Two years ago, in 2018, a book by a little-known author won the Jakarta Arts Council annual award for best novel and became one of the most widely discussed texts in contemporary Indonesian literary circles.
Orang-orang Oetimu (People of Oetimu) by Felix K. Nesi is a portrait of a small fictional town on the island of Timor in eastern Indonesia. The book clearly stands out for its satirical wit, cyclical structure, and cohesive navigation of myriad perspectives. However, also remarkable is the way in which Nesi – himself originally from Timor—depicts the province of East Nusa Tenggara, a peripheral region that is seldom represented in Indonesian literature. His is a humorous yet fully heartfelt depiction of life in the context of pervasive violence in Timor. From 1974 to 1998, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor (Fretilin) led a fight for East Timorese independence, and the Indonesian state in Jakarta attempted to crush the separatist movement at all costs, committing gross violations of human rights against members of the revolutionary movement and civilians alike. In representing the reality of Timor, Nesi also exposes political and social ills from across the Indonesian archipelago.
Today, Nesi continues to command attention in Indonesia as one of the country’s emerging literary voices. In the first weeks of 2020, the author spoke on his process for writing Orang-orang Oetimu in Yogyakarta, a university city on the island of Java. He began by expressing the motivations behind writing one of his characters: Laura, a young woman who, in the novel, is kidnapped, separated from her parents, detained without trial, tortured and abused, before finally escaping into the forest and stumbling upon a small kampung. From Nesi’s powerful, personal anecdote on Laura’s character arose a reflection on the main concerns embedded in his novel: trauma, both personal and collective; politics of identity and representation within Indonesia; and the simultaneous power and futility of storytelling. The following translation of the essay he read aloud acts both as an important exploration of those themes and as an introduction to the work of this compelling new voice in Indonesian literature.
I
The moment I saw that Laura had died, I leaned against a wall and cried. It was 3 A.M. and deathly quiet. I couldn’t believe that after everything Laura had been through since her arrest, after she survived torture, after she fled to the forest, after she managed to guard against ghosts and wild animals, she chose to die giving birth. When I stopped crying, I then spent more than six days trying to compose a version of the story in which Laura didn’t die, trying to convince her to stay alive.
I had already written about Laura for a long time. I’d known her since she was a kid (I ended up cutting the part about her growing up and dating Fernando from the first draft of the novel, it didn’t end up in the published version)—I had fallen in love with her and didn’t want to let her go. But just as with the character Am Siki, I never managed to persuade her to stay. Laura is still dead, put out of her suffering.
I couldn’t bring Laura back, but the truth is that as I cried for more than twenty minutes straight after her death, I realized my heart was already scarred with so many state-sponsored wounds.
I’m from Nesam, a small kampung between Kupang and Dili. Aside from the ghost Bito’o, one creature you wouldn’t want kids to stumble upon in the forest while searching for birds or fruit is the Fretilin. People would say that the Fretilin had big afros and mustaches and liked to murder children. The negative stereotypes still exist today. Sometimes, when I show up in my kampung, aunties will say: Auh, ho nakma onaha Fretilin! Shit, you look like a fucking Fretilin.
When I was in fourth grade, a lot of refugees from Timor-Leste arrived in my village, and one entered my class. Her name was Yanti. She was pretty and quiet. She got along with our classmates but didn’t like going to school. Her father would drop her off at school carrying a switch from a tamarind tree. He would haul her into the schoolyard hitting her; you could see that the little girl was terrified of school and that her father was broken-hearted—you could see that he was crying while hitting her. But you’d quickly forget all of that because, just a moment later, something else would happen: a fight would break out between teenagers from the kampung and the refugee camp. A house would get burned down. Someone would get hit by an arrow. Gunshots would sound. Policemen would search anyone wearing camo and beat teenagers up for no reason. Soldiers would mill around looking for prostitutes, and other stories you wouldn’t want to hear.
