Amazonian Zoophytography: Ecopoetic Writing with Animals and Plants

Abstract

In this chapter, I discuss the notion of Amazonian ecopoetry. Given that poetry from the Amazon expresses Amazonian culture and that culture from the region is marked by an indistinction between nature and culture, between human and nonhuman cultures and societies, I argue that Amazonian poetry is necessarily an ecopoetry. I subsequently reflect upon the concept of Amazonian perspectivism, developed, among others, by anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, as an entry point into the interpretation of the multiple metamorphoses that characterize Amazonian literature, broadly understood to include folktales, legends, and so on. I draw a comparison between the Indigenous, shamanic goal of translating between nonhuman and human perspectives, and Amazonian ecopoetics that allows plants and animals to articulate themselves within human literature, a mode of expression I call “zoophytography.” In the final section of the essay, I analyze the writings of Amazonian-born poet João de Jesus Paes Loureiro as an example of Amazonian shamanic ecopoetry. In his texts, legendary and actual Amazonian entities speak in the first person to express the convergences as well as the equivocations that punctuate the myriad interaction between human and nonhuman beings.