Resistance (10 page)

In that week of reduction we sold, consolidated, and gave away decades of work and personal possessions. We drove a rental truck to New York’s West Side docks. We sailed to Belém aboard a freighter, with a South African crew and a Portuguese captain under a Liberian flag. Another boat, a riverboat, took us to Tucuruí—we might have taken a more direct route to our final destination, but it would have involved a wait. Like a flock of pigeons exploding from the ground at the approach of a cat, we had to go. Waiting anywhere now was unbearable. We took a truck across a stretch of the Transamazon to Santarém, then another riverboat, the last, four hundred miles up the Amazon to Manaus.

Lora and I had always thought if we had to go away—take what we called the geographic cure—it would be to Manaus. It turned out to be right, almost, so we were lucky. Lora died of dengue hemorrhagic fever eight years into it. I remained in Manaus another two years before moving six hundred miles up the Río Negro and the Curiouriari to Dowilda, on the Utala. Two of the children are still down there. The third, our youngest, is an activist with the Greens in Germany.

I initially came to Dowilda because in Manaus the memories of Lora were too many. I stayed because the Utala River country was a terrain and climate I could manage without too great a sense of defeat. Bands of Tukano helped me with a garden, with building the house, and with transport along the river and through the jungle. The Tukano and I had a similar, intense curiosity about life, but we approached living differently. One day, a few years after I arrived, I had altered the way I live enough that I could actually see what they called “the quiet,” the realm of life that could not be sensed until one overcame the damage done to perception by a long exposure to inescapable noise.

Tukano country is directly on the equator. Makú live farther to the south. Nadobo downriver. What I have attained here is calmness, the calm behind a rock in an untenanted canyon. Do you know how an animal, an undomesticated animal, fights a cage? How it throws itself around so violently you think it must lack any sense of self-preservation? You feel sorry for it, but then when you have the power to open the cage and release the animal, you don’t. Why? But what will happen? you ask. An animal like that, it might kill us. It doesn’t understand—order is the reason it’s in the cage to begin with. Without the cage, cruel as it may be, you argue, life would be too dangerous for the rest of us.

From my teenage years onward I was like a wild animal in a cage. Outwardly I demonstrated composure. I maintained this composure for months on end. I lived a life under control—not an unhappy life, not an unrequited life, but one measured off and paced by restriction. I did what was expected of me. I was not a rule breaker, a rabblerouser. But the frantic turbulence, the desire to resist, was always loose inside me.

In my twenties I took every kind of legal antidepressant, every mood adjuster I could talk the doctor into, just to stay with it, to keep from going out the window of my room or sleeping through the whole day. I was holding on with both hands, perpetually seasick in an oarless boat, when I went to that meeting.

When Lora and I and the children were living in Detroit, my sense of hope came from four things. First, it came from what you might call the ordinary life of ordinary people in the neighborhoods around us. People with little money, occupying economic, social, and racial war zones, people with great resilience, great presence, a great capacity for joy. They had the ability to take advantage of every good moment, however it turned up. Hope also came to me from books I read written by people I’d never heard of but with whom I shared a politics. I seemed to share with them a premonition about impending disaster, which came from studying the aggressive interference in local life that Western businesses and their governments favor. I took hope as well from the power of poetry to meet misery with compassion. Finally, I found renewal in a circle of friends, at least one of whom, at any given moment, was of the view that all this would pass, that the nightmares would be turned back into the desert from which they had come.

A woman told me a story once, at a conference in Beirut, about her grandparents. They’d survived one of the death camps, Treblinka, I think. Many years after, her grandfather became a docent in a museum there, a guide. He led tourists through the ruins of the ovens, past the pits and the rusting barbed wire. What she admired most about her grandfather, she said, was that the purpose of his effort, as he explained it to her, was to warn. He did not volunteer to people that he had nearly died there. He would ask people, as if they were all relatives at the same funeral, to be vigilant, or it would come again. Sometimes, without knowing who it was they were talking to, people would break down, asking him for an explanation. He would try to comfort them.

He told his granddaughter that once a woman from Buenos Aires began shouting “
¡Nunca más!
¡Nunca más!,
” again and again. It kept exploding from her.

He held her. He rocked her. “Yes,” he said, “that’s it.”

The trick, I suppose, is to contradict those who say vigilance is not necessary, while at the same time being careful not to declare any particular person or thing the enemy—that religion, this or that political party, a certain constituency, capitalism, this or that head of state. It would be to dismantle the stage upon which any tyrant, any self-anointed claimant to power, performed. It would be to direct the attention of his audience to a place where that tyrant has no authority, no influence.

Certain realities we now face—let me call some of them, collectively, biological, the narrowing of the biological possibility for human life because of large-scale atmospheric changes, falling supplies of fresh water, and the disruption of viral ecologies of the sort that produced the AIDS pandemic— transcend ideologies. They can’t be dismissed out of hand or subjected to a compromise. To face them, let alone to find solutions to what they portend, requires a degree of imagination people have never had to exercise.

Or so we believe.

For myself, I want to live at Dowilda a while longer, until I can better understand the thing that makes the animal go crazy in the cage, and how to guard against it in every part of my life.

I love the feel of the sun’s rays here, the seizure of my eyes by the trees. I love the outcry and song of the birds, the cavitation and susurration of the river. I love the fragrance of the air. I marvel at the sight of my hand emerging at the end of this blue cotton sleeve, drawing the world of which it is a part. I marvel that in the jungle of the upper Río Negro I can still recall the violence of politics in Manaus, the many reasons for despair in every city, but feel no loss of direction, no loss of belief in the power of people to imagine their lives in a completely different way. To imagine whatever lies beyond machinery.

