Banzeiro Òkòtó
- “Banzeiro Òkòtó is at once a work of reportage, a manifesto for social and agrarian transformation, and no less than a blueprint for a new cosmography. . . . Brum may be suspicious of the ‘dogma of hope,’ then, but she never lapses into cynicism or despair. She offers instead community, solidarity, resourcefulness and a bracing defiance.”—William Atkins, The New York Times Book Review
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.
Praise
- “[Brum's book is an attempt . . . to get up close with those who have merged with the rainforest in a way that she seeks to emulate, and then to try to convey to outsiders what she has heard and felt and learned—with all its sweat and noise and discomfort. . . . She points out what should be obvious: that those best equipped to care for and report on the Amazon are those who are native to it and know it best.”—Rachel Nolan, The New York Review of Books
“A chronicle as transporting and harrowing as a mighty river. . . . [Brum is] an astute writer of conscience as lyrically intimate, passionate, and precise as Terry Tempest Williams. . . . [Her] fiercely illuminating testimony asserts in fresh and vital ways that the Amazon, the ‘center of the world,’ is essential to life on Earth.”—Booklist
- “Brum adopts an unconventional form to her work as a way of shedding the uncomfortable colonial connotations of her own Whiteness. . . . [A] formidable chronicle of the increasingly deforested world of the Amazon.”—Kirkus Reviews
- “Devastating, extraordinary, and unforgettable.”—Rebecca Servadio, Words Without Borders