Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

Through the Arc of the Rain Forest
	First edition
Author	Karen Tei Yamashita
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Magical Realism
Publisher	Coffee House Press
Publication date	1990
Media type	Print (Paperback)
ISBN	0-918273-82-X
OCLC	21910436
Dewey Decimal	813/.54 20
LC Class	PS3575.A44 T4 1990
Followed by	Brazil-Maru

Last updated May 02, 2023

Through the Arc of the Rain Forest is the first novel published by Japanese American author Karen Tei Yamashita. Primarily set in Brazil, the novel is often considered a work of magical realism but transgresses many literary genres as it incorporates satire and humor to address themes of globalization, transnationalism, migration, economic imperialism, environmental exploitation, socio-economic inequity, and techno-determinism.^[1] It follows a broad cast of characters across national borders, from Japan, Brazil, and the United States. The novel was written when Yamashita was in the United States after living nine years in Brazil.^[2]^[3]^[4]

Summary

Loosely following the novela Brazilian soap opera format, Through the Arc of the Rainforest offers brief episodes introducing the major characters that reveal their connections to one another and their relationship to the Matacão.^[5] Told from the first-person perspective of a self-conscious extraterrestrial ball that floats six inches from the head of Kazumasa Ishimaru, a Japanese expatriate who relocates to Brazil in search of job opportunities, the novel details the rise and devastation of an Amazonian community after the discovery of the Matacão, a resilient and seemingly magical and impenetrable black substance found on the floor of the rainforest on the farm of Brazilian farmer Mané Pena.

The presence of the Matacão leads to a variety of conflicts that result in several distinct but interconnected plot strands:

In the first, pilgrims flock to the site as the Matacão becomes the site of religious miracles.
Batista and Tania Aparecida Djapan collude with media outlets, and converge upon the area to make use of it as a site of advertising and media spectacle.
Mané Pena becomes a new age healer who heals with broadcast the mysterious nature of the region
Corporate entities, manifest as the American conglomerate GGG and its extraordinary representative J.B. Tweep, arrive to explore commercial potential of the site and substance
Kazumasa is invited to the Matacão by J.B. Tweep as one of GGG's major stockholders, and becomes a prisoner of the ambitious man

As the threads converge, the area experiences a boom of economic and corporate growth and development. As more people arrive, as more of the Matacão is transformed into commercial products, or used as a site of entrepreneurial opportunity, and Brazil becomes more globally connected the area suffers severe exploitation and deterioration. The characters of the novel then become increasingly isolated and estranged, with the only person finding temporary happiness being the American businessman, Tweep.

Eventually, the narrative reveals that the Matacão is actually a byproduct of industrial waste, and with that the Matacão dissolves and retreats. All of the products and benefits that had been made possible by Matacão vanish.

List of characters and figures

Kazumasa Ishimaru

Kazumasa Ishimaru is a Japanese railroad engineer and a primary character of the novel. As a child, Ishimaru encounters a sentient alien object that attaches itself to his head. This sentient ball serves as the quasi-omniscient narrator of the novel. Ishimaru and the ball migrate to Brazil after he is displaced as a rail worker with the introduction of new technologies to maintain the national rail system. In Brazil he takes on a job with the São Paulo Municipal Subway System.

Mané da Costa Pena

Mané Pena is a Brazilian native of the rainforest. He is a farmer on whose land the Matacão is discovered. After the discovery of the Matacão, Mané Pena unwittingly becomes a New Age guru wielding a magic feather that heals.

Matacão

A rock, made of a plastic-like substance with magnetic properties.

Chico Paco

Chico Paco is a Brazilian native and pilgrim to the Matacão. He sees news coverages of the Matacão on television and decides that the Matacão must be a divine place. He lives next door to Dona Maria Crueza and her invalid grandson Gilberto. Chico Paco volunteers to make the 1,500 mile trek to the Matacão on foot, and then builds an altar to Saint George on the Matacão at the request of Dona Maria Crueza to fulfill a promise made to Saint George once Gilberto is miraculously healed. This altar stirs controversy amongst local government officials, The Church, and media outlets about the legality of placing an altar on the Matacão. The altar itself then becomes a destination for pilgrims

Jonathan B. Tweep

J. B. Tweep is a highly efficient, three-armed, corporate bureaucrat working for the U.S. corporation GGG. He travels to Brazil to examine the Matacão and its potentials for commercial uses. Rather than viewing his extra arm as a deformity, Tweep was proud of it: "He accepted his third arm as another might accept ESP, and addition of 128K to their random access or the invention of the wheel. As far as J.B. was concerned, he had entered a new genetic plane in the species. He even speculated that he was the result of Nobel prize-winning sperm. He was a better model, the wave of the future."^[6]

Lourdes

Lourdes is Kazumasa's Brazilian maid and a single mother. She becomes Kazumasa's lucky charm and he attributes his sudden increase in wealth (via winning lottery tickets) to her. Kazumasa later realizes he has feelings for Lourdes.

