Writing under the Shadow of the Chullachaqui: Amazonian Thought and Ecological Discourse in Recent Amazonian Poetry

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Notes

¹Juan Carlos Galeano, Amazonia (Jalisco, Mexico: Literalia Editores, 2007). All translations are by the author and Steven Stewart unless otherwise noted.

²Fernando Santos Granero, “Una manera religiosa de mirar el mundo,” El ojo verde: Cosmovisiones amazónicas (Iquitos, Perú: Fundación Telefónica del Perú, 2000), 29.

³David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (New York: Vintage, 1997), 9.

⁴Despite the relevant nature of the themes and quality of writing, most texts do not enjoy a wide readership outside of their local context. Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz, a writer from the Bolivian Amazon, has made pioneering efforts in this area with his (unfortunately short-lived) literary journal Amazonian Literary Review, which published three issues in the 1990s with the support of Smith College and his anthology of Amazonian literature in translation, Literary Amazonia: Modern Writing by Amazonian Authors (2004).

⁵It is important to note that in Amazonia identity politics are less defined by national borders. Being from Amazonia is often a more meaningful designation of origin than identifying with one's country of origin.

⁶Joaquín García Sánchez, “El discurso literario en el discurso histórico de la Amazonía peruana,” Centro de Estudios Teleológicos de Amazonia (CETA), January 8, 2005. http://www.ceta.org.pe/confe.htm (accessed Aug. 31, 2009).

⁸Javier Dávila Durand, La jungla de oro (Iquitos, Perú: Tierra Nueva Editores, 2008), 15.

⁷See the narrative poem “Árboles,” for example, included in his collection Ojos de otro mirar.

⁹The Amazon region has been represented in literature and film, from Latin America as well as the United States, as both Green Cathedral (conjuring the sublime) and Green Hell. The Latin American jungle novels—La vorágine by José Eustasio Rivera being a prime example— promote such a representation. The last line of the novel, “Y los devoró la selva” (And the jungle devoured them), says it all. The fact that nearly all back-to-nature narratives in Latin American literature end in tragedy directly relates to issues of representation of the jungle. See Candace Slater's Entangled Edens: Visions of the Amazon (2002) for an in-depth discussion of representations of the Amazon. Slater discusses the film Amazon for IMAX, which emphasizes the importance of the biosphere over that of the people who call it home.

¹⁰See Antología poética de Napo (Tena, Ecuador: Casa de Cultura Ecuatoriana, 1997), which includes works by Manuel Paredes Mero, Fernando Espinosa Jarrín, Jaime Gallo Santracruz, and Pablo Pepinós Rosales. The poems range from celebrations of the beauty of the non-human to love poems and others about daily life along the Napo River.

¹²Galeano, Amazonia, 105.

¹¹See the poem “Árbol,” for example, from Edible Amazonia: Twenty-one Poems from God's Amazonian Recipe Book (Fayetteville, NY: Bitter Oleander Press, 2002), in which Suárez-Araúz includes in a recipe, “lanchas llenas de caucho y sangre” (“steam boats filled with liquid / rubber and blood”) (64).

¹⁴Percy Vílchez Vela, Santuario de peregrinos (Iquitos, Perú: Tierra Nueva Editores, 2007), 82–84.

¹³See Enrique Leff's chapter “Pensar la complejidad ambiental,” in La complejidad ambiental, for a discussion of the need to rethink society's constant need for economic and technological growth without considering the long-term effects on both the human and non-human. Leff's notion of “complejidad ambiental” (environmental complexity) takes into account the connections between the many actors affected by environmental problems: individuals, various cultural groups with varying perspectives, and the ecosystems directly affected. This notion is also in dialogue with the multiperspectivism inherent in Amazonian discourse, in which all actions affect many groups in diverse ways depending on their perspective and worldview.

¹⁵Vílchez Vela, Santuario de peregrinos, 84. Carlos Reyes Ramírez, another poet from Iquitos, includes images of waste in the local waterways as well. See his latest book, Animal de lenguaje (Iquitos, Perú: Tierra Nueva Editores, 2009), and specifically the poem “En los puertos”: “Sobre los atravesados armazones, las aguas emergen contaminadas y un preludio de truenos y / plagas levanta el hocico de la tarde” (Over old steel frameworks lying on their side, the waters emerge contaminated, / and, like a prelude to thunder and plagues, the afternoon raises its snout).

¹⁶Astrid Cabral, Cage, trans. Alexis Levitin (New York: Host Publications, 2008), 46–47.

¹⁷Nicomedes Suárez-Araúz discusses Aníbal Beça's haikus in the second issue of Amazonian Literary Review.

¹⁸Aníbal Beça, Folhas da Selva: Haicais (Manaus: Editora Valer, 2006), 32.

²⁰Pérez Alencart, Madre selva, 35.

¹⁹Alfredo Pérez Alencart, Madre selva (Salamanca: Colección Fray Luis de León, 2002), 34.

²¹William Cronon, Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: Norton, 1995), 82.

²²Ana Carolina Saavedra Lozada, El lugar de las imágenes perdidas (Caracas: Fundación Editorial el Perro y la Rana, 2006), 27.

²³For another poem celebrating the rain, see “Más aplausos para la lluvia,” in Juan Carlos Galeano's latest book, Sobre las cosas (Jalisco, México: Literalia Editores, 2010).

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Notes on contributors

Jeremy Larochelle

Jeremy Larochelle is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Mary Washington. His essay “Trends and Themes in Recent Poetry from the Amazon: From Abundant Rain to Dying Lakes” was published, along with translations of poetry, in the Dirty Goat 25. His article “A City On the Brink of Apocalypse: Urban Ecology in Works by Homero Aridjis and Vicente Leñero” is forthcoming in Hispania.