The Amazon is a realm of fantastic landscapes and a legion of fables and legends, starting with the one-breasted female warriors after whom the region is named. But it is also the home of writers who, despite the vast canvas before them and their own considerable talent, have had problems making their voices heard beyond the jungle.
Just ask Marcio Souza or Milton Hatoum, two leading Brazilian novelists of Amazon themes. Both were born and grew up in Manaus -- a bustling, ethnically diverse port city in the heart of the planet's largest rain forest -- but both had to leave and struggle to get recognition.
"We don't fit any of the established models or niches," Souza, 61, said in an interview at his studio. "We're not magical realists" like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other celebrated Latin American writers, he said, "and we haven't lived through the interesting times that the East Europeans have."
"Maybe we need more deforestation here to get some attention," Souza, the author of picaresque, satirical novels like The Emperor of the Amazon and Mad Maria, added mordantly. "That's how the book world seems to work."
To get even minimal recognition, Amazonian writers, whether from Brazil or neighboring nations, battle isolation and insularity. Until recently they were cut off from the main intellectual centers in their own countries, which in turn thought of the Amazon, on those rare occasions when it came to mind, in stereotypical terms.
"Most outsiders still conceive of the Amazon as a natural environment that is populated by tribesmen, if populated at all," said Nicomedes Suarez-Arauz, editor of Literary Amazonia: Modern Writing by Amazonian Authors and a professor of Latin American literature at Smith College.
"The image of terra incognita, of a savage land, persists and is promoted, so when you mention culture and writers, that produces an immediate surprise in most people," he said.
In recent years, though, the Amazon has become what Suarez-Arauz calls "an urbanized reality," and that is Hatoum's literary world. In prize-winning novels like Two Brothers and Ashes of the North, Hatoum, who is of Lebanese descent, wrote about the Arab immigrants who play a major role in Amazon trade and their relations with other ethnic and racial groups, from indigenous peoples to the descendants of Portuguese pioneers.
Hatoum, 55, said that when he started to write he faced the challenge of how to avoid the exoticism associated with the Amazon and the Levant, and that he still dreaded having that exotic label attached to him.
"I don't know why a palm tree is considered exotic and snow is not, because to me snow is very exotic," he said. "And there is a reason why 80 percent of the people in the Amazon live in cities. I'm aware of the romantic idea of returning to nature, but the Amazon is not idyllic. Living in the forest is difficult, awful even."
Souza and Hatoum expressed admiration for the work of their fellow Brazilian Dalcidio Jurandir, perhaps the first great modernist Amazon writer. But the dozen or so novels of Jurandir, an often-persecuted Communist who died in 1979, are hard to find even in Brazil and are infrequently translated.
"It's a great mystery because he is a very, very good writer," said Lucia Sa, author of Rain Forest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Culture and a professor at the University of Manchester in England.
"Canons are made of both exclusions and inclusions, and in this case the exclusion of Jurandir has to do, I think, with him being a regional realist at a time when nobody was paying attention to the Amazon," he said.
Since colonial times, the Amazon has also attracted writers from outside fascinated by its otherness. In the modern era that line runs from W.H. Hudson's Green Mansions and Arthur Conan Doyle's Lost World to the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, who has set three of his novels -- Captain Pantoja and the Special Service, The Green House and The Storyteller -- in the region.
But considering any of them Amazonian writers "is like labeling Joseph Conrad an African writer or E.M. Forster an Indian writer," argues Suarez-Arauz, a Bolivian by birth who grew up in the Amazon. "These 19th- and 20th-century visitors are closer to the first chroniclers and explorers, who were also drawn by the exotic lure of the Amazon."
Santiago Roncagliolo, author of one the most acclaimed Amazon novels published in recent years, The Alligator Prince, had never visited the region when he wrote the book. Roncagliolo, a 32-year-old Peruvian, acknowledges in an essay that he was in Spain in 2001 "dying of hunger and in an unclear immigration situation" when he accepted a publisher's offer to write a travel novel.
