In Amazonia

by Raffles, Hugh

  Then there are the stories told by maps. Like the one drawn of Amapá in 1808 on which a river is marked Obstruido, with the explanatory note: “Furo Araguarí blocked off on the orders of Conde de Va Flor.”72 And, of course, place-names are cultural histories in themselves.73 A few hours downstream toward the ocean from Igarapé Guariba is Igarapé Novo, which, we might speculate, may not have been there long. People in Igarapé Guariba could not say much about Igarapé Novo except that the original stream was cut in the 1960s or 1970s as part of the local landlord’s campaign to exploit the timber market, and that it is now about as wide as the Rio Guariba. One man I know has a cousin there: “When you return, we’ll go,” he promised. “With that outboard motor, we could be there and back in a day.”

  Just one more. I called Octávio da Gama on the recommendation of his ex-boss, for many years a logger, now an expert in reforestation who manages the rolling recuperation of the vast Trombetas bauxite strip mine in the middle Amazon. Octávio was friendly and seemed eager to meet. I found his spacious white bungalow, tucked away in Santa Rita, a prosperous neighborhood of Macapá, without difficulty. As always in September, it was a blistering day, and we sat out on Octávio’s shaded patio and drank cokes and ate cookies that the maid brought us on a silver tray. Gradually, Octávio warmed to his subject: the glory days of Amazon logging. He had plenty of time to talk. I doubt he was much more than fifty, but his career was already over, and it was only too obvious that unemployment was not a life to which he had taken well.

  Octávio had been a manager for Bruynzeel Madeiras S/A (BRUMASA), a Dutch company whose domination of the Amapá timber trade can be readily gauged by a glance at any of the Ministry of Planning’s annual statistical almanacs during the 1970s. At the foot of each page of data on timber extraction, processing, or export, there’s a one-word note on the source: “BRUMASA.”

  Like Indústria e Comércio de Minérios S/A (ICOMI), a North American mining company that in the 1920s captured access to the considerable local magnesium deposits, BRUMASA’s Brazilian operation was eventually bought out by Grupo CAEMI, a national consortium that had benefited significantly from federal disbursements under the POLAMAZONIA development program of 1974. Unlike ICOMI, however, BRUMASA, along with Octávio’s job, was liquidated once the supply of easily accessible estuarine timber had disappeared.

  BRUMASA’s main sawmill was in Santana, a booming port 20 miles from Macapá. But their operations extended to Marajó, both channels of the estuary as far upstream as Gurupá, and, according to Octávio, they even owned land and contracted collectors west of Manaus. In their efforts to get the big trees, BRUMASA combined their muscle with imagination. To really appreciate their operation, it helps to remember just how inhospitable the estuarine várzea can be. As well as the disease, insects, and animals that trouble everyday experience, industrial extraction has to contend with a radically unstable terrain. The earth moves. It makes and remakes itself with the twice-daily tides. At low tide it sucks you down into waist-deep mud; by high tide, much of the forest is a swamp. There are plenty of trees lining the banks of rivers and streams, but many more deep in the woods. Under such conditions, how do you get in there and bring them out?

  Octávio had a flair for the dramatic. Without explanation, he left the patio, returning with a small stack of bleached-out color photographs. They had been taken during one of his field operations. The first showed bare-backed ribeirinhos working on what looked like a railroad through flooded várzea forest. This, he told me, with pleasure at my amazement, was a madeiravia, a wood-road. The company brought in the rails pre-sawn from maçaranduba, a highly resistant terra firme timber, and the locally recruited temporary workers cut trees on-site for the ties. It was simple. They hacked their way into the forest and laid the wood-road across the swamp as far as an interior clearing to which other men were dragging the felled trees. Then they rolled the rail trucks off the boats and pushed them, inch by inch, out and then back along the tracks, weighed down with the giant logs cut deep in the forest.

