Write about the present so that the reader can glimpse the future that is just around the corner. The columns of Eliane Brum (Ijuí, Rio Grande do Sul, 57 years old) are like punches in the stomach, screams from the heart, warning of the climate emergency or analyzing the great evils of her country, Brazil. It shows that he writes from within. But in person, he speaks softly and in the sweetest voice, as if he wants to ensure that his interlocutors pay due attention to each word and choose it carefully. Maybe he learned it from his parents, both teachers.
Brum grew up in the whitest part of Brazil, on the border with Argentina. When you grab a map, Ijuí is at one point; on the other side the Amazon, the largest tropical forest in the world. A forest that, after surviving 50 million years of volcanoes, glaciations, meteorites and continental drift, is seriously threatened by the damage caused by humans over the last 50 years. And without Amazonia the planet would be hell.
Brum, columnist for EL PAÍS, publishes in Spanish La Amazonia, a journey to the center of the world, translated by Mercedes Vaquero Granados and published by Salamandra. It is a mix of journalistic reportage and a plea for the climate emergency, but also a personal chronicle of the profound change he experienced when he left São Paulo to settle in the heart of the Amazon, in Altamira, on the banks of the Xingu River to settle down. It is the epicenter of deforestation and a violent city. There it is just as dangerous and politically toxic to talk about ecology as it is difficult to find a house with a garden terrace. They prefer cement.
Brum has three long decades of experience in journalism, having published essays and novels, made documentaries, and in 2022 launched an Amazon-made journalism platform (also in Spanish) called Sumaúma, ceiba in Portuguese. He has the majestic tree tattooed on his forearm. The interview takes place in a cafeteria during a short stop for Brum in São Paulo. Although Altamira has an airport, three flights are required to travel the almost 3,000 kilometers.
When you're in the jungle, do you read in the hammock before you go to sleep? What is this moment like?
I always read before bed. It is very important to me. I retire early to the hammock. A seamstress from Altamira invented a wonderful technology, the mosquito net for apartments, similar to a canopy. It's a lot easier now because I have a Kindle with a lamp with me, before I used a small lamp on my head. I read a lot of novels, I like to escape because the jungle requires total presence and I travel to other worlds and come back from the hammock. On the last trip in November, I read “Umbigo do mundo” by Fran Baniwa, in which she responds to how white people anthropologically represent their people.
“Since I was a child, I have written in order not to die and not to kill.” An impressive statement. What was it like growing up in a small town in southern Brazil, on the other side of the Amazon?
This sentence comes from an event that occurred when I was five or six years old, before I learned to read. I grew up under the dictatorship, and at home people talked about banned books. I wanted to fight against it, to be a guerrilla. My father, the illiterate son, was the first in the family to learn to read. He founded a university that was considered subversive; and I, daughter of the communist. He founded a school in the countryside that followed the Paulo Freire method, had a calendar that respected harvest times, a curriculum created with small farmers… And the mayor from the party linked to the dictatorship closed the school . And for the first time I saw my father, my hero, humiliated. The mayor said to him: “Mr. Argemiro, don't be sad.” I have never forgotten this condescending sentence. I saw my father destroyed. We drove back home in the Beetle, silently, without anyone doing anything. I thought, “I have to do something. “I'm going to burn down City Hall.” I knew it was wrong and that it could have consequences, but I grew up in this world of idealism and struggle. I stole a box of matches and before the others got up, I went to the town hall, lit a match, another… Nothing happened. My first political act was a failure.
Then he learned to write.
For me, writing is a way to light a fire without committing a crime. When I was nine years old I wrote my first poem so I wouldn't die. Writing is something very visceral, it structures me. I haven't written any reports for a while now, just editorials, columns, and a funny thing happened. Stop grieving.
And is that good or bad for you?
When I don't write, a lot of unsaid things come to mind. I'm feeling very bad. As soon as I started writing, I cried again.
