“These Cycles Are Repeating Themselves”: Lara Norgaard on Indonesian History and Translating Political Fiction

Being reviewed: Advertisement Felix Nesi’s People from Oetimu could be the funniest book about colonial terror ever written. Opening with the World Cup in the late nineties only to spiral back to decades of violence in Timor, the book is a treatise on a whole menu of colonialisms (Portuguese! Japanese! Indonesian!), yet its picaresque sense of adventure and acid humor disrupt any expectations one might have of political literature as a sober, documentational, or realist genre. Rather, Nesi resembles Machado de Assis or Emile Habiby in how he sees irony as the mode of anticolonial aesthetic. The new edition, excellently translated from Indonesian by Lara Norgaard and published by Archipelago, brings out the novel’s provocations, its libidinous ire, and kaleidoscopic narrative propulsions—and offers readers a vital tool by which they may arm themselves against the seductions of nationalism. Ken Chen (KC): It’s such a pleasure to read your translation of People from Oetimu. Nesi has such a satisfyingly unsatisfying approach to who is the colonizer and who is the colonized. Central to this is ideology. We see many characters go about their regular lives only to become politicized for contingent and often counterintuitive reasons. A right-wing royalist becomes an anticolonial communist insurgent. A character named Am Siki is initially motivated by Japanese soldiers mistreating his horse and becomes an Indonesian national hero almost by accident. The book describes a process of reification or translation, where events leave the realm of social relationships and enter an ideological realm. What did Nesi want us to see in the disconnect between East Timor insurgent identity and Indonesian nationhood? Lara Norgaard (LN): This book is about ideology in a lot of ways. It’s also about the oppressive narratives that come from these ideologies that are imposed on different people or the narratives that arise out of these everyday lived experiences that then become part of an ideological apparatus of some kind. One of the things I find most interesting about this novel is how storytelling is its central theme: It’s a novel about so many different competing narratives and how narratives have power. Either they have power in an oppressive sense, or they have power on some level like a liberatory sense. Although not in a triumphal sense—there’s nothing really very triumphant about this book. Still, the satirical vein of the novel shows how to recognize and dispute some of those narratives that come from power. You are right to say that these are often very quotidian stories. That’s one of the most interesting elements of the book, that these narratives of power come out of the most mundane experiences. One of my favorite moments is when the novel subtly addresses how the Indonesian state imposed eating rice on people. There’s quite an interesting way in which Nesi presents this idea. He begins by saying, “there were no rice paddies in Oetimu; people cultivated tubers and maize on the land that sloped down from the hills. But rice was nevertheless a staple in their diet, and the vast majority of town residents were ashamed to eat cassava and corn — and if people weren’t embarrassed to eat local crops, they nevertheless felt sick to their stomachs whenever they did, since their guts had gotten used to digesting rice. Every harvest season, officials from the Ministry of Information drove big trucks through the town, blasting official regulations through huge loudspeakers.” And the loudspeakers tell everyone, you are stupid and backwards and uncivilized if you would eat cassava and you should eat rice. Now, this little detail really speaks to that element of ideology and everyday material lived experience. The Indonesian state has this desire for everyone to modernize, to become a “civilized nation.” It’s an official narrative that’s literally blasted through loudspeakers about normatively what you should do in your everyday life. And yet, because of the way that Nesi introduces it into the landscape, it feels incongruous and almost absurd. You can feel the absurdity of that official narrative as you are reading the book. It showcases exactly how the author very skillfully exposes how some of these narratives of power actually don’t make any sense. And so, while presenting just how powerful these narratives are in the lives of people, he simultaneously critiques them, revealing how we could dispute or challenge them. KC: What’s so curious about the scene with the Ministry of Information is—yes, it’s an illustration of neocolonial exploitation of rural laborers, but it’s also a moment where ideology weirdly becomes almost more real than material lived experience. Let’s talk about the book’s humor. People from Oetimu is a novel where someone gets gruesomely beaten up every few pages, yet it’s a sarcastic and funny book. Unlike a contemporary liberal novel of representation, People from Oetimu does not try to speak from the point of an “authentic” East Timorese subject. One element of this is how the book often adopts the viewpoint of the oppressor, often to provide a critique of the collaborator. How do you think humor operates in the book? LN: There isn’t an essentializing discourse about people from Timor in this novel at all. East Timor was occupied by Indonesia for much of the latter half of the 20th century, and the western half of the Island of Timor is a marginalized site within the Indonesian nation (economically marginalized, linguistically marginalized, etc.). All that’s true, but the book shows