Banzeiro Òkòtó: The Amazon as the Center of the World
The prose — riddling, elliptical, sometimes convoluted — is no walk in the park, nor is it meant to be ... Brum may be suspicious of the 'dogma of hope,' then, but she never lapses into cynicism or despair. She offers instead community, solidarity, resourcefulness and a bracing defiance.
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Brum adopts an unconventional form to her work as a way of shedding the uncomfortable colonial connotations of her own Whiteness ... Brum is keenly aware of the disconnect between the White rhetoric about 'ecology' and the Indigenous practice of being one with the forest, and she writes fervently about the massive deforestation that has been ongoing for decades ... A bleak, formidable chronicle.
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Uneven polemic ... Brum is a spirited advocate for her subjects, but frequent abstract digressions prove more suggestive than edifying ... Abstruse prose further muddies her points ... The elliptical delivery drags down an otherwise stirring account of the Indigenous fight for justice in the Amazon.
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