In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  Three rivers converge in the glistening bay in front of Santarém: the whitewater Amazon, the clear water Tapajós, and the clear water Arapiuns. It is a wonderful place to see the encontro das águas, the meeting of the waters—bands of different-colored water flowing parallel to each other for mile after mile, barely mixing because of their distinct sediment loads and densities. The more famous contrast between the Amazon and the blackwater Rio Negro just below Manaus is certainly impressive, but here at Santarém, several bands of water are clearly visible—Amazon café-au-lait, Tapajós green, and the blacker tones of the Arapiuns. Often, during the low summer tides, one stream will part on meeting an island or sandbar, somehow another will slip into the breach, and this cosmopolitan river will flow on in an ad hoc pattern of four or five stripes. Yet despite such natural drama, it was Manaus (under the aggressively entrepreneurial Governor Gilberto Mestrinho) that captured the eco-tourist itinerary of the Amazon, and visitors to Santarém are often surprised to find that this town too is a site of fluvial spectacle.

  As all this might lead us to expect, ecological conditions on the várzea of the Amazon River and the floodplains of the Tapajós and Arapiuns are significantly different. It would be a mistake to assume, however, that edaphic poverty leads automatically to human poverty. It is true that the white and reddish sand igapós found bordering the Tapajós and Arapiuns support a distinct and, to my eye, lackluster vegetation with a scrubby Mediterranean look, and few of the tall, graceful palms that lend such vitality to the estuarine várzea. But the Arapiuns is sprinkled with small villages and there is an active trade with Santarém in those Amazonian carbohydrate staples farinha d’água and farinha de tapioca, gritty manioc products that are produced only with difficulty on the inundated floodplain. Mapping the lower Arapiuns basin in the 1920s, the pioneering German anthropologist Curt Nimuendajú—the inspirer of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ South American inquiries—reported compacted trails known as estradas.31 Farmers still use these as routes to deep and extensive deposits of terra preta do índio, fertile black soil, probably of pre-Columbian anthropogenic origin, on which they maintain productive agricultural colonies. These deposits were commonly found in dry upland forest and linked by the estradas to riverine settlements, often several miles away. People travel back and forth between these locations along this remarkable network of trails, many of which, worn deep and tunnel-like into the ground, also evoke an ancient history.32

  Leaving Santarém, it takes a full four hours to cross the mouthbay of the Tapajós and reach the Arapiuns. Even here, so far from the estuary, the volume of water in this river system is astonishing. The vast bay resembles an inland sea or one of the North American Great Lakes, and is subject to the same restless weather. Henry Bates, returning from a voyage on the Tapajós in 1852, almost died here as well:

  We were driven back on the first night (October 3rd) by a squall. The light terral was carrying us pleasantly round the spit, when a small black cloud which lay near the rising moon suddenly spread over the sky to the northward; the land breeze then ceased, and furious blasts began to blow across the river. We regained, with great difficulty, the shelter of the point. It blew almost a hurricane for two hours, during the whole of which time the sky over our heads was beautifully clear and starlit. Our shelter at first was not very secure, for the wind blew away the lashings of our sails, and caused our anchor to drag. Angelo Custodio, however, seized a rope which was attached to the foremast and leapt ashore; had he not done so, we should probably have been driven many miles backwards up the storm-tossed river. After the cloud had passed, the regular east wind began to blow, and our further progress was effectually stopped for the night. The next day we all went ashore, after securing well the canoe, and slept from eleven o’clock till five under the shade of trees.33

  Bates might have expected something similar. The dry season, the period Amazonians call verão, acknowledging it as a form of summer, is a time of unpredictable winds, sudden storms, and dangerous tides. In Santarém, there is a 36-foot drop in water levels between the height of the seasons, and sandbars, islands, and beaches migrate, to reappear almost out of nowhere, challenging the reflexes of local sailors. Vegetation standing on dry sand at this time of year may have been completely submerged in the long, wet inverno, the Amazonian winter, and how it manages to photosynthesize for months on end under such conditions is still not entirely clear.