that it isn’t simple; the people on Timor, in fact, have more complex psychological relationships to all of these structures of power which interlock to oppress various different groups. You have the power of the Indonesian state and all of the characters in the novel who become associated with it and choose to become associated with it. You have the power of a local police officer. You have the power of the patriarchy with male characters in gender relations. You have the power of the church and those involved in the church. And often characters with the best intentions end up in ethically compromised positions. Even characters with completely benign intentions or mildly selfish intentions end up doing pretty bad things because of the institutional structures around them. Take the church. In the novel, a priest starts a school, initially to revive an impoverished school that’s been entirely neglected by the church system, because the publicly funded schools are in complete disrepair in West Timor. And so, he’s trying to improve the community in some way. He does but inadvertently ends up making an elitist institution that’s incredibly competitive to get into, which doesn’t serve the very poor communities that it used to serve, who then have no option, no school to go to whatsoever. He is celebrated for it and ends up having an air of self-importance due to all of this. His original motivations to revive this school also had to do with his own dramatic romantic life and him trying to escape his shame over an affair he had. And at the end of the day, he ends up covering up sexual assault that’s taking place at the school. Again: no triumphalism in this narrative. All of this fits into the ironic register. Nesi doesn’t treat his characters with very much piety. Another example is Linus, who’s probably one of the most awful characters in the book. But there’s a very funny chapter about his backstory. He’s not the brightest bulb, and yet when he goes off to college, he tries to convince his father to send him extra spending money through various schemes. And one of Linus’s schemes is to make up student organizations that he’s participating in, using English language words that his father won’t understand to justify extra fees, which he’s really using for partying. So, he tells his father about the rising costs of a Student Association of Chain-Smoking and Binge-Drinking and that sort of things. His father accepts the premise simply because he assumes anything written in English is a worthy investment and ends up selling off most of his ancestral lands to support what he thinks is his son’s education, but what’s really his son’s debauchery. And that’s part of the origin story of a character who later commits some of the worst crimes in the book. I actually had a conversation with my editor at Archipelago about those sections. We had to play around with the English so that those names came off as immediately funny. For me, interpreting this novel as humorous and making those ironic moments land for readers in English was really important. KC: Let’s talk about the novel’s ambiguous gender politics. Women in anticolonial literature often stand in for the imagined motherland. I thought about Beauty Is a Wound, a novel by fellow Indonesian Eka Kurniawan which depicts a kind of economy of rape. The women in Nesi’s novel sometimes seem both more intelligent and even autonomous than the men, yet the book also features extensive representations of sexual violence and their suicides. Did you feel uncomfortable translating the passages around sexual assault? What did you make of the novel’s engagement with its female characters? LN: When I first met Nesi and interviewed him about this novel, I asked him a question around the topic of sexual assault and whether some passages in the novel could be seen as gratuitous. One of the things he told me was that he was drawing on real narratives that he witnessed either directly or heard about secondhand growing up in West Timor. So, there’s an element of him trying to bear witness in this text, which I feel distinguishes this book from Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty Is a Wound, for example. And to be fair, nearly all the characters—male and female—meet tragic ends. KC: Of the female characters, there’s Silvy, who is arguably the smartest character in the novel. There is also Maria, who’s in the running for smartest character. They seem different from the men, who are uniformly stupid, one-dimensional, protoplasms of violence. Maria is a communist student organizer and could be the one character in the book who deliberately creates a constructive politics. And something interesting happens with Silvy, who’s an ingenue who has experiences with sexual violence that become recontextualized as the narrative progresses. These two women seem larger than whatever trauma is inflicted on them. LN: The female characters’ roles aren’t entirely allegorical, either. They as characters are not merely allegorical for the nation or for Timor in any specific way. That said, Maria does seem to represent the student movement and its aspirations and its failures, its cynicisms. Silvy is an especially interesting character because of the way in which she drives the second half of the narrative. It’s her decision to move to Oetimu that brings this very winding fragmented narrative structure back together. And she’s the one who survives at the end. I was uncomfortable with some of the scenes of sexual assault that appear in the novel but her thinking through that situation—and as an agent resolving the situation to the best of her ability despite the awful constraints