In Amazonia (31 page)

7

FLUVIAL INTIMACIES

Amapá, 1995–1996

The Language of Water—Intimate Places—The White House, A Haunting—The Vila as Chronotope—Sônia and Miguelinho—A Perverse Irruption and a Lurid Moment—The Mote in the Association's Eye—Life and Debt—Yes, It Still Looks Like Aviamento—The Cantina—Tainted with the History of Its Own Birth—Açaí Is Delicious!—Hard Times in Macapá—Fear of a Free Market—A Terrible Responsibility—The Fractures through Which She Sails—Tough, Dangerous Work—Recursive Performance of Public Surveillance—“Even Beasts Feel Love”—Eliana

There is a moment early on in his strange and beautiful book,
Water and Dreams
, when Gaston Bachelard tells us that “the language of water” is not metaphorical. This seemingly obscure point is later developed in a discussion of the mimetic inadequacies of onomatopoeia, and it shows Bachelard reaching to convey the profound unity that ties people and water, indissolubly. His starting point is autobiographical. “I was born in a section of Champagne noted for its streams,” he confides:

The most beautiful of retreats for me would be down in a valley, beside running water, in the scanty shade of the willows and water-willows. And when October came with its fogs on the river….

I still take great pleasure in following a stream, in walking along the banks in the right direction, the way the water flows and leads life elsewhere.
¹

As he writes, Bachelard is in the midst of his multivolume meditation on the elements, the “hormones of the imagination,” as he calls them. He has already caused quite a commotion with
The Psychoanalysis of Fire
(1938), but there is something too personal about water: it
confounds him, prevents him from achieving the rigor that would allow the invocation of the psychoanalytic. Instead, he describes his essay simply as a study in literary aesthetics.

But in this he is altogether too modest. The book is unexpected and creative. And its most telling insight, that in water people find “
a type of intimacy
,” and that “already, in his inmost recesses, the human being shares the destiny of water,” translates across continents, contexts, and disciplines.
²

Bachelard has a wonderful way of explaining this. He argues that “the language of waters is a direct poetic reality; that rivers and streams
provide the sound
for mute country landscapes, and do it with a strange fidelity; that murmuring waters teach birds and men to sing, speak, recount; and that there is, in short, a continuity between the speech of water and the speech of man.”
³

I love this idea of the speech of water. Its animism summons entirely different traditions of thought and instantly enlivens the narrow materialism of Euro-American academia, a tide to wash away parochial convention. Its enlivening of nature carries me back to Igarapé Guariba, to what people there call the
rio-mar
, the river-sea, and in which live all kinds of worlds, all types of beings, and all manner of intimacies.

Bachelard's method for unfolding these poetics is, appropriately, through poetics—a rich and idiosyncratic study of image and imagination. In this final chapter, I want to approach the same end in an entirely different way: through an account of rivers, trade, and the grounded prosaics of everyday political economy in Igarapé Guariba. Bachelard's work is the invitation and inspiration. Yet where he holds water in view, up to the light, sharply examining its facets and ungraspable fluidities, I meet it seeping through at the margins, always there, always in motion, always in mind, and—as if to demonstrate Wittgenstein's observation that “the aspect of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity”
⁴
—nearly always invisible.

I
NTIMATE
P
LACES

It is by transgressing the conventions of human space that rivers reveal the poverty of scalar categories. They are, as Bruno Latour has written of railroad tracks, “local at all points,” while being definitively, unstoppably
translocal.
⁵
Well, not entirely unstoppable, of course, as dam-building and other engineering have shown only too plainly. But always
immanently
translocal—if not saturated with nostalgia for other geographies, then brimming with the promise and the possibility of Bachelard's elsewhere.

Not even locality is contained within spatial borders though. As people journey along these Amazon rivers, they take places with them in their embodied and imaginative practices.
⁶
But, as everyone knows, locality also has its spatial correlate, and even imaginary places usually have a physical location, the anchor and first mark of placefulness.
⁷
Lines of demarcation may be tenuous, permeable, and rapidly dismantled and reconstituted, but they nonetheless confer a kind of fixity. Places seem to need boundaries and to make sense in terms of insides and outsides, even if these are permanently in the being-made and even if we have trouble knowing exactly where they are at any given moment. And rivers? Rivers themselves are both guardians and betrayers of places. And, what's more, despite often being themselves the borders that make places, they are places too, as mobile as can be. Nevertheless, it makes no sense for this Amazonian natural history to follow Bachelard in opposing water to landscape. We have been wading in
terra anfíbia
, an amphibious world of mobile porosities where land and water become each other, and where humans and non-humans are made and unmade by those same sediments that bring histories and natures flooding into the immediacy of the now.
⁸

Bachelard tunes out the dissonances of power and politics from his murmuring waters. He prefers an easy nostalgia, one that fills his present with the pleasurable romance of the pastoral. But the type of intimacy in which he lingers is more than mere proximity. It is also the mark of a lived relationship between humans and nature, an expression of biography—of the politics tied up in the lives of both people and landscapes. Different natures and histories produce a wide range of mediations of experience, varied and differential structures of feeling, and complex and constitutive intimacies.
⁹
Such intimacies are sites where the politics of space are practiced: where places, regions, and localities get worked through, made, and grounded, literally.

In a series of provocative essays, Alphonso Lingis takes us to intimacies quite unlike Bachelard's comforting ruralities.
¹⁰
Although similarly at the edge of the inexpressible and pushing against rationalist analyses and cultural logics, this is a dangerous space of desire, claustrophobic even when most at ease. Lingis is not party to the conservatism
that ties place, rootedness, and the intimate, and instead strives for that fleeting communion in which intimacy burns in anonymous coupling. Despite their expression in the idiom of individual experience, these intimacies are always compromised by contexts and events, are never exterior to power. They emerge through a reflexive ethnography of encounter, and in this respect as well as in his refusal to romanticize locatedness, Lingis opens up intimacy as a broad and differentiated realm of affective sociality, a realm characterized by embodiment and relationality.