Michelle Mabelle

Michelle Mabelle is a highly competent French Ornithologist who travels to the Matacão to study the local birds and the magical feathers. She surrounds herself with a menagerie of exotic birds that she names and treats as children. She becomes the object of affection for J. B. Tweep, who thinks she is his perfect match because of her three breasts, which make her a match for his three arms.

Batista and Tania Aparecida Djapan

This couple are the neighbors of Kazumasa, with whom they share a back porch. They are depicted as a passionate couple that fights constantly. Upon taking in a wounded pigeon, Batista and Tania's relationship shifts from being heated and tumultuous to being a more harmonious one. Their wounded pigeon eventually becomes a faithful carrier pigeon who brings out the entire community to watch his return and read the notes Batista sends with the bird.

Criticism and significance

Although generally viewed as an Asian American text, Through the Arc of the Rainforest has also been an important text for scholars of eco-criticism, media studies, transnationalism, and globalization.

Literary critic Ursula Heise, for example, writes of the Matacão:

"As the central symbol of the novel, the Matacão signals not only that there is no such thing as pristine wilderness left, but more decisively that there is no local geography that isn't already fundamentally shaped by global connectivity. The local bedrock that reveals itself to be at the same time global plastic waste functions as a striking trope for the kind of deterritorialization John Tomlinson analyzes, the penetration of the local by the global that leads to the loosening of ties between culture and geography. But Yamashita takes the idea of deterritorialization one step further than Tomlinson in that she describes specifically the local natural environment as global and artificial at the same time. A landscape where digging into the soil leads not to rock or roots but polymer makes implausible any return to nature via the immersion into the local of the kind envisioned by many environmentalist writers. The native soil itself is deterritorialized in Yamashita's vision, turning into a product of human industry and long-distance connections as much as of the geological processes in the immediate vicinity."^[7]

The text has also been recognized for its post-colonial critique, as Aimee Bahng situates the book in relation to the purchase of 2.5 million acres of Amazon rainforest in Pará, Brazil, by Henry Ford in 1927 to establish a rubber plantation known as Fordlândia:

"...Yamashita excavates this largely forgotten scene of US imperialism in Brazil and extrapolates from such imperial legacies what might happen to the Amazon when a valuable, rubbery, and possibly alien resource is unearthed during an age of global restructuring. In Through the Arc, disavowed imperial legacies such as Fordlandia resurface in mutated forms that haunt Yamashita's near-future speculations."^[8]

Awards

1991 - American Book Award
1991 - Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award
1990 - Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize

Related Research Articles

Deforestation or forest clearance is the removal of a forest or stand of trees from land that is then converted to non-forest use. Deforestation can involve conversion of forest land to farms, ranches, or urban use. The most concentrated deforestation occurs in tropical rainforests. About 31% of Earth's land surface is covered by forests at present. This is one-third less than the forest cover before the expansion of agriculture, with half of that loss occurring in the last century. Between 15 million to 18 million hectares of forest, an area the size of Bangladesh, are destroyed every year. On average 2,400 trees are cut down each minute.

The Amazon rainforest, also called Amazon jungle or Amazonia, is a moist broadleaf tropical rainforest in the Amazon biome that covers most of the Amazon basin of South America. This basin encompasses 7,000,000 km² (2,700,000 sq mi), of which 5,500,000 km² (2,100,000 sq mi) are covered by the rainforest. This region includes territory belonging to nine nations and 3,344 formally acknowledged indigenous territories.

Afonso Augusto Moreira Pena, often referred to simply as Afonso Pena, was a Brazilian lawyer, professor and politician who served as the 6th president of Brazil from 1906 until his death in 1909. Before his political career, Pena had been an attorney and legal scholar. He was the first president of Brazil to die in office.

Tropical rainforests are rainforests that occur in areas of tropical rainforest climate in which there is no dry season – all months have an average precipitation of at least 60 mm – and may also be referred to as lowland equatorial evergreen rainforest. True rainforests are typically found between 10 degrees north and south of the equator ; they are a sub-set of the tropical forest biome that occurs roughly within the 28-degree latitudes. Within the World Wildlife Fund's biome classification, tropical rainforests are a type of tropical moist broadleaf forest that also includes the more extensive seasonal tropical forests.

Karen Tei Yamashita is a Japanese American writer.

David Mayer de Rothschild is a British adventurer, environmentalist and heir to the Rothschild fortune.