  This landscape of the middle Amazon has a chimerical quality all its own, a bewildering instability different from that of the estuary. In those lower deltaic reaches, people sit on front porches overlooking the water and watch giant fallen trees and big chunks of riverbank flow out to sea with the tide. In winter, with the heavy rains and swollen rivers, an eerie long-distance procession forms, and the estuary takes on a surreal aspect, filled with floating islands of long canarana grass descended with small animals and clouds of insects from who-knows-where, possibly hundreds of miles upstream—the very same islands I saw bobbing quietly at the mouth of the Tapajós outside Santarém, readying themselves for the long voyage down to the sea.

  Unlike the Tapajós and the Amazon, the Arapiuns moves unnervingly slowly, especially in its broad lower course, where, as Harald Sioli, the eminent limnologist who first worked here in the 1950s, observed with descriptive precision, the river represents “an elongated lake.”34 Upstream, above the Cachoeira do Aruá (a wide and violent set of rapids beyond the division of the Arapiuns into the Rio Aruá and the Rio Maró), the dark water coils around in great meanders, doubling back on itself, passing silently between steep walls of high forest. To evade the rapids in summer when the waters are low, people take one of the estradas, the land trails described by Nimuendajú. These paths take them past fields planted with manioc and by huddles of clay-and-thatch houses built close to the low, swampy bank of the Aruá. The people who rely on these routes maintain them with machetes and enxadas (heavy, sharp-edged hoes) in organized annual limpezas, or cleanings, keeping them wide enough for oxcarts and smooth enough for bumpy bike rides, scraping off the accumulated litter from a broad passage that sinks lower each year.

  Still, if you are paddling a canoe between the dispersed settlements on its banks, a river like this is hard work. And the big, slow bends that lead almost nowhere are particularly frustrating. On the Rio Aruá, residents have made their lives easier by cutting short channels that chop off a loop, allowing a canoe to pass in a more or less straight line through a forest tunnel and out again onto the open river. People living beside the Aruá also describe communal limpezas that serve to maintain these canals. I arrived here with my friend Michael Reynolds and we met up with Joe McCann, who has been conducting research on the history and uses of terra preta in this area. An elderly man told us that he himself had cut one of these channels across the river from his house, digging out the tree roots through the forest with an enxada to access a tiny, seasonal rego, a creek. The slow current gradually stripped away the heavy clay tabatinga soil, he said, and opened a channel 3 or 4 yards wide. He lent us a canoe, so we followed his directions and paddled up to take a look. Sure enough, there was a narrow break in the forest wall, and we left the almost silent river to slip into a coolly shaded atrium about 50 yards from end to end, where the transparent, shallow water flowed rapidly before scooting us out into the bright sunlight once again.

  People here used the word varadores, a term I had not heard before, to identify these anthropogenic channels.35 As you might expect from those who live in a landscape dominated by water and tides, their vocabulary, like that of other ribeirinhos—as people who live along the rivers are sometimes known in the region—is particularly rich in designations for watercourses. Precise distinctions are drawn between waterways according to length, depth, type of water, seasonality, and other relevant factors. At least, so it would appear at first glance. As well as igarapé, rego, rio, canal, várzea, and igapó, words I have already used in this chapter, after a few days in a village on the Amazon floodplain, a v
isitor might also have heard rio-mar, riacho, atalho, mupéua, furo, paraná, córrego, caminho, água grande, água pequena, água parada, reponta, préamar, pacuema, lancante, remanso, and mondongo. Many of these, especially those derived from Tupi, are regionally endemic. Others are more generally Brazilian but have specific local associations. All are likely to be complicated by their diminutives: regozinho, for instance, or, even, águazinho, little water.

