In Amazonia (9 page)

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.

Octávio can explain this. Most of the middle-class urban Amazonians I know affirm their strong kinship connections with people in the countryside through talk that casts ribeirinhos in sentimentally nostalgic terms, as nobly folkloric, if deeply flawed figures. Octávio had other ideas. He considers blood ties subject to transcendence and locates himself on an uneasy border. Though his body be saturated with the genetic stain of the indigene, his spirit can soar, taking flight, south to São Paulo, north to Miami, perhaps east across the Atlantic. His conversation contains echoes of the Amazonian travel accounts of Victorian natural historians, with their descriptions of the easefully decadent life of the interior and the inability of rural people to perform what, in post-Enlightenment terms, was the definitively human action of asserting their will over nature through transforming it into culture. And I also hear traces of the Amazonianist anthropologists and archaeologists of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s—famous names: Julian Steward, Alfred Métraux, Betty Meggers, Daniel Gross—with their parallel depictions of a descent into nature, although here it is the draining enervations of Steward's “tropical forest culture area” rather than race or psychology that determines decline. There are important distinctions, but there is also an epistemic correspondence. Both these share with Octávio what literary critic David Spurr has recognized as a familiar Rousseauian-derived hierarchy of differences: one that “identifies non-European people with … nature, and then places nature in opposition to culture.”
⁵

Octávio's account was in many ways more sophisticated than either of these influential narratives. He, at least, understood that the making of places was hard, unremitting work, and, moreover, that it was characterized by tenuousness and insecurity. He demonstrated a rare understanding of the instabilities and incertitudes of global transformations, of the fact that space produced can later be erased, that marks on a map often have little permanence. This awareness stemmed partly from his rootedness in Amazonian localities. Here was a man who, although based in a comfortable office, had spent a good part of his thirty-year logging career on expeditions in the estuary searching for timber. Here was a man who had dragged his own cosmopolitan self through rural communities, trekking into forests, sleeping in the open, grappling with the logistics of timber extraction in difficult, uncomfortable, and technically and emotionally challenging terrain.

Octávio clearly had a local knowledge, and it was one that involved
a certain sensitivity to the insecurities of rural life. But it was positioned in such a way that it obscured the slightest notion of rural agency. As in the European narratives of jungle nature, his account locates Amazonian ribeirinhos as living
on
and
off
the land, scratching parasitically at its superficial layer, subject to its vicissitudes, and destined finally to succumb, driven to flee once the shade of the patrão's protective economic order has been withdrawn. Locality, for Octávio (in this case, Igarapé Guariba), was no more rooted than those ribeirinhos who were now its sole, inadequate markers. With the timber all gone, Igarapé Guariba had no meaning beyond its pitiful residue of abandoned peasants, whose commitment to this piece of land Octávio knew to be entirely transitory.

Unlike most Victorian naturalists and many post-war Amazonianist anthropologists, Octávio understood that rural Amazonian places assume at least some of their particularity through the transnational mobility of political economy. He had, after all, personally directed a sizable chunk of extra-local capital as it made its blundering way into the interior, chopping down forest and hauling out trees. These extractive projects of the 1970s did not just represent modernity, they actually were modernization in his eyes. And he was hardly alone in viewing the arrival of large-scale capitalist enterprises as the vehicle that would drag Amazonia and its reluctant peasantry into the modern world. This had been a strong-state project premised, like so many others in so many places, on the notion that new subjects would be created through the making of a new nature.
⁶
It would be through the transformation of the Amazonian landscape that those debilitating bonds holding rural people captive to nature finally would be severed.

After the timber ran out along the northern channel of the estuary and BRUMASA was taken over and liquidated in the late 1980s, Octávio passed into that premature career twilight in which we met. In so doing, he received brutal confirmation that there is nothing permanent about Progress. In his world of unforgiving nature, in which constant vigilance was needed just to stay civilized, rural places could fall out of locality far more easily than they could come to exist within it. And, he believed, once those networks of bourgeois political economy that had wrenched it into history were dissolved, there was nothing standing between Igarapé Guariba and the unforgiving jungle from which it had temporarily emerged.