  Their other strategy was to dig canals. Octávio’s second photograph was of a sizable barge, more like a motorized raft, a vessel Amazonians call a balsa and which you often see plying the big rivers loaded with logs, containers, or vehicles. Like most balsas, BRUMASA’s came with a cabin and sleeping quarters and it was flat-bottomed, designed with minimal draft to pull right up to the shoreline and navigate shoals and sandbars. But there were a couple of significant differences: at the front it had a giant mechanical digger, and at the rear a large horizontal rectangular slab of wood. It was an adapted dredger.

  During the late 1970s, BRUMASA’s balsa saw a lot of action. The company used it to bludgeon nearly 20 miles of channels in the municipality of Breves in the southwest of Marajó. They tore up the land at the rate of 100 yards a day, carving a ditch 6 yards wide and 3 yards deep into which the rivers poured. They plowed straight through the forest, slicing at the trees with chainsaws as they went. An unstoppable juggernaut. “We could go wherever we wanted,” said Octávio.74

  It would really be something to visit those places today. The channels must still be there, although wider and deeper, the powerful estuarine tide continuing the work of the loggers. I imagine the people there living along the crumbling banks of the canals just like people in Igarapé Guariba and Igarapé-Miri, the streams now deeply part of a world of hunting, fishing, and canoes that the water makes possible, a world in which people manage the açaí to which BRUMASA, without thought for the lives or landscapes it was invading, gave access.

  It is easy to drown in all this movement among earth, people, and water, to sink in its ubiquity and idiosyncrasies. But didn’t Chermont de Miranda always keep his head above the tide he never tired of defining? And even though to me these channels finally all mean the same, that won’t stop them from sliding in and out of categories.

  Although the urge to typology seems to diminish this Amazonia of restless landscapes and practical people, of the foundational intimacy of multiple materialities, the urge itself has an irresistible aesthetic that intensifies its logic. The seductions of classification should not be denied. Think about technology and capitalization: comparing channels stripped with mechanical diggers and customized barges to ones cut by men struggling through mud with enxadas and machetes. Or the question of initial motivation and subsequent utilization: whether the channel is primarily seen as a shortcut to somewhere else or as a site of resource extraction in its own right. There is the matter of the environment in which the intervention is made: its soils, vegetation, and water qualities. Or, a more sociological approach: an examining of the roles in canal production of discretely analyzable social actors. We could identify channels initiated by individuals and collectivities with principal allegiances at a community level, others opened by members of the provincial elite, others by corporate elements of the regional economy with secure links to national and international capital circuits, and still others cut by organized sectors of the state itself. And, always historical conjuncture: associating interventions with particular moments in Amazonian history—the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave economies, the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century rubber trade, the timber and cattle frenzies of the 1970s. Or, archaeological conjecture and links to pre-Columbian economies. And what about the country and the city, a distinction between urban and rural manipulations, including in the former those giant projects of damming, channeling, and draining igarapés carried out during the construction of Belém and Macapá?

  The value of classificatory categories lies in more than their dismantling. Sometimes, the juxtaposition of taxa gives a shock of illumination. At other moments, there are other satisfactions, albeit more prosaically heuristic. The anthropogenic channels of Amazonia—great and small, old and new—are moments in the life of a region. Like grains of sand, their presence lies in their spectacular multiplicity; yet, they are also little gems, self-contained and faceted histories of counterpoint and reli
ef. They signal other worlds, so normal, commonplace, and everyday, yet also unfamiliar, and, in the persistence of that difference, revelatory of the boundaries that circumscribe inquiry.

  The porosity of the borders between earth and water in this terra anfíbia marks another order of fluidity. It offers an opportunity to reflect on both the insubstantiality of categories and on the work that they accomplish: on the instrumental logic that holds apart the everyday from the historical, the natural from the artificial, the local from the global, the human from the non-human. We can follow these channels, swim in their waters, float in their currents. We can suffer their intimacies as they take us to places in a different region, on another set of maps. Another place, right here, yet unmistakably different. Another place entirely. The Amazonian waters I know best run through Igarapé Guariba. We have barely broken their surface.