Lumholtz's tree-kangaroo is a rare, long-tailed bear-like mammal found in rainforests in northeastern Australia. Like most tree-kangaroos, it lives alone in trees and feeds on plant matter. It belongs to the macropod family (Macropodidae) with kangaroos, and carries its young in a pouch like other marsupials. It is threatened by climate change and diseases, and is found in the hilly, fertile Atherton Tableland in Queensland.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sérgio Cabral Filho</span> Brazilian politician

Sérgio de Oliveira Cabral Santos Filho is a Brazilian politician and a journalist

Brazil once had the highest deforestation rate in the world and in 2005 still had the largest area of forest removed annually. Since 1970, over 700,000 square kilometres (270,000 sq mi) of the Amazon rainforest have been destroyed. In 2001, the Amazon was approximately 5,400,000 square kilometres (2,100,000 sq mi), which is only 87% of the Amazon's original size. According to official data, about 729,000 km² have already been deforested in the Amazon biome, which corresponds to 17% of the total. 300,000 km2 have been deforested in the last 20 years.

Monkey Hunting is a 2003 novel by Cristina García.

JBS S.A. is a Brazilian company that is the largest meat processing company in the world, producing factory processed beef, chicken and pork, and also selling by-products from the processing of these meats. It is headquartered in São Paulo. It was founded in 1953 in Anápolis, Goiás.

Eike Fuhrken Batista da Silva is a Brazilian-German serial entrepreneur who made and lost a fortune in mining and oil and gas industries. He engaged in a quest to promote Brazil's infrastructure with large-scale projects, such as the Porto do Açu.

The Amazon rainforest is the largest rainforest in the world, covering an area of 3,000,000 km². It represents over half of the planet's rainforests and comprises the largest and most biodiverse tract of tropical rainforest in the world. This region includes territory belonging to nine nations. The majority of the forest is contained within Brazil, with 60%, followed by Peru with 13%, Colombia with 10%, and with minor amounts in Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.

The Brazilian automotive industry is coordinated by the Associação Nacional dos Fabricantes de Veículos Automotores (Anfavea), created in 1956, which includes automakers with factories in Brazil. Anfavea is part of the Organisation Internationale des Constructeurs d'Automobiles (OICA), based in Paris. In 2021, the annual production exceeded 2.2 million vehicles, the 8th largest in the world.

Santería, also known as Regla de Ocha, Regla Lucumí, or Lucumí, is an African diasporic religion that developed in Cuba during the late 19th century. It arose through a process of syncretism between the traditional Yoruba religion of West Africa, the Catholic form of Christianity, and Spiritism. There is no central authority in control of Santería and much diversity exists among practitioners, who are known as creyentes ("believers").

Rainforest Foundation US is a non-profit NGO working in Central and South America. It is one of the first international organizations to support the indigenous peoples of the world's rainforests in their efforts to protect their environment and fulfill their rights to land, life and livelihood.

Coffee House Press is a nonprofit independent press based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The press’s goal is to "produce books that celebrate imagination, innovation in the craft of writing, and the many authentic voices of the American experience." It is widely considered to be among the top five independent presses in the United States, and has been called a national treasure. The press publishes literary fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

<i>Tropic of Orange</i> 1997 novel by Karen Tei Yamashita

Tropic of Orange is a novel set in Los Angeles and Mexico with a diverse, multi-ethnic cast of characters by Karen Tei Yamashita. Published in 1997, the novel is generally considered a work of magic realism but can also be considered science fiction, postcolonial literature, speculative fiction, postmodern literature, world literature, or literature of transnationalism.

The 2019 Amazon rainforest wildfires season saw a year-to-year surge in fires occurring in the Amazon rainforest and Amazon biome within Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru during that year's Amazonian tropical dry season. Fires normally occur around the dry season as slash-and-burn methods are used to clear the forest to make way for agriculture, livestock, logging, and mining, leading to deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Such activity is generally illegal within these nations, but enforcement of environmental protection can be lax. The increased rates of fire counts in 2019 led to international concern about the fate of the Amazon rainforest, which is the world's largest terrestrial carbon dioxide sink and plays a significant role in mitigating global warming.

Petrofiction or oil fiction, is a genre of fiction focused on the role of petroleum in society.

References

↑ Heise, Ursula K. Local Rock and Global Plastic: World Ecology and the Experience of Place. Comparative Literature Studies 41.1 (2004) 126-152.
↑ Murashige, Michael S. Karen Tei Yamashita: An Interview Amerasia Journal. UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press. Volume 20, Number 3 / 1994.
↑ Martin, Robin. "Through the Art of the Rainforest" Narrative. Spring 2011.
↑ Harris, Michael. 'The Narrative Arts: Through the Arc of the Rainforest By Karen Tei Yamashita. Los Angeles Times. 9 September 1990.
↑ Yamashita, Karen Tei. "Author's Note." Through of the Arc of the Rainforest. New York: Coffee House Press, 1990.
↑ Yamashita, Karen Tei. Through of the Arc of the Rainforest. New York: Coffee House Press, 1990. 30.
↑ Heise, Ursula K. Local Rock and Global Plastic: World Ecology and the Experience of Place. Comparative Literature Studies 41.1 (2004) 135.
↑ Bahng, Aimee (Winter 2008). "Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rainforest". MELUS. 33 (4): 123–144. doi:10.1093/melus/33.4.123. JSTOR 20343510.