Few places captured Elizabeth Bishop’s imagination like the Amazon. From the moment she arrived in Brazil, she wanted to visit the region and began to research it. Bishop made the unusual decision to write a dramatic monologue set in the Amazon prior to visiting, composing “The Riverman” based on a passage from Amazon Town: A Study of Man in the Tropics by Charles Wagley.⁠ Given her commitment to accuracy, this was a significant break from her typical writing process, and she often expressed uneasiness about the poem.
Read today, “The Riverman” poses several problems of representation due to the gap between Bishop and the poem’s speaker, a character based on Satiro, an indigenous Amazonian who appears in Wagley’s study. Satiro is doubly interpreted: first by Wagley and then by Bishop, raising questions of whose story this is and who has the right to tell it. In this paper, I discuss Bishop’s appropriation of Satiro’s story alongside their commonalities. To write this dramatic monologue, Bishop needed an entry point into the character. The Amazon, though compelling, remains elusive in the poem, unlike the places of Bishop’s other Brazilian poems. Instead, “The Riverman” tells a story of shared vocation and ambition.

Keywords: Elizabeth Bishop; Brazil; appropriation; the Amazon; Charles Wagley