  I found guidance in Vicente Chermont de Miranda’s Glossário Paraense, a slim dictionary of rural Amazonian usages that I spotted (in a moment of obsessive but serendipitous distraction) in a stall selling used books at a lively open-air party during the annual Festas Juninhas in Belém.36 Chermont de Miranda compiled his glossary in 1904, the same year W. H. Hudson’s best-selling fable Green Mansions: A Romance of the Tropical Forest went on sale in London. Hudson deploys the standard device of the enchanted faery glen to evoke the types of magical forest recesses created by the diggers of the varadores, and he employs it without restraint, conjuring a tropical idyll in the midst of the forest:

  I spent several hours in this wild paradise, which was so much more delightful than the extensive gloomier forests I had so often penetrated in Guayana: for here, if the trees did not attain to such majestic proportions, the variety of vegetable forms was even greater; as far as I went it was nowhere dark under the trees, and the number of lovely parasites everywhere illustrated the kindly influence of light and air. Even where the trees were largest the sunshine penetrated, subdued by the foliage to exquisite greenish-golden tints, filling the wide lower spaces with tender half-lights, and faint blue-and-grey shadows. Lying on my back and gazing up, I felt reluctant to rise and renew my ramble. For what a roof was that above my head!37

  Chermont de Miranda’s investments were expressed rather differently. I like to think of the contrast between his classificatory logic and Hudson’s extravagant Romanticism not as one between a modern scientific sensibility and something now archaic, but rather as a measure of the awkward but not unhappy coexistence of disparate and contradictory ways of knowing Amazonian nature. Very often, for instance, and without having to look too hard, we find the pantheistic in the scientistic. But Chermont de Miranda’s glossary is interesting in its own right. Surprisingly, despite immediate appearances, his book leads us to think about everyday life on these Amazonian rivers.

  When he returned from his studies in Lisbon to sell his parents’ loss-making sugar mill on the Rio Capim, not far from Igarapé-Miri in eastern Pará, Vicente Chermont de Miranda made a highly satisfactory marriage into the Dutch upper class, and entered Paraense society enviably situated, a scientist-politician, wanting neither money nor cultural capital. He would eventually complete a series of studies on the natural history of nearby Marajó Island, but his particular triumph was the Glossário Paraense. In it he provides comprehensive definitions for most of the watery terms I listed above, and he includes others: arroio, repiquete, baixas, and perau. As a luminary of the Liberal Party, Chermont de Miranda would have had little sympathy for his socialist contemporary Baptista de Moura, the engineer-poet who had passed through the canal at Igarapé-Miri less than ten years before. Somehow, though, in his writing, political elitism does not prevent him from combining pedantic hauteur with a less expected dialogic sensitivity, frequently clarifying terms by including examples of their usage in local speech. He is rigorous too. Here is his discussion of rego, which I earlier rashly translated as “creek”:

  REGO, n.m.—Gullies, fed by rain water, start as shallow streams; while they are snaking their way through the savanna [campo], exposed to the atmosphere, they dry up, becoming narrower and more shallow, and take the name regos. Where they are shaded by trees at the margins, they are known as igarapés. During the severe dry season the shallow streams and regos dry up, leaving only the igarapés in their upper reaches, receiving river water at full tide, becoming dry at low tide. On the savannas of Marajó, perennial water does not exist, as has been erroneously reported by Professor Orville Derby. A Ilha de Marajó, by Professor Orville Derby, Boletim do Museu Goeldi, vol. II, p. 170.38

  Clearly, Chermont de Miranda can find plenty to say about streams. His definition of igarapé, which focuses mostly on questions of etymology, takes up a full page. And there is no doubt that his text was unique in its day, a labor of dedication and connection, still fascinating for those of us trying to come to grips with vocabulary that rarely find its way into standard Portuguese dictionaries.39 Moreover, the Glossário Paraense embodies an affection and regard for ribeirinho culture, a persistent current in urban Amazonia but one that is often, although not here, sentimentalized, and that is neither universal nor, necessarily, unambiguous.

