All photos: Dan Wylie |
What a
change this is from the attitudes of earlier European travellers, ethnographers
and missionaries who, in their smug and self-sacrificial way, gave themselves
over to trying to haul remote and isolated ‘Indian’ tribes bodily into
modernity. Those intruders, coming from an
industrially-developing Europe which largely thought of wilderness as a blight
to be conquered or held at a safe aesthetic distance, found the Amazonian
jungle terrifying. And they took their fear out on the hapless indigenous
peoples, even as they enslaved them to leach the forests of rubber.
Michael
Taussig’s gritty and unsparing book, Shamanism,
Colonialism and the Wild Man, relates the cycle of violence against both
nature and natives in the colonial Amazon:
[T]he image of stark opposition and of otherness in the
primeval jungle comes forth as the colonially intensified metaphor for the
great space of terror and cruelty ... working its way in the ancient forests of
the tropics ... such that the brutal destructiveness imputed to the natural
world serves to embody even more destructive relations in human society.
In the 1820s
(just as Thomas Pringle & Co were settling in another wilderness in our own
Eastern Cape), the British explorer Charles Stuart Cochrane experienced the
jungle as a riot of predatory violence:
[E]ach shrub or tree weakens or destroys its neighbour, by
its excess of produce, which is greater than the space will admit. One plant
springs up to destroy its predecessor, and is doomed to the same fate itself by
the growth of its successor. It appears as if a war existed amongst plants,
similar to that which devastates the human world, and prevails even amongst
brutes and insects. ... Why it should be so – what great or good object is
gained by it, we know not; we only perceive that all are under some
irresistible influence, and impelled by some invisible power.
And
this thirty years or more before Darwin published On the Origin of Species.
A
hundred years later, responses remained often the same. The Colombian Joaquin Rocha descended into
the Amazon basin from the Peruvian Andes. Down in the jungle, he wrote:
The silence hangs heavy, broken only by the clanging
clamour of the torrents, the growling of tigers, and the swarming of infinite
vipers and venomous insects. In [the village of] Descanse begins the plague of
vampire bats that extends until Brazil, treacherously sucking in the hours of
dreams the blood of men and animals. There also, by the side of Brassymum galactodendron whose trunk
when incised yields milk as delicious and nutritive as the cow’s, grows the Rhus juglande folia whose mere shade
puffs up and scars the careless wanderer. There one begins to suffer the
privations and calamities of the wilderness, that in the Caqueta and the Putumayo
grow so as to at times make of life there scenes whose horror could figure in
the Dantean pages of Purgatory and Hell.... There the person in perpetual
contact with this savage wilderness becomes just as savage.
A
strange mix of botanical accuracy and
revulsion. It was the lack of
controllable order that seemed to space visitors out most. The indigenes had to be subjected to the same
order, too (or elevated into it, as some thought of it). The result, as Roger Casement was almost
simultaneously documenting in both the Congo and the Peruvian Amazon, the
impact on local populations was vicious to the point of genocide.
Oddly,
at much the same time as Rocha was quaking in his boots, and Casement was
irritating the British Government with the grim truths of colonial invasion, the
great English Modernist writer Virginia Woolf was composing The Voyage Out (1915). The characters in
this early novel voyage to a fictional holiday resort on the South American
coast; most of the ‘action’ consists of intricate conversations about one another,
but at one point some of them do take a boat trip up a major river into the
forested hinterland. As one might expect from a writer who had never been
there, the descriptions of the jungle are rather generalised. At first, this
forest which, Woolf writes, had scarcely changed since Elizabethan times,
overwhelms:
They seemed to be driving into the heart of the night, for
the trees closed in front of them, and they could hear all around them the
rustling of leaves. The great darkness had the usual effect of taking away all
desire for communication by making their words sound thin and small ... The
trees and the undergrowth seemed to be strangling each other near the ground in
a multitudinous wrestle; while here and there a splendid tree towered high
above the swarm, shaking its thin green umbrellas in the upper air.
And one
character, Hirst, bursts out:
“It makes one awfully queer, don’t you find ... These trees
get on one’s nerves – it’s all so crazy. God’s undoubtedly mad. What sane
person could have conceived a wilderness like this, and peopled it with apes
and alligators?”
But
other characters do find glimpses of beauty in the forest, moments of
meditation, fabulous butterflies. This party of displaced and introverted
English makes a boat trip to an “Indian village”, evidently rather set up for
the titillation of foreign voyeurs. A sad and depleted community, the scene
saddens them, makes at least one character even more aware of the essential
fragility of their lives.
Much
the same happened to me when I descended on the Amazon almost exactly a century
later in 2013. I had the advantage of a jet liner that landed me in Manaus, a
city of half a million right in the middle of the Amazon basin. I shacked up at
little tour outpost on a tributary of the Amazon itself, with a dining room
mounted on great floating logs and reed-walled cabins. I was mainly there to
research caimans for my book on crocodiles – which I did to the extent of going
out with a guide at night, boating among the reeds with eyes gleaming back in
our torchlight, until we caught a little fellow who had to suffer the indignity
of being manhandled by everybody and photographed before being released.
