Milton Hatoum’s Amazon Theater: Unsettling an Icon

The Amazon Theater – built on a hill in the center of Manaus and topped with a shimmering green and yellow cupola – has an imposing presence. It was built to display triumph and grandeur, to tell a story of a city and a nation stepping boldly into modernity. However, as we learn from Henri Lefebvre, spaces that are produced to assert a specific message are among the most deceptive because, in telling one story, they strategically conceal others (143). Moreover, buildings change. In the case of Manaus’s opera house, physical changes to the building (decay, restorations, and changes to the exterior color) are apparent, but more significant are the ways in which perceptions and uses of the theater have changed throughout the decades.

Examples abound in much of Milton Hatoum’s fiction of how the Amazon Theater asserts meaning. In his novel Relato de um certo oriente (1989), the opera house reminds a Lebanese immigrant of a mosque depicted in storybooks from his youth, thus giving his newfound tropical home an air of familiar fantasy. In Órfãos do Eldorado (2008), a man shows the theater to foreigners eager to visit the “colosso de arquitetura na selva,” which suggests how Manaus’s main attraction appeals to tourists not just because of its architectural components, but because of the anomaly of finding a conspicuous opera house in the rainforest (21). Boys spy on performers in their dressing rooms in the story “Varandas da Eva” (2004), giving readers the impression that locals possess a shared knowledge of the building that allows them to enter it undetected and deftly navigate its interior. In the novel Cinzas do Norte (2005), the fresco on the ceiling of a Manaus mansion is a replica of the ceiling of the theater’s Salão Nobre. The theater’s artwork serves as a legible code among the local elite, connoting sophistication and status.

The Amazon Theater is prominent in much of Hatoum’s fiction, but no work showcases the legendary opera house more than “A ninfa do teatro Amazonas,” originally published in 1996 in O Estado de São Paulo to commemorate the theater’s one-hundredth anniversary and later included in Hatoum’s 2009 collection A cidade ilhada.¹ Ellen Doré Watson’s excellent English translation of the original story appeared in 2006 in the Oxford Anthology of the Brazilian Short Story, edited by K. David Jackson. When flaunted on the city’s postcards, the Amazon Theater is commonly viewed simply as the icon of Manaus. But Hatoum’s work transcends such formulaic ways of seeing the theater. “A ninfa” employs literary techniques such as unlikely juxtapositions, intentionally disorienting exposition, and a style that blurs distinctions between public and private, real and imagined, and belonging and displacement in order to upend simplistic conceptions of the Amazon Theater and challenge us to expand our conception of urban public space.

In “A ninfa,” set over two days in the mid-1990s, the Amazon Theater is closed to the public one morning, but it is not unoccupied. Eighty-seven-year-old Álvaro Celestino de Matos, a mentally ill man born in northern Portugal, has snuck inside the theater where he used to be a guard and believes he still works. A pregnant young woman in labor also finds the door unlocked and promptly gives birth in the seating area of the first floor. Afterward, Álvaro secretly observes the mother and newborn from the theater’s stage through a hole in the closed curtain. Or so we are told by the narrator, a reporter who interviewed Álvaro and inquired about the unnamed pregnant woman. By having this theater – a locale seeped in highbrow customs – shelter two social outcasts, “A ninfa” presents an exaggerated illustration of what a more egalitarian public space might look like.

The story’s depiction of the theater has a defamiliarizing effect, allowing us to see the building afresh. Defamiliarization, an artistic technique identified by Viktor Shklovsky in 1917 in his seminal essay “Art as Technique,” refers to the way in which literary language can make the familiar strange by heightening our perception: “art...