that exist in her social world—is the most important narrative thread in the entire novel. KC: She’s one of the few characters who seems to possess an interiority and act less like a type than some of the others. She has been abandoned by both her father and her mother and has issues around chastity, yet she has an almost psychoanalytic relationship with her sexuality. LN: Part of the reason why some of the characters might come across as a bit flat is because the third person narrative voice. The narration has this very storytelling-like feel about it, which mostly focuses on action. What’s very clever about Silvy’s narrative arc is how we gain access to her interiority within a novel that deals so much with exteriority and material actions and choices. Of course, we get these brief windows into the interiority of each character. But because of the fragmentation and because we are hearing so many different tales, it’s hard to get to deep dive into each character. Silvy, by contrast, develops as the second half of the book develops. And so, we’re able to see her change in really fascinating ways as a result of her choices, her pragmatism, and her self-assertion in a social context that wants to force women to be passive. KC: We’ve talked about violence and tragedy. I wanted to ask you about political hope. This novel is not a liberatory call for East Timorese nationalism—in fact, it’s quite skeptical of such idealism. This is a bit of a spoiler alert, but Silvy is one of the characters who has the closest thing to a happy ending, though it’s never depicted. Elsewhere, hope seems to consist of moments of ideological rupture. In one scene, an East Timorese character working for the state suddenly realizes the army is killing his people. In another moment, Maria’s family is killed by the military—and when the Indonesian state co-opts the funeral, she enacts her own form of rebellion by cussing out the bureaucrat. What does it mean to find hope in these moments where nationalist ideology self-circuits? LN: We have to infer some of the happy endings. We have to infer Silvy’s happy ending. We definitely don’t witness it and there are also a thousand ways it could go wrong. I agree more with the idea that the happy ending comes from these moments where dominant narratives, where ideology or different forms of power fracture and the characters start being able to see cracks in those structures of power. The hope comes from dispelling some of our mythmaking about the nation or gender and from the characters who manage to discursively challenge those structures over the course of the novel. Even if they individually don’t necessarily have a happy life, this still creates some element of hope. At the same time, it’s not an optimistic novel, which makes sense given the context that it was written in and given the political backdrop of present-day Indonesia. It’s reasonable that there isn’t a ton of hope in this book, or that the hopeful ending isn’t quite there. But we can read it in a way that understands what I see as the novel’s main idea about change making, which has to do with breaking down ideological narratives. Maria’s act of swearing at these state officials—these male powerbrokers in public and in front of an audience, calling out their hypocrisy—is the greatest act of political challenging that we witness in this book. It’s a very powerful moment where you see: Okay, the language and discourse and stories matter here, and there are ways to challenge them even if it won’t work out for that individual person at the end of the day. KC: The anarchist Gustav Landauer said, “One can throw away a chair and destroy a pane of glass,” but you can’t destroy the state that way since it is not an object but “a certain relationship between human beings.” People from Oetimu endlessly depicts violence, often spiraling backwards to some ever-prior act of retaliatory force. Violence is wielded both by the state and by insurgents, and the book seems quite skeptical of violence as a liberatory tool. LN: We can think about cycles of violence in this novel vis-à-vis trauma, intergenerational trauma, and colonial trauma. There is a police officer, Sergeant Ipi, who goes around this fictional town and is able to beat people up for no cause and with total impunity. One thing that’s interesting about him is that he was raised by Am Siki, the supposed savior of the nation, an anticolonial hero who is said to have liberated Timor from Japanese occupation. But his mother underwent torture and sexual assault during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. So, Ipi has this very interesting mixed history and upbringing which is steeped in violence. His decision to go around beating people up doesn’t always necessarily seem like a conscious choice. Instead, it seems to come from his background, those interlocked stories of violence: both the macropolitical violence of colonial occupation and resistance and being raised by Am Siki who imposed on him a very rough, tough, hypermasculine upbringing. It stems from trauma. KC: Yes, Am Siki is a character who has killed the Japanese soldiers and regales the village children with this supposed act of anticolonial heroism. He’s a murderer! And yet, one always telling others never to act violently. LN: Exactly. That’s precisely it, and that really adds an element of nuance to this idea of liberatory violence. Technically, the violence that he committed was liberatory. He was in a forced labor camp. He was going to be killed and committed this violence in the name of liberation. And yet, it comes to be repeated in this postcolonial and neocolonial context over and over