"I was unknown and needed to publish something urgently, so I proposed the Amazon," he writes. "I went into libraries and searched bookstores and got 46 books about the theme, and with them I constructed an Amazon of words, woven out of the stories of explorers and novelists. The main merit of this novel has been to demonstrate that I am a good liar."
Hatoum's work has been translated into more than 10 languages, including Arabic, but he said he would like to see more of it published in his parents' native tongue. He talks of his Muslim father driving his mother, a Catholic, to church every Sunday for 50 years as an example of the kind of tolerance the Arab world would do well to absorb.
"The dilution of one's origins is one of the good things about Brazil," he said. "Ours is a mestizo society whose richness comes from the fusion and dialogue of different cultures. My wife is of Italian descent, and as a teen-ager, I was the singer in a pop band whose guitarist was a Sephardic Jew. So I don't think of myself as Lebanese-Brazilian, but just Brazilian."
Souza has built a parallel career writing and directing plays that draw heavily on the legends and mythology of Amazon Indian tribes. Political persecution stemming from the allegorical nature of some of his plays was one of the factors that forced him to leave the Amazon when Brazil was under military rule a quarter-century ago.
"Manaus was a very enclosed society in those days, and Marcio's theater work has always been very critical of that society," Sa said. "He is a rebel who faced a unique difficulty working in a place that was seen as marginal and was not supposed to produce literature."
But after two decades living in Rio de Janeiro, Souza returned to Manaus in 2002, and now writes from an apartment that is roughly midway between the city's opera house and its port. He is completing a tetralogy of novels about the Amazon's violent integration into Brazil after the country won its independence from Portugal in 1822.
"People were anticipating a funny, humorous book because I'm seen as a comic writer," he said. "But once again I'm not conforming to expectations, and that's my problem. The massacres and the destruction that took place back then, they're not at all funny."
Hatoum, on the other hand, continues to live in Sao Paulo, where he moved at 15, "because there I'm closer to my readers and my publisher and the heart of Brazilian cultural life." But he says that the craving to recharge in the rain forest never leaves him.
"I travel to the Amazon every morning at 7am, when I sit down to write," he said. "But I also have to go back two or three times a year, because that's where my childhood and my memories are. You can't deny your origins."
Recently, China launched another diplomatic offensive against Taiwan, improperly linking its “one China principle” with UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to constrain Taiwan’s diplomatic space. After Taiwan’s presidential election on Jan. 13, China persuaded Nauru to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Nauru cited Resolution 2758 in its declaration of the diplomatic break. Subsequently, during the WHO Executive Board meeting that month, Beijing rallied countries including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Egypt, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Laos, Russia, Syria and Pakistan to reiterate the “one China principle” in their statements, and assert that “Resolution 2758 has settled the status of Taiwan” to hinder Taiwan’s
Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s (李顯龍) decision to step down after 19 years and hand power to his deputy, Lawrence Wong (黃循財), on May 15 was expected — though, perhaps, not so soon. Most political analysts had been eyeing an end-of-year handover, to ensure more time for Wong to study and shadow the role, ahead of general elections that must be called by November next year. Wong — who is currently both deputy prime minister and minister of finance — would need a combination of fresh ideas, wisdom and experience as he writes the nation’s next chapter. The world that
Can US dialogue and cooperation with the communist dictatorship in Beijing help avert a Taiwan Strait crisis? Or is US President Joe Biden playing into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) hands? With America preoccupied with the wars in Europe and the Middle East, Biden is seeking better relations with Xi’s regime. The goal is to responsibly manage US-China competition and prevent unintended conflict, thereby hoping to create greater space for the two countries to work together in areas where their interests align. The existing wars have already stretched US military resources thin, and the last thing Biden wants is yet another war.
As Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu’s party won by a landslide in Sunday’s parliamentary election, it is a good time to take another look at recent developments in the Maldivian foreign policy. While Muizzu has been promoting his “Maldives First” policy, the agenda seems to have lost sight of a number of factors. Contemporary Maldivian policy serves as a stark illustration of how a blend of missteps in public posturing, populist agendas and inattentive leadership can lead to diplomatic setbacks and damage a country’s long-term foreign policy priorities. Over the past few months, Maldivian foreign policy has entangled itself in playing