  Chermont de Miranda sent me to Igarapé Guariba with an anticipatory sense of the complexity of native cognitive categories. However, in my attempts to fix these categories, to tie words to definitions and definitions to concrete examples, I rapidly found myself at sea on this expanding river. The terms existed in popular usage, and I had no trouble identifying a declamatory context, much as had Chermont de Miranda himself. But there was nothing fixed about that context, and words refused to be tied down. It was not only that different people used the same word with different meanings; it was more that these supposedly highly specific terms seemed largely interchangeable.

  “Mupéua” is a case in point. This was a word that became important to me, partly because it was unusual (Chermont de Miranda does not list it), but more because, for some people, it signified the work of humans. A friend, a middle-school teacher, who was transcribing interview tapes for me in Macapá, knit her brow when she heard this strange word and sought out her boyfriend’s father, a man who had spent most of his life living and working on rural Marajó. The definition he gave her was exact and, at the same time, intriguing: “A small, shallow river, a streamlet (riacho), opened by manual labor in upland forest” (“aberto pelo mão do homen em terra firme”). Yet, this clarification threw no new light on the portion of the tape that had confused her, a conversation between two elderly men in Igarapé Guariba:

  Seu Benedito: When we arrived here, what was it like … it was narrow.

  João Preto: It was a mupéua.

  Seu Benedito: There was a …

  João Preto: It was a mupéua.

  A few days later I asked Seu Benedito what a mupéua was. “Just a rego,” he said, without much interest, “a little furo.”

  I turned to the classics. Valentin Vološinov’s Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, a revolutionary revision of linguistic theory written in the 1920s, is marked by both precision and creativity. Vološinov (most likely the great Russian linguist Mikhail Bakhtin writing under a politically expedient pseudonym) reconfigures Saussure’s linguistics by considering what happens to the structural formalities of language when it is thrown around in the rough-and-tumble of social speech. For Vološinov, “the meaning of a word is determined entirely by its context. In fact,” he tells us, “there are as many meanings of a word as there are contexts for its usage.” While also possessing an intrinsic unity, a word has what he calls “polysemanticity.”40 Resolving this paradox is a task for which Saussure, with his stiff and unconvincing models of social interaction, is ill-equipped. Vološinov’s solution is characteristically elegant:

  Actually, any real utterance, in one way or another or to one degree or another, makes a statement of agreement with or a negation of something. Contexts do not stand side by side in a row, as if unaware of one another, but are in a state of constant tension, or incessant interaction and conflict.41

  Vološinov gives us a theory of language-in-motion, a theory in which the very act of plucking a word from its relational moment in time and space to extract a general definition is both utopian and wrongheaded. Which is not to say that the Glossário is useless, only that the definitions won’t work unless some serious thought is given to the context in which the words are being used and to the relationship of the speakers to each other
and to their broader surroundings.

  A rego and an igarapé, an igarapé and a furo, a riacho and a canal. At times these become equivalent pairs. At others, their distinct meanings are contextually apparent, and, like a glossary, we can allocate and codify them as if they represented the substance of an indigenous knowledge.42 But such definitions will be shattered in speech, as when a long-suffering interlocutor finally lost patience: “Look, this is the Amazon. You know, we’re very easygoing about this kind of thing; we’re very flexible. Sometimes it’s a furo, sometimes it’s an atalho. That’s the way it is.”

  Chermont de Miranda does not include varador in his glossary. But he does have an entry for the closely related varadouro.43 This he defines as a shortcut across the várzea—ironically enough, in his text, both a “canal” and an “atalho.” Indeed, atalho, which can be any kind of shortcut, by water, road, boat, or foot, is a word that people in the Arapiuns often use when pressed to redefine varador. Varador is related to the feminine noun, vara, signifying the long pole used to propel canoes through muddy or swampy passages, or to guide river launches in or out of moorings. “Vara” also leads to the transitive verb varar, which means to travel through or into, either with or without the aid of a vara, but which, in my understanding, connotes a certain degree of difficulty, the way in English you might say “we made it home.” However, while varar accurately expresses the function of the Arapiuns varadores as places through which a person travels, it glosses their heterogeneity.