Showing posts with label Amazon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amazon. Show all posts

7 November 2014

"The xapiri float down through the air from their mirrors to come protect us"

The xapiri float down through the air from their mirrors to come protect us…. Their mirrors arrive from the sky’s chest, slowly preceding them. They suddenly stop in the air and remain suspended…. When they arrive, their songs name the distant lands they came from and traveled through. They evoke the places where they drank the waters of a sweet river, the disease-free forests where they ate unknown foods, the edges of the sky where, without night, one never sleeps.
from The Sky is Falling by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert (2013), quoted by Glenn H Shepard in the NYRB, and from which this blog quoted in June.

Later in the book Kopenawa warns of industrialisation:
The sky…is getting as sick as we do! If all this continues, its image will become riddled with holes from the heat of the mineral fumes. Then it will slowly melt, like a plastic bag thrown in the fire…. If the sky catches fire, it will fall again. Then we will all be burned, and we will be hurled into the underworld like the first people in the beginning of time.

Image of fallstreak by David Barton via ABC

20 June 2014

"The sky's chest seemed so close"

In my dreams, the spirits tied my hammock's ropes high up in the sky. They looked like radio antennas extended at my side. They became paths that led the xapiri and their songs to me, just like the white people's telephone's talking path. I was lying calmly but I could feel my hammock getting bigger and bigger. Then I had the impression I was growing bigger with it. I was still only a small child, but I felt myself getting huge. I would look around and see nothing but a large void. It made me dizzy. The sky's chest seemed so close, within reach. A sound rose up from it, like the one from the groups of dancers yelling loudly when they arrive at a reahu feast: "Ao, Ao, Ao!" This was the clamor of the xapiri dancing as they came towards me, but I couldn't see them very well. Then after a while everything stopped. As I struggled to wake up I still felt huge. But realizing I was normal size, I worried and asked myself: "I'm still so small! But how could have I become so enormous?" and wound up falling back asleep.
-- from The Falling Sky by Davi Kopenawa and Bruce Albert (2010, 2013)


Photo: Sabastião Salgado