I’ve had many months of back-and-forth with the Tukano. I’m intrigued by their stories of creation and their myths about the origins of all we see and smell and taste and hear around us. They are far more comfortable in a landscape of myth than people in the culture I’m from, though I’m not always at ease with their reasoning, their explanations. I’m gaited a different way.

I don’t believe that the truths we search for, the ones that make us wise and free, fall, all of them, to any one group or time. My fascination with the Tukano is sustained by two thoughts. First, attention to the way they have chosen to live offers a perspective on humanity. My culture is of another time and place. What, then, can we say about the truths we seek that will be given deeper meaning by a consideration of each other’s solutions? For example, do the Tukano still have a tool that my own North American culture threw away, centuries ago, but could now use, something as simple as a logic never known to the Greeks, nor to the Chinese or Sanskrit cultures?

And second, I have to admire how the Tukano remain in accord with the quiet world, their intercourse with what most of us separate out as the spirit world. For them, all things—the stars, the yatira on the jungle floor, the headwaters of the Utala—are immediate, open at any time to the solace that might come from holding a conversation with them. When I lie outside the house on a warm evening looking at the stars and feel comforted, and know this feeling is real even though it is beyond language, at least as I understand language, I’m not suspicious of the sense of peace I obtain. As the Tukano say, I am “speaking to the stars,” the stars are responding, and the emotion of redemption I feel is just another form of my drawing, the result of uncalculating conversation with the elements of the world.

From time to time in the complicated realm of message exchange that stretches from the laptop to the hand-delivered letter, I hear from people I went to school with. Though it might be for the first time in twenty or thirty years, I find the conversations sometimes pick up where they left off. If we push beyond reminiscence and personal history, we can find where we once were. We share a respect for urgency. The experience of the intervening decades has not made these people despair or driven them to take refuge in cynicism. It has made them cautious, though, I would say.

Some years ago I got a letter from an old friend living in Urumchi, in Xinjiang, northwestern China. She’d gone with a friend of hers from Kashgar west to Tadshikistan, through Dushanbe to Baysun in southeastern Uzbekistan. At a place called Teshik-Tash they visited a cave where, fifty years before, a child buried by Neandertals 65,000 years ago was found. It had been an intentional burial, the child surrounded by pairs of ibex horns standing in defense. Shortly afterward, apparently, carnivores of some sort, perhaps hyenas, partially exhumed the body.

The threat of scavenging hyenas, if that’s what kind of desecration they feared, did not deter the child’s family from seeking a way to provide for its comfort. They tried to ensure that the child would not be disturbed. And then they traveled on.

Is it so different for us now? A hopeful people, attending to family tasks in a landscape of mysterious forces, a landscape where hyenas roam. We finish the day’s work and move on, overland or into dreams, ever vigilant over the children.

When I read her letter about this burial, I had the breadth of time across which to consider our present tribulations, which she meant me to do.

They did not seem so tyrannical then.

My plan is to rest here awhile longer, then go down to see the children in Manaus. I want to send more drawings and field notes to the journals—I’m amused by the editors’ suspicions, their disbelief about the shape and range of life here—and then make some significant gesture of gratitude to the Tukano for their hospitality.

They do not seem truly to lack, so it will be hard. Aweseela has asked me to leave a child, though I may have misunderstood this. In any case, I don’t think I could manage such a thing.

I have a poem taped to a food tin in my house. It was written by a man named Zagajewski about, in his phrase, the need to embrace the mutilated world, to give in to a shared fate. The poem has kept me afloat, kept me from taking my own rationales too seriously, as though there could be no others.

It is a sobering truth that only with the greatest difficulty can we convey our life, our meaning, to other people. Some essence always seems to evaporate with the translation into language. I could write out a speech in Tukano that would sit well with everyone, the right words, the right tone of voice for the moment. I could demonstrate to my Tukano teachers what I have learned and in this way show respect for their skills. But our parting calls for something more.

I am not going to decide this alone. I’ll put my suggestions before Aweseela. I am leaving, I will tell her, with many of their legends, stories about the origin of the world, and relationships between things in the world as they know it. Whether I understand the stories in every particular or not, I regard them as a kind of protection against what menaces every person—despair, conceit, failure of imagination. It is this feeling I want to give back: not
thank you
or
every blessing on you
but
I wish for
my life to protect your life.

I will not go until I have made a form of protection that fits into their world, something that says, as eloquently as their stories,
it is good to be fully
alive
and
may this protect you against whatever it is
in the world that cannot or will not see us, but that
nevertheless has plans for us.

I believe that it will be a story about Lora, how she carried the children and me when, blinded by a strange light, I thought I alone carried us.

Eric Rutterman, indigenous rights
activist, author,
Ishnalume, Kapanuna,
Diltan Sa,
on leaving the Utala River
country, to which the Tukano belong,
nation of Brazil

BARRY LOPEZ

RESISTANCE

Barry Lopez is the author of eight previous works of fiction and six works of nonfiction. His stories and essays appear regularly in
Harper’s
,
The Paris Review
,
Orion Magazine
, and
The Georgia Review
. In addition to the National Book Award, he is the recipient of an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as fellowships from the Guggenheim, Lannan, and National Science foundations. He lives in western Oregon.

Alan Magee is an artist of international repute whose works reside in many public collections, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Portrait Gallery. He is represented by Forum Gallery in New York and Los Angeles. His work may be seen at
www.alanmagee.com
.