igarapé Guariba would read instantly as one of deforestation and a hapless Amazon peasantry. And here we agree: this truly is not the thing that matters!

But, Dona Rita's refusal is also itself the sign of significance, revealing that what does count here is the very vitality of this contentious politics of nature. The incontrovertible fact is that people actually did these things, that, in Igarapé Guariba, place, nature, and locality were transformed—invented, even—through embodied practice. These micropractices of locality, these very things in which Octávio, Edinaldo, Dona Rita, the Macedos, and everyone else here are so profoundly invested, are precisely the natural-cultural histories to which this book cleaves. And for good reason. Because, as the travels that follow suggest, it is largely by the elision of the multiple agencies through which places are made that the Amazon itself, the Amazon that many of us know only as the space of a very particular nature, has come into existence.

4

A COUNTREY NEVER SACKT

Guiana, 1587–1631

Guiana and the Wild Coast—Correspondence of Native and Colonial Mappings—Ralegh, Hakluyt, and the Imperial Project—His Rapid Rise and Vapid Tumble—Failures of Science, Civility, and Knowledge—A Politics of Restraint and Equivalence—Circulations—Dialogue without Communication—The Rape of Guiana, Its Promised Lands—Difference and Similitude, Proof and Credence—The Ralegh Circle, Vernacular Science, and Scientific Imperialism—A Pullulating World—Faced with Such Nature, Words Fail Him—The Germ of the Tropical—The Plaines of Sayma Are Not What They Seem—Violence, Subjection, and the Displacement of Guiana

A river not a region. On the edge of a place, rather than the place itself. The Amazon entered Europe as a liminal space in an unsettled cosmography.

It hardly mattered that the Spanish had long since witnessed populous hierarchical societies as they sailed downstream and out into the Atlantic. At the end of the sixteenth century, the Amazon's principal significance to Europeans was as the southern margin of Guiana, a region whose boundary reached from the mouth of the Orinoco, along the shore of what is now Amapá, down to the Canal do Norte.
¹
This was what Europeans knew as the Wild Coast, the eastern seaboard of a still mysterious territory that stretched an uncertain distance inland—at times, depending on imperial hubris, all the way to the Pacific.
²
For the English who fill the pages that follow, there was little reason to distinguish between the Amazon and the Orinoco. Edmund Spenser, for example, celebrating Sir Walter Ralegh's return from his first voyage to the Orinoco in search of El Dorado, locates the “land of gold” on the Amazon,
“that huge Riuer, which doth beare his name / Of warlike Amazons, which doe possesse the same.”
³

This was not simply vague geography. The two rivers melded as sites of the spectacularly indeterminate, and both their main channels and the great landscapes between figured centrally in colonial-entrepreneurial design. For nearly fifty years, from the late 1580s to the 1630s, English, Irish, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish maneuvered to establish secure footing in a region that none could convincingly claim, and to which they were drawn not only by gold, but by hardwoods, dye-stuffs, tobacco, and a more general sense of abundance.
⁴
It was this latter that Ralegh detailed to James I in strikingly domesticated terms in his
Apologie
of 1618, a long, involuted letter written from Salisbury while feigning illness following his catastrophic second voyage to Guiana:

[B]esides the excellent air, pleasantness, healthfulness, and riches, it hath plenty of corn, fruits, fish, fowl (wild and tame), beeves, horses, sheep, hogs, deers, conies, hares, tortoises, armadiles, [ig]wanas, oils, honey, wax, potatoes, sugar canes, medicaments, balsamum, simples, gums, and what not.
⁵

Although Ralegh's prose would draw him into other modalities, this was a nature that invited colonization rather than mere plunder. And it was consistent with a defining characteristic of his Guiana: the competence of its native population, their self-conscious and developed political subjectivity, their recognition of the virtues of English restraint and protection, and their unjust subjugation beneath the feet of the Spanish intruder.

Indeed, it was not just in European cosmography that this expansive Guiana achieved cohesion. Beyond the wild coastline lay a complex of shifting indigenous polities that spanned the Pakaraima uplands dividing the watersheds of the Amazon and Orinoco.
⁶
Formed out of long-distance trade, as well as by conquest and kin-based and military alliance, here was a parallel region deeply sedimented in traveling narrative and “politically integrated in native conceptions.”
⁷
It was a realm of active politics, sharpened by the intensifying presence of Europeans that followed Orellana's descent of the Amazon in 1540. To the English, it was an unexpectedly volatile realm, and they were wrong-footed by the leadership and territorial changes that took place between Ralegh's visit in 1595 and Lawrence Keymis' return a mere six months later—reconfigurations that left them scrambling to reassemble a native alliance.

There is, of course, no mystery to the correspondence between indigenous and European mappings. Exploration was both dialogic and textual, a fundamentally ethnographic practice.
⁸
Ralegh, who learned Spanish specifically to read the accounts of the early expeditions, and who twice had the opportunity to test his skills on captive
conquistadores
, is explicit about this. His enterprise, he makes plain, is accretive and cumulative, building on the experience and authority of the Iberians who forced their way through the forests in search of El Dorado.
⁹
And how did these ill-equipped men chart this world? Through the stories of their native interlocutors, through the calculations of encounter and the tales of invasion and flight, through the same local narratives of history and nature in which Ralegh himself would participate, through stories inhabited by the immanent spatial logic of the region.