Ecocriticism in Brazil: The wastelands of Ana Paula Maia’s fictions

Abstract

In their introduction to the volume on ecological crisis in Latin American culture, Mark Anderson states that contemporary representations of the environment in Latin American culture activate the trope of crisis and depletion. The fictions of Brazilian author Ana Paula Maia take up the theme of ecological crisis via the representation of wastelands inhabited by subjects who are reduced to their bare lives. Maia’s novels not only suggest a rethinking of the environmental imaginary in Brazilian fiction that runs counter to the idealized vision of nature present in much of Brazil’s literary tradition, but also delineate a reexamination of the relationship between human, and their lived landscapes, as well as between human and non-human beings. Maia’s fictional texts employ the imaginary of environmental crisis to probe into the role that late capitalism plays in the construction of the human/ecosphere/non-human interface. Her novels suggest both an exploitative relation and, at the same time, destabilize the binary between the human and the non-human that justifies this exploitation. This paper examines how Ana Paula Maia’s two novels, De gados e homens (2014) and Enterre seus mortos (2018), employ the trope of ecological exigency to broach the slow violence implied in extractive capitalism and its effects on land, humans and non-human animals. Both novels bring to the fore the imbrication of economic exploitation of both human and non-humans and environmental crisis.

Keywords:

• Animal studies
• Brazilian literature
• ecocriticism

Notes

Notes

1 In Brazil, one can think of Letícia Wierzchowski’s Os aparados (2009), Regina Rheda’ Humana Festa (2012), two examples of recent novels that deal with nature in crisis.

2 Besides Edgar Wilson, there are three other reoccurring characters in this novel. Erasmo Wagner, who also appears in the novella O trabalho sujo dos outros (2012), Bronco Gil, the protagonist of Assim na terra como embaixo da terra (2017) and Seu Milo, the owner of the homonymous slaughterhouse, who also makes a cameo appearance in Assim na terra como embaixo da terra. Maia points to the intertextuality of her characters when Erasmo Wagner, in a conversation with Edgar Wilson, hints at his profession as a trash collector in O trabalho sujo dos outros. He explains that: “Alguém precisa fazer o trabalho sujo. O trabalho sujo dos outros. Ninguém quer fazer esse tipo de coisa. Por isso Deus coloca no mundo tipos que nem eu e você” (Maia, De gados 16).

3 Fernanda Gárbero observes that the character’s name (as well as that of several others in Maia’s texts) is an homage to Edgar Allan Poe and a reference to Poe’s short story “William Wilson” (“Sujos, brutos, invisíveis”).

4 In Brazilian literature, examples include José Lins do Rego’s “sugarcane cycle”—Menino de engenho (1932), Doidinho (1933), Banguê (1934), Usina (1936) and Fogo morto (1943)—and Jorge Amado’s cocoa cycle.

5 The novella Entre rinhas de cachorros e porcos abatidos also touches upon the trope of environmental crisis, albeit in a more indirect manner. The urban spaces in which the novella takes place also bear the mark of environmental degradation. At the same time, the novella, similar to Entre gados e homens and Enterre seus mortos, reflects on the relationship between human and non-human animals and suggests the latter’s sentience.

6 The Cambridge Declaration is a document signed by a group of prominent cognitive neuroscientists, neuropharmacologists, neurophysiologists, neuroanatomists, and computational neuroscientists who gathered at Cambridge University in 2012. The report asserts that “Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors” (2).

7 In 2013, Brazil ranked fifth in per capita world consumption of beef, with use of 172.2 pounds of meat per capita annually. It is also the second-largest meat-producing nation in the world. Most of the meat produced in the country is consumed nationally, as only 20% of it is exported (Marques).

8 All of Maia’s texts have male protagonists and few, if any, female characters. Maia’s male universe can be read as a commentary of homosocial relations and what these relations reveal about society at large. In a review of Maia’s oeuvre, Joca Reiner’s Terron proposes that her texts are metonymic of contemporary social dynamics in Brazil (Terron).

9 For an exposé on the inhumane practices of the meat, dairy, and poultry industry in the United States, see Paul Solotaroff’s article in Rolling Stone Magazine “In the Belly of the Beast” (2013). In Maia’s text, Zeca’s cruelty to the cows bears a resemblance to some of the treatment meted out to animals by workers described in Solataroff’s exposé.

10 In June of 2019, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration identified the largest dead zone on record in the Gulf of Mexico. Nutrient pollution, much of it generated by agricultural debris (such as fertilizer and manure runoff) causes the hypoxic zone. One of the main culprits of nutrient pollution is the meat industry (Milman).

11 Another notable, non-fictional text, that details a cosmovision based on a deep connection between species is Davi Kopenawa’s and Bruce Albert’s (Kopenawa and Albert) The Falling Sky: Words of a Yanomani Shaman (2013).