Magical encounters with nature draw people to the Amazon every year. LA: That animal, it turns out, was a giant otter. But w- I was inside this river in the middle of the forest listen of dozens of people dancing. And because we are a- white people, are foreigners, we couldn't participate of the party. And the Yanomami were doing a party because they have hunted a big animal. I was, uh, one night in a river, because we have showers in the rivers and we are in the forest, of course. It's something so, so, so amazing that, again, I feel myself so alive. And immediately a couple of, uh,, I don't know the name the- of this animal in, in English, jump in front of us. We have to cross, to carry the boats across the stones and many things happened.Īnd when I- we enter in this river, dozens, maybe, maybe thousands of yellow butterflies appeared suddenly. We needed five days to reach them by boat from here, from Altamira. The official Brazil didn't know about them. We went there because the people were threatened, the forests were being burned with the house of the traditional people for the structures of the forests. She spent years covering social issues in Brazilian cities but at some point her interest in the Amazon started to take over.ĮB: We were the first journalists to reach a part of the forest called. LA: That was the indigenous singer from Brazil, Djuena Tikuna.Įliane is a documentary film maker, a novelist, nonfiction writer, and a journalist who's written for publications like Bronte, The Guardian, El Pais, and the New York Times.
When was the moment you knew you had fallen in love with living in the forest? I don't need clock alarm because I know by the sounds what is happening, what time it is. And there are different and amazing sounds all the time. I live in the forest, not the primary forest. And I couldn't understand what was this- that song. And then we sleep in the forest.Īnd the first time I, I listened this guadebis, this monkeys, I was still sleeping around four AM in the morning. And we begin- and we, we make a fire to do our food. We make our hammocks in the middle of the forest. And we cannot travel during the night because it's too dangerous because there are many stones in the river.
Because some moments of the day, the first time I listen many, many, many years ago, I thought it was - I was sleeping in a hammock in the middle of the forest, because when you travel in the forest, we stopping in the end of the day because we travel by boat. For me the most beautiful sound in the forest is the sound of a monkey that we call guadebis. So I wanted to know what it sounds like, what it feels like to be there.ĮB: The forest is unbelievably alive. Eliane says even Brazilian readers don't know that much about her area. LA: Few people get to experience the Amazon during their lifetime. And we need to understand that just here in Brazil we have more than 300 indigenous people and more than 200 languages. LA: Diane and Eliane have never met in person, but working together to bring the stories within this book to an English-speaking audience has really bonded them.ĮB: I'm trying to talk in English and my book was translated into English.
I asked Diane how you'd explain the book to anyone unfamiliar with Brazil.ĭiane Whitty: If you would like to take a journey into the Amazon, a world that, um, you know hardly anything about, and in the same time take that trip as a transformational experience of a person who goes from a city dweller to someone who feels herself intermixed with the forest, you will come out with a new understanding of our relationship with the world, where we are at this moment of the world, and how the Amazon is central to our ability to continue to exist on this planet as we have, as we'd like our future generations to live on this planet. It's why we're also talking to Diane Whitty, who's based in Madison, Wisconsin and lived in Brazil before translating Eliane's book. Eliane has been documenting this for decades, and much of that work appears in her new book, Banzeiro Òkòtó, or The Amazon as the Center of the World, out on March 7th.
0 kommentar(er)
