In the early hours of Monday August 12, silence fell on the Amazon. Márcio Souza, writer, dramatist, director, novelist, ’emperor of the Amazon’, passed away.
Considered one of the most important voices in modern Brazilian literature, he presented the Amazon from what he felt and from the history he so profoundly revealed. Márcio’s work encompassed theatre, literature, and cinema. He was the author of Mad María, A caligrafia de Deus (The Caligraphy of God), Gálvez, O Imperador de Amazonas (Galvez, the Emperor of Amazonas), As folias do látex (Sheets of Latex), A paixão de Ajuricaba (The Passion of Ajuricaba), and O fim do terceiro mundo (The End of the Third World). He told the story of the Amazon as no other writer has done.
Clashes between what is ‘modern’ and what is ‘backward’ still guide discussions on development in the Amazon. It is no accident that President Bolsonaro (PL) and his political base of deputies and senators relied on the rhetoric of progress to promote laws that unleash mining on indigenous lands, highways through the middle of the forest, and legalize the occupation of public lands by land-grabbers.
The duality between modernity and backwardness is not the fruit of chance, it has been cultivated by the powers that be in Brazil throughout history, as Márcio Souza explained in an interview with Amazônia Latitude in March 2022.
Márcio was the giant who taught us that ‘We cannot trust that the Amazon will resist just because it is big’.
‘In the advanced North [of Brazil],’ Márcio explains, ‘there was an industrial economy, small properties without slaves in Rio Negro, the introduction of coffee, the shipping industry, the export of various products from the jungle, the rubber. And, in the meantime, the Grão Pará 1)Grão Pará included a vast swathe of the Amazon including Para, Maranhão and the Rio Negro, with its capital at São Luís. It was governed from 1626 until 1775 as a separate ‘captaincy’, effectively a separate state ‘vice-kingdom of Brazil’ was a backward rural world with a regime of slavery’.
In Souza’s view, there was a pact of silence made by the southerners regarding what matters in knowledge of the Amazon. ‘There is a kind of cultural apartheid in Brazil between the metropolitan, culturally advanced South and the backward North, seen more as nature than as culture’.
One of Souza’s main concerns is that the idea of ‘progress’ destroys the Amazonian episteme and the profound cultural structure of the region, given that ‘the modernity conducted by the south of the country begins in the category of persecution and murder of the native populations’.
For Souza, viewing the Amazon as backward ‘is a stupid attitude because you do not have the slightest idea of what you are destroying … If an entire area is brought down that has never been visited, which only the indigenous peoples know, we are throwing away unbelievable wealth. When an ethnicity disappears, humanity loses a piece of its own humanity’, he continues.
Souza describes his personal experiences during the dictatorship and how projects for the region are generated in air-conditioned offices in Brasília. He warns that the Amazon is not eternal: “We cannot trust that the Amazon is big enough to resist”.
More, almost, than any other contemporary figure, Márcio Souza loved the Amazon and will be loved in turn for every word he gifted us.
LAB will publish The Amazon In Times of War by Marcos Colón In October 2024, with launch events planned In London, Oxford, Manchester, Newcastle, Cambridge and St.Andrews