“He just moved about on the river, solitary, aimless.” This is João Guimarães Rosa, narrating the fictional short story of a father who embarks on a journey along a nameless river, never setting “foot on earth or grass, on isle or mainland shore.” He floats between the river’s banks: in the nebulous space called the third bank—where time stands still, where the past and present merge. Author Chris Arnold of The Third Bank of the River titled his book after Rosa’s acclaimed short story. Arnold was drawn to the “timelessness” of the third bank. It captures his own meandering voyages down the Amazon River, and the Amazon itself, a region shaped by dreams of development but crippled by the legacies of colonization. From thriving drug cartels in the city of Manaus to fast disappearing Indigenous communities in the Amazonian interior, no place in the world contains so many “eras of the human experience existing at the same time.”
Arnold deftly weaves these stories into a sprawling panorama of the Amazon. His writing is suffused with an intimacy that comes from someone deeply tied to the region. This connection, as it turns out, runs blood deep. Arnold was born in the city of Belo Horizonte but was adopted by an American family and later raised in Oregon. His childhood and teenage years were marked by an abiding longing for Brazil, yet it was a country he knew only in fragments: a Brazilian flag hoisted on top of his nightstand; a Latin History class; Portuguese language learning CDs. In his 20s, Arnold finally returned to Brazil to meet his birth family. The journey was a discovery of both personal roots and a nation’s history. For Arnold, the search for the Amazon is a search for identity.
Through interweaving the personal and political, Arnold expands public imagination of the Amazon beyond childhood movies of the “booby-trapped temple, Indiana-Jones” kind or well-intentioned but reductionist narratives asserting that saving the rainforest means protecting trees. Surprisingly, the actual jungle finds little mention in Arnold’s chronicles. You get glimpses of it—the river “banks lined with factories” and the “the cooler, faster Solimões and the warmer, slower Negro…light and shadow, murky sediment and decayed leaves—” but it almost always serves as the backdrop to the book’s main animating force: the people of the Amazonas, and the power relations they are entrenched in.
The Amazon is more than just rivers and jungle. Manaus, the capital city of Amazonas, is a thriving metropolis, and Brazil’s seventh largest city (Source: The Guardian).
The Amazon is steeped in violence. It lurks everywhere. In the dense foliage that camouflage illegal loggers. Between privately funded prison walls. In the industrial waste that seeps into the Xingu river. Arnold does not paper over the carnage. Oscillating between dispassionate accounts (“12:12am. Harlem Duque Protazio…two men, one motorcycle, seven fatal shots”) and grim, gritty details (“Wives were raped in front of their husbands, six-year-olds beheaded in front of their mothers”), he illuminates the underbelly of the romanticized tropical rainforest.
More often than not, Arnold blames the “white man” for such atrocities. The white man comes in many guises: early European invader, public-private energy consortium, and wealthy cattle rancher. First came the Portuguese colonists. They took over the city of Belém, located at the mouth of the Amazon River, in the early 17th century, and then the entire Amazon Basin. Spain, France, Holland, and Ireland soon followed. Drunk on power and fantasies of diamond, gold, and rubber, the colonists enslaved Brazilian Indians, the only people familiar with the forest’s treacherous landscapes. Indian laborers were forced to work their fingers to the bone. If quotas were not reached, settlers meted out brutal punishments. Those that did not collapse from exhaustion or torture died from “white man” diseases.
Tribes fought back of course; acts of resistance abound in Arnold’s book. He tells the story of Chief Ajuricaba: In 1728, in a bloody conflict between the Dutch and Ajuricaba, the Dutch captured and chained the chief and his allies. Using the same metal shackles that restrained them, the prisoners strangled their captors. The Dutch inevitably overpowered Ajuricaba’s tribe. Choosing death over slavery, Ajuricaba “leapt into the river…and never reappeared dead or alive.”
In the end, we are reminded again of Rosa’s third bank—the river that perpetually renews itself. Arnold’s travels through the Amazon unearth a history of creation and destruction. Here is a region that has risen out of its tragic past. Today, the Amazon boasts the second largest hydroelectric dam in the world and the fourth longest highway in Brazil. And in 2014 and 2016, Manaus hosted games for the World Cup and the summer Olympics respectively. The pomp and circumstance of these events sent a clear message to the world: “Brazil is the country of the future.” And yet history repeats, often in painful, cruel ways. Arnold painstakingly details the inequality, violence, Kafkaesque bureaucracy, and environmental degradation that continue to plague the region. We come away feeling like the Amazon and perhaps all places exist in the timeless third bank, where we experience “cycles of horror and hope as ceaseless as the Amazon clock.”