again in different ways, ultimately creating a character who so casually engages in police brutality. This relates to what you asked me at the beginning of our conversation, about how People from Oetimu depicts state ideology in the context of neocolonial occupation. The novel’s commentary on violence moves between intimate, personal histories and broader national and global political upheaval. The acts of violence that repeat over generations are not always the direct consequences of a specific state policy, but they are always materially connected to longer structural histories of political violence. KC: This book is written in the shadow of the massacre of leftists in Indonesia and the rise of US-backed authoritarian regimes in both Latin America and Southeast Asia, which were often connected in surprising ways. You are also a specialist in the dictatorship literature of Brazil, and I wonder what connections you see between there and the Indonesia or East Timor of this book? LN: There are numerous historical and political connections. The Indonesian dictatorship that frames the setting of much of this novel was in direct communication with Latin American dictatorships by way of both the CIA and also by more independent right wing anticommunist networks. Vincent Bevins has written a journalistic book about some of those that offers an illuminating starting point to thinking about the Cold War from the perspective of the global South. On the level of literature, I’m interested in some of these connections in terms of cultural production rather than just the historical and the political. There were many writers in both contexts who were attentive to these uncanny similarities if nothing else that had yet to be proven historically but that were pretty evident from the early 1970s. One of the most important Indonesian playwrights of the second half of the 20th century was WS Rendra. He wrote a play in 1973 called The Mastodon and the Condor that critiques the Indonesian military dictatorship but is set in an unnamed Latin American country. One of the things that I find really powerful about it is the way in which the author doesn’t leave the US as the determining force of all of these connections. KC: Many characters in the novel blame the US, but their critique comes off as a joke, rather than critique. LN: It’s actually a debate among the characters: Is the US at fault for Brazil losing to the French in the World Cup? There’s an active running debate. Yes, the US is at fault. No, the US thinks it controls everything, and they don’t control everything. And actually, Brazil’s star player’s failure to score is all about the curse of internal, Indonesian domestic politics. The debates continue. There’s also a Latin American connection happening there, with the characters’ sense of affinity with the Brazilian team. I find it powerful to keep in mind that when you think about these historical and political connections, directly connecting regimes by way of the CIA, the United States was an actor and was supporting these governments, but emphasizing that can reduce the agency of the characters, historical figures, and all these places who were actively involved in right-wing networks who were actively invested in fascist ideologies. To reduce that to “it’s the US’s fault” is also a—maybe it’s one of those essentializing of people in the global South discourses that we would also want to avoid. People in all of these places also had agency to take the support of the United States and to… KC: Something they got out of it. LN: Exactly. And there’s plenty of opportunism in that history as well. So, remembering those kinds of nuances—this novel reminds us of that fact. KC: The first Trump administration elicited the rise of a discourse about fascism, but those from the global South have been quite familiar with dictatorships and often possess a suppler set of metaphors to use to describe authoritarian moments. What do you think Americans can learn from Nesi about living in a nondemocratic nation? LN: Readers should definitely take note of how insidious these authoritarian states are, not just because of the policies and directives that are top-down, but also because of all the people who end up siding with a corrupt or authoritarian regime out of their own interests or because of difficult situations they find themselves in. We see this happening already. The story at hand in People from Oetimu is one of military coups, it’s one of violent ruptures and regimes being overthrown, and maybe that is part of the reason why people have a hard time confronting our current moment in the United States, because we don’t see regime change in the same obvious, explicit way. But the ways in which actual violence and impunity is taking place in the United States right now, and the way that oppression operates, is something that’s very much resonant with the novel and relevant across different political contexts. And the last thing I would say is that it’s useful to think about the current situation of the United States in dialogue with a global moment and not as an isolated phenomenon. Our situation has precedence in the past decade, not just domestically, with the first Trump administration, but also across Latin America, as well as in Indonesia, where Prabowo was recently elected president. Prabowo was part of the Indonesian military under the Suharto dictatorship and had a direct hand in the violence in East Timor. So, these cycles are repeating themselves in different places and it’s important to have that wider lens on how democratic erosion is taking place globally. This article was commissioned by Tara K. Menon.