  3

  IN THE FLOW OF BECOMING

  Igarapé Guariba, 1941–1996

  How Did This Place Come into Existence?—Octávio, Race, and Nature—Timber and the Political Economy of Place-Making … and Unmaking—The River That Time Forgot—The Patrão, the Caboclo, and the Cultural Politics of Aviamento—The Simple Man—Onto the Maps of Modernity—Hard Work and Discursive Practice—Imprinting Locality on Landscape—Heavy, Fat Fish—Above the Waterfall—Digging, Digging, Digging—And More Digging—They Knew Where They Were Going—Two Aerial Photos—The Story of O Centro—Long Unraveling and Systemic Collapse—A New Regime—Many Natures, Many Places—These Truly Are the Things That Matter!

  I walked on shimmering pavement to meet Octávio da Gama, the ex-logger whose dredger ate the islands of Marajó. By night, Macapá is a party town for some, and a dance club marks the line of the equator. But under the relentless summer heat all is flat, dusty-red, and shadeless, and Octávio’s leafy patio was cool relief.

  Inevitably, it was our current selves that met that afternoon, “all the earlier phases of development continu[ing] to exist alongside the latest one,” as Freud once said, remembering Rome.1 Octávio seemed bound in frustration, forced retirement leaving no outlet for the decisive mind and powerful body that had once traveled rivers and commanded men. And I was newly obsessed by the landscapes of Igarapé Guariba, worrying constantly at one expanding question: How did this place come into existence?

  “How did this place come into existence?” It was Octávio who revealed the question’s possibilities. Perched in the BRUMASA offices above the port of Santana, he had received wood for many years from Raimundo Viega’s sawmill in Igarapé Guariba. And, although he had never actually set foot in Igarapé Guariba, he was not about to let that be an impediment to theory-making.

  BRUMASA controlled the Amazon timber trade from the beginnings of the logging boom in the early 1960s through to the 1980s. They bought up vast stretches of the estuary and built a state-of-the-art sawmill at Santana. They processed high-value timber for export, either to the south of Brazil, to the United States, or to Europe, and they sold cheaper lumber for construction in the local market. They operated largely by contract, buying logs from independent third parties who set up poorly capitalized, inefficient, and mostly short-lived sawmills at the mouths of distant rivers. BRUMASA’s operations extended from Santana past Manaus, nearly 1,000 miles upstream. They bought wood cut in Igarapé Guariba until there was no more worth buying, and, from his dealings with residents, Octávio, a senior manager in those years of dynamism, felt secure in asserting the place’s typicality and confident about describing its history and future.

  Octávio began by explaining that he, too, was an índio, an Indian. His blood was just as contaminated, his spirit just as base, as those who lived in the countryside and whom, he told me, I could find drinking themselves stupid down by the docks or wandering through town looking lost. In fact, everyone here in the Amazon, he told me, was índio. The patrões—the landowners—were the same, he said, even if they did not look it. What I should realize was that he, Octávio, had escaped in a way that these other wealthy men had not: they may be bosses, but they were of the interior, the hinterland, and they had never fully broken away. He, however, had been moving in a completely different world—working for a major international corporation, running the largest sawmill in the eastern Amazon, transforming his thinking and his character. He had, as Amazonians say, “mudou a cabeça,” he had “changed his head.”

  Octávio was unabashed in his characterization of the ribeirinhos, the people who live along the Amazonian rivers. “They spend 90 percent of their time looking for food. They don’t work. They put up their little houses, make their little fields, get themselves a woman, have a bunch of kids, and pronto! When they’re 65,” he concluded with vigor, “they get their pension from the government and they live like kings—vagabundos!”

  Although lively—and familiar—enough topics, race and destiny formed little more than an ambient agenda. As we sat sipping Cokes in the easy shade of his walled garden, what Octávio really wanted me to acknowledge was that there was nothing special about Igarapé Guariba, nothing that made it worthy of a foreigner’s attention.

