Join us in conversation with award-winning Brazilian writer Eliane Brum and guests to discuss Brum's latest and highly acclaimed book Banzeiro Òkòtó - The Amazon as the Centre of the World, and debate the impact of Amazon deforestation in climate change and the importance of the world's largest rainforest in regulating the Earth's climate.

The Event will take place at the London Review Bookshop, 14 Bury Place, London WC1A 2LJ, on the 12th of September between 18:45-20:45.

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Banzeiro Òkòtó - The Amazon as the Centre of the World

"A confrontation with the destruction of the Amazon by a writer who moved her life into the heart of the forest.

In lyrical, impassioned prose, Eliane Brum recounts her move from São Paulo to Altamira, a city along the Xingu River that has been devastated by the construction of one of the largest dams in the world. In community with the human and more-than-human world of the Amazon, Brum seeks to ‘reforest’ herself while building relationships with forest peoples who carry both the scars and the resistance of the forest in their bodies.

Weaving together the lived stories of the region and its history of violent corruption and destruction, Banzeiro Òkòtó is a call for radical change, for the creation of a new kind of human being capable of facing the potential extinction of our species. In it, Brum reveals the direct links between structural inequities rooted in gender, race, class, and even species, and the suffering that capitalism and climate breakdown wreak on those who are least responsible for them.

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."

 

Eliane Brum is an award-winning Brazilian journalist, writer, and documentarist. Her work of nonfiction, The Collector of Leftover Souls, was long-listed for the National Book Award for translated literature.

She is a columnist for the international section of El País among other European and US newspapers and magazines. She is a founder of Sumaúma: Journalism from the Centre of the World, a trilingual news platform based in Altamira, in the Amazon rainforest, where she lives. Her work as a journalist has won more than 40 prizes.

 

* This event is organised by Octavio Ferraz, of the Transnational Law Institute at King's College, in collaboration with Brazil Matters and Indigo Press.

Professor Octavio Ferraz is currently leading the project The Laws of our Sustainable Future focusing on human rights and environmental laws in the Amazon forest.