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In lyrical, impassioned prose, Eliane Brum recounts her move from São Paulo to Altamira, a city along the Xingu River that has been devastated by the construction of one of the largest dams in the world. In community with the human and more-than-human world of the Amazon, Brum seeks to reforest herself while building relationships with forest peoples who carry both the scars and the resistance of the forest in their bodies. Weaving together the lived stories of the region and its history of violent corruption and destruction, Banzeiro Òkòtó is a call for radical change, for the creation of a new kind of human being capable of facing the potential extinction of our species. In it, Brum reveals the direct links between structural inequities rooted in gender, race, class, and even species, and the suffering that capitalism and climate breakdown wreak on those who are least responsible for them. The title Banzeiro Òkòtó features words from two cultural and linguistic traditions: banzeiro is what the Amazon people call the place where the river turns into a fearsome vortex, and òkòtó is the Yoruba word for a shell that spirals outward into infinity. Like the Xingu River, turning as it flows, this book is a fierce document of transformation arguing for the centrality of the Amazon to all our lives.
Eliane Brum is an award-winning Brazilian journalist, writer, and documentarist. Her first work of nonfiction, The Collector of Leftover Souls, was long-listed for the National Book Award for translated literature. Her work as a journalist has won more than 40 prizes. She is a columnist for El País and regularly collaborates with the Guardian. She lives in Altamira, in the Amazon.
"Banzeiro Òkòtó is the ultimate guidebook to the Amazon. Not a travel guide, but one that takes you much deeper, right into the forest's deep soul. The wonder of it, the oneness of the indigenous people with the land, the horror of the genocide they're still resisting, the corruption and the terrible violence – always inextricably linked – perpetrated by the grileiros and their political allies as they seek to convert one of the world's greatest treasures into cash."
– Patrick Alley, Co-Founder of Global Witness and author of Very Bad People
"A book that distils a lifetime of listening, wild with empathy, and refines it in the fire of unimpeachable political acuity. Written with diamond intelligence, Brum gives the reader the reforested human: impassionate, courageous and complete."
– Jay Griffiths, author of Wild: An Elemental Journey
"I read it in a single sitting, transfixed, terrified, heartbroken and exhilarated. The book's alive and ablaze; tender, tough, fierce and prophetic, thrumming with urgent and contagious anger. Its importance as an account of the darkness and glory of humans, and the rape and love of a land, is matched only by its importance as a manifesto. If we're to survive as a species, Brum shows us how it must be done."
– Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast
