I descend the steps of Cabelo Seco’s House of Rivers cultural centre, leaving the AfroRoots pulse of its youth community drummers behind me, and cross the cracked street. I step over scattered beer cans and uncollected waste from the night before, on to the chipped kerb of the waterfront and lean across the rusted railings. Tucunaré Island is barely visible, 200 metres away. Acrid fog from weeks of burning forests smothers this southeastern region of Pará State, choking Marabá City and crowding its hospitals with asthmatic children and babies. It hasn’t rained in five months.
Zequinha, village songwriter and fisher, joins me. ‘This ash is as much from the fires in California and Australia, carried by the wind, as it is from here,’ he reflects. He shakes his head at the parched riverbed. ‘Our rivers in the sky have dried up. Now we suffer the effects on the other side of the world.’ The meeting of two rivers, the mighty Tocantins and the sinewy Itacaiúnas, has sharpened into a stony arrowhead that points to the River Araguaia and its arid plain on the near horizon. ‘We’ll soon be able to walk across the Tocantins!’