  “The story of Igarapé Guariba,” he explained, carefully, so I could not fail to understand, “is the standard Amazonian story. Some guy puts up a sawmill in the interior. There’s never enough labor out there so he builds a bunch of shacks and contracts workers from somewhere else. After a while, there’s no more wood left to cut. The sawmill closes down, but there’s still this remnant of a town and so people stay on. They collect their fruit, catch their fish, hunt their animals; and soon there’s nothing left. Then they pack up and move to the city.” He worked up a satisfied cadence of inevitability, far from resignation: “Igarapé Guariba won’t be there for long. You’ll see.”

  Octávio was determined I not be naïve. There were certain realities here that needed affirming. But his language was disorienting. He was bringing me abruptly face to face with a new Igarapé Guariba, a place that at once seemed starkly opposed to, but no less realized, than the ones I encountered daily on the banks of the river itself. I tried to tell him it wasn’t at all this way! But then I started to think about the effects of a story like his—an account that described lives quite concretely and asserted a deep and specific connection between location and social life, that, in fact, made it clear that place, as much as race, class, and gender, was itself a social relationship. I started to think about what it meant when stories like this were set loose upon the world. Octávio’s Igarapé Guariba was not just nostalgia filtered through the bitterness of prejudice. His timbre, the crisp and absolutist structures of feeling he called upon, were naggingly similar to tones I knew from conversations in Igarapé Guariba itself. I saw it was a mistake to assume that the familiar ribeirinho style of assertive self-negation, with those knowing tales of how it had all gone to the dogs around here, was simply an expression of political maneuvering internal to this place.

  On the face of it, Igarapé Guariba is very much a “small place,” to use Jamaica Kincaid’s deliberate term.2 Just twenty-five houses strung along a river, no roads to take you there or back, no electricity to speak of, poor sanitation and the diseases that it brings, intermittent schooling, no health services within easy reach, a priest who stops by once a year to sanctify birth, death, and marriage, an economy of farming, fishing, hunting, and the sale of forest fruits. A village of the Amazon interior.

  Dora, my best friend there, the one at whose kitchen table I sat kvetching for more than a year, and a woman of formidable aspiration, regularly and evocatively referred to herself as living on “O Rio Esquecido”—The Forgotten River—as if this were all a waking nightmare from some tacky jungle movie. It was a phrase she launched with great acidity but very little irony, despite my discomfort. The language, of course, has its personal histories. For Dora, the overwhelming backwardness of Igarapé Guariba springs from her intolerable sense of out-of-placeness, her almost insupportable desire to return to the urban life in which she spent her teenage
years and in which she still feels complete. Her favorite adjective, triste, evokes something deeper and more systemic than ordinary sadness, and she uses it deliberately to describe this place, making of the wooden house and its scattered neighbors a metaphor for her life.3

  It was her ability to travel across psychic and cartographic boundaries that gave such intensity to what Dora experienced as the parochialism of Igarapé Guariba. It was the fated inevitability of return from her trips to Macapá—the inability to overcome her husband’s control of transport—that always generated her dismay, and the cascade of wishes, promises, schemes, and threats that betrayed it. Yet it is her voluble travels, her explosive coming and going along the networks that take her from Igarapé Guariba through Macapá, Santana, and occasionally Belém, her own charismatic cantankerousness, that are themselves the things that guarantee this river is not forgotten.

  Dora would have cursed Octávio for his arrogance had she heard our conversation that afternoon, but she would also have understood him. They had in common the terror of being circumscribed by lack of possibility, of being cast outside and behind the stream of history. The local as cosmopolitan horror story, the city as home. If the local was a pocket of exclusion, here were two people who refused to live within its compass. Dora never needed to spell it out directly: strong places can be so alienating, their pull of conformity so withering.

  Yet places are never still, and they are never finished. Instead, like people, they are always in process, always in “the flow of becoming,” always on the move.4 Igarapé Guariba forms and unravels, it comes together and disperses, constantly, unendingly, at particular moments in the service of particular projects. And everyone who speaks of it or who listens to its stories or who believes they know it in some otherwise analogic or associative way has their own changing idea of what Igarapé Guariba, this small place, actually is.