Where Bachelard points to the intimacies of proximity that tie human and non-human, Lingis helps me find intimacies in the dynamic and disruptive, in the asymmetrical politics through which place, economy, and history are made in Igarapé Guariba. And, in another way, so does Doreen Massey. In a critical formulation, Massey writes about places as meeting points of social relations, as the outcomes of difference and inequality that also produce difference and inequality. And she points to the things people—all of us—do to bring places to life and to make them as much as possible the way we want them: those things we do physically with hands and machines, and the things we do with our imagination and our talk. The things we do with affect and the things we do with labor.

Social spatialities are simultaneously contingent yet located. Bringing together space and time, Massey describes places as “particular moments” in intersecting, spatialized social relations, some of which are “contained within the place; others [of which] stretch beyond it, tying any particular locality into wider relations and processes in which other places are implicated too.”
¹¹
Such translocal places are relational, involved in the complex articulations of effective geographies, tying humans and non-humans across time and space.
¹²
Such places are formed in the complicities of human and non-human agency—and such complicities are further entangled through the work of place-making.

Places are never stable, and space is never empty. Both are always active, always being made, always in process and in practice. Place and space are always in that flow of becoming, caught—and it's as if Deleuze and Guattari were thinking of Igarapé Guariba when they imagined the metaphor—in “a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks.”
¹³
There is no point of stasis: people are in motion, the tide turns, the banks crumble. Shifting historical sedimentations form the unreliable ground on which lives are made.

“The world,” Foucault writes, “is a profusion of entangled events.”
¹⁴
Throughout this book I have resisted the impulse to purify these conjunctural assemblages and instead have written across and between the consequential analytical divides that partition local and global, past and present, materiality and meaning-making, affect and rationality, human and non-human.
¹⁵
In this Amazonian natural history an analytics of entanglement has found its ground in the complex co-constitutions of intimacy. And here, back in Igarapé Guariba, those situated, differentiated practices of intimacy are fluvial: intimacies of lives that inhabit rivers and of rivers that inhabit lives.

T
HE
W
HITE
H
OUSE

My fieldwork in the Amazon estuary has always involved traveling with traders on the region's rivers. In fact, those have often been my favorite moments, the times I've felt most at home. Huddled up on the roof of a small boat as it putters slowly between ports, a little shivery as the sun comes up on the unbroken brown plain of this river-sea, chatting with friends and new acquaintances, sharing crackers and sometimes hot sweet coffee—each of these journeys is a space outside, suspended in the freedom and tension of expectation and mobility. Traveling taught me to think of the trading networks that unfold along these Amazonian rivers as embodied practices, meaningful relationships assembled and followed by the people who depend on them, a way that Amazonians take a place out into the world beyond the mouth of a river.

And it has often been at river mouths that the politics of rivers have played out here. Prior to the twentieth century, they formed defensible points of military strategy in the many struggles that wrenched at the region: those between native and European, those among the would-be colonial powers (English, Irish, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French), and those that pitted slave and Indian against Liberal forces during and after the Cabanagem. Unsurprisingly, river mouths can still figure as strategic outposts, now as sites where
patrões
impose transport barriers and establish their own fiscalization, acting simultaneously as monopsonists with depots for the reception of farm and forest produce, and as monopolists with stores for the sale of household goods. Beyond the river mouth (or the impassable rapids or falls) often lies another country, a private domain.

Igarapé Guariba was like that. Viega's house standing at the mouth
of the river, raised on a bluff with a view across the mouth-bay, white-painted, tile-roofed—the only tile-roofed building in this village of twenty-five houses just off the Amazon River on the floodplain of Amapá. Next to it stood a warehouse and attached to that a store. This was once the
vila
, the economic center, a river mouth complex of buildings where Old Man Viega's
fregueses
, his clients—the people who worked the land along this river and in return owed the landlord their labor and their income, just about everybody, in fact—came to exchange their produce for merchandise.

Most of the other structures in the vila have disappeared with time, but the house is still standing, the worn white paint clinging to the wooden boards beneath. The Old Man himself is now long gone, his heart giving out soon after his fregueses succeeded in forcing him off the river. These were dramatic events that took place almost twenty years ago now. But they were struggles, I've realized, that have never really ended. And in the run-down white house at the river's mouth they have their site of oneiric condensation. That house is now a haunting, with all the dangers, transgressions, and seductions that brings. Because, despite everything that has happened, despite the changing of regime and the entry of a new order, there are still Viegas living there, plying the river, muddying its already turbid waters.

E
XILE AND
R
ETURN

Raimundo Viega, the Old Man, the patrão, came to Igarapé Guariba for the timber. The late 1950s were a propitious time for entrepreneurial Amazonians. With newly aggressive state and federal policy directed at territorial integration, the first major road was constructed to the north of the country (the Belém–Brasília highway, 1956–60), and a rudimentary development infrastructure put in place via the Amazon Credit Bank and the Superintendência do Plano de Valorização Econômica da Amazônia—early intimations of what was to become a fearsomely opaque bureaucracy.
¹⁶

Viega had other commodities in mind—animal skins, oilseeds, bananas, watermelon, cattle—but it was the timber that drew him out along the Canal do Norte, the northern channel of the Amazon estuary. And, as we might expect, one of his first projects in Igarapé Guariba was the sawmill.