Eliane Brum. Goodbye Christ
He says that the Amazon sets traps like an anaconda. How did it happen?
Slowly it became years. It started in two ways. Firstly, with the propaganda of the dictatorship, which gave rise to the slogan that is still valid today: “Amazon, a land without people for men without a country.” That is, for them, the people in the jungle, they were not people. The rich people in my town bought land there when I was growing up and openly said that they had driven out the native people. The second way was a Xingu indigenous person who brought Funai (the National Foundation for Indigenous Peoples) to the city to give lectures. He must have been around 60 years old. He was in such poor accommodation that we invited him over and he stayed home for a while. Since my parents worked long hours, he took care of me. He taught me to sing in his language, he told me stories, we walked hand in hand. That shaped me. He had a very beautiful handwriting in which he wrote the Ave Maria [lengua] Tikuna, something I already sensed was violent. The Amazon comes to me through these experiences. I traveled there for the first time in 1997 and as the poetry of [Carlos] Drummond de Andrade: “The world machine opened up.”
Two decades later, in 2017, it is back to stay. You settle in Altamira, in your opinion “on the first front line of the most important battle of our time”. What prompted you to do this?
For a decade he had closely followed the families displaced from the jungle [la construcción de la hidroeléctrica] Belo Monte. This gave me a different perception of the climate crisis. I understood that we were in a moment about creating things that didn't exist and making radical decisions.
For example?
On a trip in 2014, I met a woman on the riverbank named Raimunda Silva. We traveled together in a rowing canoe. The best way: It's slow and you don't make any noise. In fact, he told me stories while others were rowing. Last week she watched the island where she lived with her husband Don João burn. Norte Energía, the concessionaire of the work, had set fire to the house and all its belongings. Everything burned to ashes. Raimunda sang to the plants and asked for forgiveness for not being able to save them. She also told me that her husband was at the Norte Energía office to negotiate, but why negotiate when you have no other choice? João, who was over 60 years old, knew he would be hungry from then on. And he suffered a stroke, he tried to convince his family that he wanted to burn himself on the island to get the world's attention. I told his story in EL PAÍS, it had a big impact. We put together a team of psychoanalysts to listen to the suffering of the displaced, but I thought: “I defend that the Amazon, nature, where life is – and not markets – is the center of the world.” “Either do it “We need a radical shift in what is center and periphery, or we have no option to address the climate crisis.”
Above all, she likes to define herself as a listener. What do you learn from the jungle people?
This nature, life, is about relationships, not individuals or groups. When I saw the jungle from here [São Paulo]No matter how much I read, I understood it as vegetation, dense, lush, deforested. I remember the first fire, when I was already living there, when I was already someone else. It was then that I understood that I was seeing Holocausts. Because every tree is a planet that is connected to another planet, each of which is home to millions of living beings. And when you see the forest burning, sloths die, jaguars, macaws, monkeys, toads, insects die… Some are in unbearable pain. They helplessly participate in the Holocaust. And the next day there is only silence. The jungle is very loud, he only falls silent when he dies.
And see how everything is really connected.
Understanding interdependence is very transformative. I don't see my house as my home. I learned it in the Amazon. I share my house with many other creatures that live with me, spiders, toads… There is a species of ant that comes by once or twice a year; One day you wake up and there they are, crossing the house in a row. A different neighborhood in every era. We don't kill snakes, we try to drive them away if they are poisonous. I also learned that joy is one of the main tools of struggle and resistance. We mourn the dead, but we also dance. The body is not denied, nor is love, sex, or the joy of being a body. People laugh no matter how brutal the situation is. I always reported on human rights, but then returned to my safe apartment. There are weeks in the Amazon where almost every day something very brutal happens that affects people I know. It is impossible to deny that we are witnessing a war.
Without the ability to close the door and seek refuge.
