Stories of drought
Drought, or, in other words, ‘water getting scarce,’ is a recurrent topic and concern in the stories of Passa- rinho’s inhabitants. Most people living in Passarinho and the whole Canárias island, are descendants of immigrants either from the State of Maranhão (from the terra firme) or from the State of Ceará.
The first ones that arrived on the island, probably in the beginning of the 18th century, were a group of fishermen fleeing the drought in the State of Ceará. They first built some fishing huts, then they started to spread across the island and founded the five villages that exist today. In this way drought, even if not directly experienced, is something present in the narrative of origin of the villages, a narrative that is transmitted from generation to generation. Besides the past, drought also marks the present situation in Passarinho. Indeed, for some years now the winters in Passarinho have been getting ‘weak’. The last few years have been marked by ‘bad winters’, with a little rain only during some months. Before, some of the older inhabitants told me, there were six months of summer (i.e. dry season) and six months of winter (i.e. rainy season), the winter starting in January. Now, in bad winters, there is rain only during three months. The lakes dry out completely during the dry season. Before, everything was full of water, covered by water, so that to walk around you had to look for the ‘highs’. There were many ‘bleeders’ – connections to the river and other lakes – so that the fish could move around and enter the lakes. This period, when the village is partly under water, is described as beau- tiful and joyful: everyone takes a bath in the lakes; children play in the water; women wash clothes in the lake; the whole family fishes with fishing lines. During the dry season washing and bathing is more restricted to the household, and fishing predomi- nantly a men’s activity.
Morover, the nearby river is drying out. It is one of the many branches of the Parnaíba river, but it is the one where most men of the village go fishing. It used to be connected to the sea before, but now the moving sand dunes have almost closed the branch off from the sea. In consequence, there is much less water and fewer fish. These types of water- courses, called barras – arms or inlets of the sea – are of crucial importance because they allow the entry of fish coming to spawn in the calmer waters. Fishermen say that it is much more difficult to fish today, so some have moved to other places much further away, and others fish less. Most inhabitants, however, do not see it as a big problem. Instead, they explain the situation as part of ‘Nature’. Nature, in the local view, makes and unmakes, builds and unbuilds, constructs and deconstructs – it is all a natural process, nothing is fixed. Nature is
much stronger than humans, so people should not try to fight against it. Furthermore, it is not seen as a linear process, that is, a development towards an ever-drier situation, where water will get scarcer and rivers drying up more and more. In the local percep- tion Nature can for instance open up the closed river tomorrow; the situation can revert back to a past situation or change to something completely new; a principle inherent, it seems, to a fluid order of the world.
When the water got salty…
Passarinho was once known for its rice plantations. Today, the traces of this past are almost invisible and only in the stories and memories of the older inhabit- ants do they continue to live. Many people migrated to Passarinho during this rice period in search of work opportunities, so that the village was about
double its current size.
Dona Lucía (about 70 years old) and her husband came from Coqueiro, situated on the terra firme. There were no opportunities in Coqueiro, the soil was not fertile, and they could hardly nourish their ten children with only crab gathering and fishing. ‘I caught crab in the early morning, I went into the mangrove with the tide and started to catch crabs’, recalls Dona Lucía.
‘Sometimes I would come back only at 6 o’clock at night and sometimes it was very bad, I caught only a few. I just had my work clothes and one dress. Sometimes I hid in the basin where I took my bath and waited for the clothes to dry to put them on again. When I found some potato bags on the riverbank, I would take them home and sew clothes for my children. Then my husband and I heard about this place called Passarinho
where he had the opportunity to work in the rice fields. When I got here I was with my hands down, I was on the floor. And here it improved a lot, many people helped me. Today my chil- dren and I have a good life but I had to fight a lot.’
At this time, people planted rice in the mangrove forests during the winter. In summer, the water was salty, but in winter, the rain ‘sweetened’ the water. People had to work in the mud, but the rice grew very well. The advantage of planting in the mangrove forests was that people did not have to change the planting area from year to year as is usual in slash-and-burn agriculture practiced on the land. In mangroves, they could plant on the same land for 10 to 15 years. The older inhabit- ants remember that there was a huge abundance of rice: there was so much rice that a part of it got spoilt by falling into the mud. However, some years ago (probably less than ten) the water in the mangroves started to become more and more salty. The dam of Boa Esperança on the Parnaíba River. built in the 1970s. had already reduced the volume discharged by the Parnaíba River, and so with the decreasing rainfall there was not enough rain anymore to sweeten the water during the winter. The brackish water made rice cultivation more diffi- cult, and around the same time, the number of capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) increased in the region. Capybaras are herbivorous, semiaquatic rodents. They preferably live in forested areas close to bodies of water (rivers, lakes, swamps, marshes) and feed on various types of grasses. Capybaras are social animals and can occur in groups of over 100 animals. If not hunted, they can become problem- atic in some regions because of their population density. Capybaras definitely became a problem in the rice fields in the mangrove areas in the prox- imity of Passarinho. Probably various factors jointly led to this situation. Inhabitants state that before there were less capybaras and some people hunted them for their own consumption, but since 1998 hunting these animals is considered by the Brazilian
legislation as an environmental crime1. Addition-
ally, since 2000 the area has the status of a Marine Extractive Reserve (Resex Marinha) which means an increase in control and environmental inspection. Whatever the exact reasons for these changes, it is clear that the salinization of water and the
increasing numbers of capybaras jointly led to the complete abandonment of rice cultivation in recent years. It also greatly altered the social structure and life of the village. Many inhabitants of Passarinho migrated to other places – either their places of origin, or places such as the neighboring village of Canárias, considered more developed, and closer to the city of Parnaíba. More than half of the village left, and the remaining inhabitants had to migrate to other activities. In Passarinho, a whole part of the village called ‘the other side’ or the ‘side of the Adrião family’ disappeared. Once, there were over 30 houses on the Adrião’s side. Today, only three of them are left, and some other traces, for instance the arrangement of some trees, allows visitors to guess where the former gardens were; tiles and bricks and an abandoned cemetery testify to the former social life. Today, Passarinho is seen throughout the region as ‘the village that didn’t get it’, the village that did not develop, that did not manage to follow ‘evolu- tion’ (e.g. buy quads for transport).