Like
Woolf’s characters we also dropped in on the obligatory ‘Indian village’,
watched women weaving house walls from palm fronds, lamented the thinness of
the scabrous dogs, and felt obliged to buy a necklace adorned with a piranha
jaw. It was all rather dispiriting and faintly artificial – a sense of a kind
of “slow violence” (the phrase is Rob Nixon’s) inflicted on a reluctant people.
With
motley international companions I also boated through various channels in the
complex waterways, looking for grey and pink dolphins in the ochre waters, sloths
and howler monkeys in the trees, jacanas in the water-lily beds. The river was
in flood, so we could kayak almost through the lower canopy of the huge trees –
what they call the varzea – where all
horizons and directions and depths are lost in a shimmering maze of bewitching
reflections melting into more reflections.
And we
walked in the jungle. Unlike my predecessor travellers, I absolutely loved it.
For all the sweat-drenching humidity, the startling thorns, and stinging ants,
and tarantulas we coaxed out of their burrows, and the possibility of jaguar
and anaconda (I didn’t get to see either, sadly), I felt utterly at home there.
I was raised in forest – albeit nothing so gigantic as this – so my soul was
prepared, despite the radical differences in vegetation. I couldn’t stop taking
photos of light through palm fronds, and luminous fungi, and fringes of
feathery leaves, and marvellously symmetrical creepers snaking up the massive buttresses
of towering trees. We slept out, in a row of hammocks under a reed lean-to: I
could scarcely sleep for the multiplex, layered sounds of the forest’s insects
and frogs and creaking night birds and subtle whisperings of wind and nearby
water. Struggle and competition there surely is out there, but also a riot of
symbioses, mutualities, supports and sharings. What I could hear of it through
the snoring, that is: I just wanted to be alone out there, in the not-silence.
Back in
Manaus, I attended part of a jazz festival in the incongruously huge, gold-domed
opera house – an opera-house in the jungle! This of course was the subject of Werner
Hertzog’s film Fitzcarraldo, in which
the hero Fitzgerald humps the materials for an opera-house over a jungle-encrusted ridge
between rivers to construct his dream (wholly unnecessarily, in real life).
Hertzog captured the experience of filming Fitzcarraldo
in another film – a meta-film – called The
Burden of Dreams, in which he had
this to say about the jungle:
There is some kind of harmony. It is the harmony of
overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate
vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle.
We in comparison
to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and
half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel.
And we
have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming
fornication, overwhelming growth and overwhelming lack of order. Even the ...
stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe.
We have to get acquainted with this idea that there is no real harmony as we
have conceived it. But when I say this, I say this all full of admiration for
the jungle. It is not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much. But I
love it against my better judgement. ... fornication and asphyxiation and
choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away...
Some
love. Obscenity and fornication – really? I suspect the problem was that the
jungle, unaccountably, failed to stroke Werner’s overweening ego.
Likewise
even the most lyrical and insightful of all Amazonian ethnographers, Philippe
Descola, whose book The Spears of Twilight
relates his time of living with the fabled Putumayo people. He cannot but feel
rebuffed, his very sense of self disintegrating, if he approaches the forest
wearing European artistic lenses:
Submerged in its green monotones, nature here is not of the
kind to inspire a painter. Only at twilight does it deploy its bad taste, in
line with Baudelairean aesthetics, exceeding the artifice of the gaudiest of
coloured images. The inhabitants of the forest become exceptionally agitated
during this brief debauchery of colour. The animals of the daytime noisily
prepare for sleep while the
nocturnal species awaken for the hunt, their
carnivorous appetites whetted. Smells are also more definable now, for the heat
of the long late afternoon has given them a consistency that the sun can no
longer dissipate. ... [T]he sensual organs are suddenly assailed at dusk by a
multiplicity of simultaneous perceptions that make it very difficult to
discriminate between sight, sound and smell. Thanks to this brutal onslaught on
the senses, the transition between day and night in the forest acquires a
dimension of its own as if, for a brief moment just before the great void of
sleep takes over, the human body is no longer separate from the environment.
When
acres of clear-felling (for rubber and hamburgers), pollution from mining
operations (mercury turning up in the tissues of caimans), and proposals to
build dozens of dams on Amazonian tributaries, this sense of being overwhelmed
is waning. The ecological consequences of decimating the “lungs of the world",
and the planet’s highest reservoir of biodiversity, are one thing. We are also destroying
the very sense of mystery on which our psyches seem to long for, like an inner
Eden. Michael Taussig is sensitive to
its fragility, but even his perception is shadowed by a sense of threat:
Yet all around in the forest nothing is fixed. The rain is
beating. The water drips off the shining leaves in the dark forest. Rivulets
form into streams and rivers gather force to form the muddy Amazon swirling
past the Italian marble and Polish prostitutes of rubber-rich Manaos ... Onward
swirls the river to the sea close by where Columbus’s boats met the heaving
chop of the currents of the Orinoco, one of the four rivers of Paradise...
What
have we come to, when the very health of our planet is perceived as alien to
us...
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