No, I'm in the Banzeiro, in the middle of the whirlpool. Then you understand that time is circular and not linear. Says [el antropólogo] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro that the indigenous people of Brazil experienced the end of the world in 1500 and that perhaps they can teach us how to live after the end of the world.
Doesn't the magnitude of the challenge sometimes drown you?
I never miss an opportunity to laugh, you always have to be looking for life. Even though the Amazon is in the middle of a whirlwind, I feel much lighter.
An apocalyptic headline from today: “2023 will be the hottest year in millennia.” And as we talk, people around us are drinking coffee, others are exercising in the park, others are driving cars. They claim that the solution for the planet is for us to become Amazon, like you are doing. To count.
When I come to São Paulo or go to London and see people living like there is no tomorrow [se ríe]I have a very stressful feeling, like I'm in a model or in a resort. I really like that sentence [el filósofo] Bruno Latour: “Denial is the way the elites have found to make the poor pay the climate bill.” Trump and Bolsonaro, the executives of large companies, are such deniers and calculators. But the majority of us live a different denial mindset. Capitalism has destroyed our survival instinct. Every being, no matter how primary, has it. No matter how much information people have, no matter how much they scream, no matter how much the house falls down on us, even if no more scientific reports are needed, just look out the window: people continue to live as if this were a phase that will pass. .
She chose Altamira because she is convinced that there she can glimpse what our future will look like in years, decades or centuries.
Belo Monte caused a kind of local climate crisis that radically changed the landscape within ten years. People were torn from their flooded territory and thrown to the outskirts of cities. You have lost contact. They died. Altamira became the most violent city in Brazil. This troubled area has seen a wave of suicides by children-turned-teenagers.
Eliane Brum poses in a park in São Paulo. Goodbye Christ
Do you miss hearing Greta Thunberg's voice louder?
The movement that inspired Greta is fundamental. I put myself in the shoes of this generation. She must be desperate to see her life in the hands of denying adults. I accompany the young people of the jungle. In 2019, Bolsonaro's first year, we celebrated that the Amazon was the center of the world. We invited activists from Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Pussy Riot… to come from Europe into the deep jungle. It was a very powerful meeting with the leaders of the jungle. The shift between center and periphery materialized. We will not emerge from this abyss with the same Eurocentric, Western, white, binary, patriarchal language that drew us here. We must focus on the values of the jungle people. Thanks to them, nature survives.
Are you therefore defending that the fight for the jungle includes the fight against patriarchy, femicide, racism or gender binaries?
One cannot understand the climate crisis without understanding that it is traversed by issues of race, species, class, and gender. Women are leading the fight in the Amazon because some of the men have become corrupt.
What was the experiment like using gender neutral in this book?
Very difficult at first. It created noise. What causes noise now is its disuse. We have to find a language that we all fit into. In the jungle everyone is human, without hierarchy.
Man is conceited and arrogant.
And ridiculous! Our time on this planet is tiny. The first time I saw bioluminescent mushrooms, I realized how ridiculous we are. Fungi have been producing very sophisticated compounds for billions of years.
Under Bolsonaro, Brazil was seen as a global environmental villain. What do you think of current and former President Lula?
Any answer must begin with the fact that Bolsonaro was a genocide. The most important thing was to defeat an electoral genocide. Lula is giving very contradictory signals. Brazil has everything it takes to be an ecological power, but it wants to be one by producing more oil. They are incompatible things. The integration of millions of Brazilians into a new middle class took place at the expense of nature and the export of raw materials, without structural changes in income distribution. Lula is a man steeped in the mentality that oil means national salvation and wealth. Most leftists in Latin America, perhaps even in the world, still live in the 20th century and have not yet understood what the climate crisis means. We don't even talk about the law. Brazil is an example. For the dictatorship and all subsequent governments, the jungle is a body to be violated and exploited. The tragedy is that on this home planet we are living through the worst plight of our time with an extremely predatory far right and a left that does not understand the 21st century. And there is no time.
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