Muddy Waters: Amazonian Rivers as Zones of Indistinction

This presentation discusses the nuanced character of Amazonian rivers in the work of Brazilian writers of the first decades of the twentieth century. I study the notion of “nuance” as related to issues of landscape and power in Latin America. I am interested in the ways in which the blurring of boundaries and the absence of clear distinctions between forms of matter constitute a key and sometimes unsettling part of the description of certain regions understood as “deserts”. Specifically, through the study of the essays and travelogues by canonical writers Euclides da Cunha and Mário de Andrade, I examine the ways in which the impossibility of distinguishing between the solid and the liquid, between land and water, constitute a central element in these lettered perspectives on the Amazonian region. I discuss the ways in which the Latin American landscapes have defied the technologies of seeing of the intellectual who describes them on behalf of the modern state. 

After examining scenes of vertigo provoked by moments of indistinction or by regions of nuance in different contexts, I turn to the aforementioned two writers. I will study Euclides da Cunha’s essays about the Amazon, gathered in his posthumous book À margem da história (At the Margins of History,1909), and translated into English as Amazon: Land without History. I argue that for Euclides, an engineer who visited the Amazon as part of a bi-national Peru-Brazil border commission, the Amazonian rivers constituted a source of instability and uneasiness. While he describes scenes of land that becomes watery or losses its firmness, of portions of land that suddenly become part of the river, of a river which slowly “eats” into supposedly solid lands, of islands that travel and are continuously created and subsumed by the river, among other scenes, I highlight the disapproval or concern with regard to all that is unstable and changing in this landscape. 

The presentation closes with the study of Mário de Andrade’s O turista aprendiz (The Apprentice Tourist), another posthumous narrative of a 1927 trip to the Amazon. I will study some moments when this writer describes the particularly muddy characters of this water, and will subsequently focus on the description of a dawn on the mouth of the Madeira river, one of the main tributaries of the Amazon. I will show how Mário de Andrade embraces nuance from an aesthetic point of view, that is, focusing on its beauty, and will contrast this perspective with that of Cunha, for whom indistinction is not an element to inhabit, but to eliminate or control.