II
In fourth grade, I almost got in a fight with Kristo and Frid, two of my brothers, after they told me that the books I read so seriously by the light of the gas lantern were fiction, and fiction means that those books are filled with nonsense, that people make it all up, and that I was wasting my time reading all that junk. But once I managed to accept that those stories had been invented, I started to enjoy writing. When else would I be allowed to lie to people like that?
I became the writer for my friends at Nesam Elementary School. I would write four-page stories in my exercise book and my classmates would take turns reading them aloud, commenting on them, or adding in story ideas. I crafted tales in which the hero was a young kid who went on holiday to his grandmother’s, or a student in Java, or a child who put out a fire at Gambir Station in Jakarta. That sort of thing.
But I never wrote about Timor. Later, I realized that, when I would write, Timor felt very distant. It wouldn’t even come to mind. Even though I lived in Timor, everything I read (in the world of literature) brought me closer to Gambir Station, to the National Monument, or to middle class families in Jakarta with two kids, the likes of which I’d learned about in library books, all provided by the state.
I was alienated from my own home. I grew up with the notion that we weren’t important in Indonesia’s eyes. Teachers would get mad if we spoke in local languages in school. That’s village talk, they’d say, don’t use it. Eating betel nut is uncivilized, wearing woven cloth is primitive, even though our teachers would use it to make the school uniforms. On the map hanging in our classroom, the name of our former kingdom was spelled wrong. They’d turned Oelolok into Oilolok, but not a soul would protest because, in our eyes, the city people who made maps were always right. Maybe it was us, the uneducated people from the kampung, who was wrong.
These are just examples. I could go on talking about the role of the church, about my experiences confronting racism and colonialism, about foreigners coming to Timor, or about how, after moving to Java, I met Javanese people face-to face. Some were good people, and some saw me as an ugly eastern islander—stupid and a troublemaker. Little memories like these become wounds, which, in turn, would transform into the anger I realized I felt after crying over Laura.
III
At the opening of the 2020 Winternachten Festival in Den Haag, Goenawan Mohamad said: literature and art cannot be built by anger. He wanted to explain that he didn’t hate the Netherlands, that he wasn’t angry, even though the Dutch army had shot his father. With so much pain and anger in my own heart, what could I say in the face of a statement like that?
In the middle of a book discussion at the Petra Book Club in Flores a few months earlier, a teenager asked me how long it had taken to do the research for my novel. He was a bit shocked that I could narrate so many violent events. I write about myself. In the face of so many wounds, I only needed research to finish up the story. For so long, we have known that something happened and continues to happen, we live in fear, we can feel hearts breaking, as when Yanti’s father cried while hitting his daughter, or when Indonesian soldiers tell us that we should marry Javanese girls to better the Timorese race. We know something is happening, we just don’t know what it is.
Motivational writers as well as psychologists always say: sharing heals pain. I have written and shared my story with you in the form of a 200-page novel. But when I look at this country—its treatment of Papua, eviction after eviction, the killings of activists, and more—it seems, to this day, to exist only to harm. And I cannot hope, or think it possible, to heal or forgive.
Yogyakarta, 2020
Translated by Lara Norgaard
Felix K. Nesi is an Indonesian author from Nesam-Insana, East Nusa Tenggara. A graduate of Merdeka Malang University in psychology, he was named the Emerging Writer at the Makassar International Writers Festival in 2015. He has published a collection of short stories entitled Usaha Membunuh Sepi (2016) as well as the novel Orang-orang Oetimu, which was awarded the prize for best novel by the Jakarta Arts Council in 2018.
Lara Norgaard is an editor, journalist, and translator. A graduate of Princeton University (B.A. Comparative Literature), she founded and directed Artememoria, a free-access, English-language arts magazine focused on the memory of Brazil’s civil-military dictatorship and served as Editor-at-Large in Brazil for Asymptote from 2017–2019. Her nonfiction reporting has been published in publications such as Agência Pública and The Princeton Echo, her literary criticism in The Jakarta Post and Peixe-elétrico, and her translations of fiction and non-fiction in Asymptote Journal. Currently, she is a Luce Scholar collaborating with the Lontar Foundation in Jakarta, Indonesia and a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University.