Posts featuring Felix K. Nesi

Writing Orang-orang Oetimu, Writing Wounds

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?

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. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches from the Frontlines of World Literature

Your weekly literary news from around the world, all in one convenient package.

Awards, new translations, and a poet working to help the homeless—all this and more awaits in today’s dispatches! From Hong Kong, Hungary, and Indonesia, our editors-at-large have the latest updates.

Jacqueline Leung, Editor-at-Large for Hong Kong, reporting from Hong Kong

In the last few months of 2018, Hong Kong saw the deaths of several literary greats, but with January comes commemoration and activity. Martial arts novelist Louis Cha Leung-yung, or “Jin Yong,” passed away on October 30, 2018, just half a year after the publication of Legends of the Condor Heroes: A Hero Born, the English translation of one of his emblematic wuxia series set during the Song Dynasty. A Bond Undone, the second volume of the quartet, will be published at the end of this month in Gigi Chang’s translation. Its release is likely to gain even more traction in the aftermath of the writer’s passing.

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