Keynote
A confrontation with the destruction of the Amazon by a writer who moved her life into the heart of the forest
Book Title
Banzeiro Òkòtó
Subtitle
The Amazon as the Center of the World
Cover Image
- “Banzeiro Òkòtó is at once a work of reportage, a manifesto for social and agrarian transformation, and no less than a blueprint for a new cosmography. . . . Brum may be suspicious of the ‘dogma of hope,’ then, but she never lapses into cynicism or despair. She offers instead community, solidarity, resourcefulness and a bracing defiance.”—William Atkins, The New York Times Book Review
Body
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.
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.
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About the Author
Credit: Azul Serra
Praise
- “[Brum's book is an attempt . . . to get up close with those who have merged with the rainforest in a way that she seeks to emulate, and then to try to convey to outsiders what she has heard and felt and learned—with all its sweat and noise and discomfort. . . . She points out what should be obvious: that those best equipped to care for and report on the Amazon are those who are native to it and know it best.”—Rachel Nolan, The New York Review of Books
“A chronicle as transporting and harrowing as a mighty river. . . . [Brum is] an astute writer of conscience as lyrically intimate, passionate, and precise as Terry Tempest Williams. . . . [Her] fiercely illuminating testimony asserts in fresh and vital ways that the Amazon, the ‘center of the world,’ is essential to life on Earth.”—Booklist
- “Brum adopts an unconventional form to her work as a way of shedding the uncomfortable colonial connotations of her own Whiteness. . . . [A] formidable chronicle of the increasingly deforested world of the Amazon.”—Kirkus Reviews
- “Devastating, extraordinary, and unforgettable.”—Rebecca Servadio, Words Without Borders