T
HE
P
ATRÃO

Especially compelling in Octávio's account of Igarapé Guariba was his conflation of rural society into a single, undifferentiated
caboclo
, a countryperson, a hick. What people in Igarapé Guariba expressed as a foundational cleavage—the line between ribeirinhos and patrão—was eclipsed in his narrative. Instead, Octávio offered a view of the world in which the site of irreducible difference was the gulf between the modernization project of BRUMASA and that of the patrão of Igarapé Guariba, Raimundo Viega, the Old Man.

Until a few years before he died in 1983, Raimundo Viega was
O Patrão
. This did not mean that he was simply the landowner. He had purchased the land in the 1940s after working his way as a cowboy, a rubber-tapper, a small farmer, a boat-builder, and, by some accounts, as a
regatão
, an itinerant trader sailing between the settlements that dot the rivers and coastline around Macapá.
⁷
He had accumulated a little capital, married, bought his first piece of land in the municipality of Afuá on Marajó Island, and cultivated a network of ribeirinho clients—or “partners,” as his wife Dona Rita once corrected me. In explaining the underpinnings of life in Igarapé Guariba when his father was in control, Nestor, Raimundo's son, suggested why his mother might have made this distinction:

It was a type of exchange. You have some land. You put in someone who these days we'd call a
freguês
, a client. The responsibility of the patrão is to make land available to the freguês without the obligation of paying rent…. He plants his crops and takes them to the [patrão's] store and, with the produce he's bringing, grown on that land, the freguês buys merchandise. It was an exchange of work for goods.

Powerful emotional ties and obligations fostered and underwrote this transactional framework. Nestor is making explicit the often unspoken intimacies of
aviamento
, that intricate, persistent, Amazonian system of credit that emerged during the nineteenth-century rubber boom and involved large numbers of intermediary merchants moving capital (in the form of a variety of transformable goods) from places like Liverpool to other places like Igarapé Guariba, and back again.
⁸
To Viega's family, real leadership of Guariba involved more than merely
managing economy. It was an experiment in modernist social engineering, an enactment of enlightened humanitarianism, and a continuance of traditional forms of Amazonian solidarity. The terms in which Nestor and his mother frame the story of Igarapé Guariba were powerfully expressed twenty-five years earlier in a local newspaper column written by Edinaldo Gomes, a journalist and family friend:

It was only because of Raimundo Viega's
fibra
, his will, that people came to help with the occupation of Igarapé Guariba, an area unknown until 1940. That was when the brave pioneer, impelled by circumstance, resolved to drag it from a state of abandonment and exploit the potential that was already there only awaiting courage and the absolute willingness to work—two virtues Viega possesses even today.
⁹

For Gomes, this effort was a collaboration. The people who “came to help” were the ribeirinhos, who, I was told many times, by residents of Igarapé Guariba as well as by members of the Viega family and their associates, prospered under the paternalist regime that was soon established.

The great Brazilian historian of Amazonia, Arthur Cézar Ferreira Reis, writing in the 1950s, described the Amazon patrão as follows:

He is neither an opportunist nor someone who has got where he is by dint of birth or money. Originally, he was a backwoods scout, a forest explorer, who succeeded through possession of the virtues and qualities needed for victory. Experienced in the forest, ambitious, capable of imposing himself to willfully discipline men, successful in gaining the confidence of his suppliers. Sometimes he was the founder of a plantation, a
seringal
, sometimes an ex-worker who had managed to climb among his comrades and substitute himself for the former patrão, inheriting, by legal means, ownership rights to the plantation.
¹⁰

Reis is talking specifically about the rubber trade. But his militaristic construction of the patrão in self-made heroic terms corresponds remarkably with the language used by Gomes and by Viega's family. The discourse of struggle is not just tied to that of enlightenment, it constitutes it. Viega understands his fregueses because he himself was once where they are now. Moreover, their dependence on him imposes responsibility. As Nestor told me: