In Fábio Zuker’s new essay collection, The Life and Death of a Minke Whale in the Amazon: Dispatches from the Brazilian Rainforest, translated from the Portuguese by Ezra E. Fitz and illustrated by Indigenous artist Gustavo Caboco, people, plants, water, animals, and identities are displaced...Everything is rearranged in the wake of colonialism and extractivist capitalism...Zuker explores a new kind of storytelling, one that reports the truths witnessed and investigated by the people of the Amazon amid horrifying pressures...He honors the poetic myths they’ve newly created, combinations of language, place, symbol, and politics that are sorely needed as they navigate life in their rapidly altering home...Zuker is an excellent witness to transformations...He has created a book that is slim and readable and moves quickly through both the real pain of change and the dreamy immersion in the place and its people and stories...His work does corrode form and structure...The stranding of rural people in urban poverty mirrors the minke whale’s story...These strandings are tragedies that resist what we expect from journalism...These strandings invite myth and poetry, conflation and syncretism, resistance to extraction and solidarity in struggle.
In poignant, lyrical, even fable-like essays written primarily from the perspectives of Indigenous people, Brazilian journalist Zuker chronicles the destruction of the Amazon rainforest...The titular whale was an ocean-going animal found beached on the banks of a major tributary of the Amazon, hundreds of miles from the sea...Covered with mud and moss, it was initially thought to be a tree trunk...The subsequent attempts at rescue and the eventual death of the whale lead to a discussion of global trade, starting with the hunt for whale oil...By mixing in interviews with Venezuelan migrants escaping corruption back home and coverage of how the web of Brazilian 'modernization' impacts all kinds and all strata of people, Zuker presents an in-depth depiction of massive environmental and social decimation conveying urgently needed information and insights.
From varied corners of the shrinking Amazon, Fábio Zuker’s essays report on perils to humans and wildlife, surveying Brazilian history, geography, and culture and documenting a raft of environmental problems that have been exacerbated by climate change...The essays highlight the balanced interconnections of healthy environments and those that have been unraveled by a rain forest ecosystem under siege...Gold mining, road building, wildfires, and extreme shifts in rainfall bring plagues of soil erosion, water pollution, and the loss of biodiversity...Wonderful respite from this weighty reportage comes from Indigenous artist Gustavo Caboco’s dynamic illustrations...This unique view of Brazil’s precious, precarious rain forest shimmers with passion and an intimate understanding of 'the friction between two worlds, between two ways of relating to the land.'
