Liberating East Timorese Liberation Poetry: Oppositional discourses and postcolonial theory
By Anthony Soares
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| Photo: http://makanaka.wordpress.com/ |
In Postcolonial Studies: A
Materialist Critique, Benita Parry (2004) accuses the predominant trends in
postcolonial criticism of having relegated liberation theory and discourses to
a largely ignored academic backwater. She begins by stating that, ‘It must
initially appear improbable that disciplinary fields constituted around
critiques of capitalism and colonialism have given a meagre reception to
liberation theory’ (75). In part, this lack of attention derives from what
Parry sees as ‘a tendency amongst postcolonial critics to disown liberation
discourses and practices, and indeed all forms of anti-colonialist rhetoric and
organization’ (75); in the particular case of Marxist critics, ‘this
indifference takes its place within the wider and long-standing exclusion of
non-western knowledge from the canons compiled by metropolitan scholars’ (75).
It is in the light of these perceived tendencies, as identified by Parry, that
this essay analyses some instances of East Timorese liberation poetry, using
them to illustrate the reluctance of postcolonial critics to posit value upon
this type of lyrical discourse. It will argue that this lyric production is
unjustly relegated to an ‘intermediary’ stage of doubtful merit in the literary
development of East Timor, and doubly so given
the particular circumstances of this former Portuguese colony, whose full
independence was only achieved in 2002. This essay will also propose that some
postcolonial critics may minimise the value of such poetry because of its
‘utopian’ visions. In this respect, critics fail to take properly into account
that this poetry is a creative reaction to the concrete situation in which the
Timorese found themselves at the time of its production, and the historical
context needs to be considered.
East Timorese poets
like Francisco Borja da Costa, or Jorge Lauten, could be perceived by some
postcolonial critics to have engaged in an oppositional poetic project that
reinforced an imperialist dialectic, looking to replace the colonial presence
with an homogenizing nationalistic identity as restrictive as the regime it
sought to defeat. The potential dismissal of these poets’ liberation poetry
evidences some of the debates surrounding the theoretical premises and objects
of study of postcolonialism (or ‘post-colonialism’) itself.1 Where
postcolonialism is accused of introducing a false historical or developmental
linearity, liberation discourses and liberationist histories are ‘accused of
weaving a seamless narrative’ (Parry 18). The poetry of liberation is seen in
this light as a reductionist lyric, poised at a false crossroads between
colonial rule and national emancipation. Citing Anne McClintock as evidence,
Alison Blunt and Cheryl McEwan (2002), for example, having defined the ‘post’
within ‘postcolonialism’ as referring to both the temporal and the critical
aftermaths of colonialism, describe the perceived theoretical difficulties
raised by these definitions:
These two meanings do not necessarily coincide, and it
is, in part, their problematic interaction that has made ‘postcolonialism’ such
a contested term. Focusing on the temporal difference between a colonial past
and post-colonial present not only obscures colonial and neocolonial
inequalities that persist today, but can also obscure the power relations between
colonizer and colonized (3).
It is particularly in the determined efforts to avoid the accusation
of a temporal or teleological inconsistency inherent within postcolonialism
that liberation discourses are largely dismissed as contaminated objects of study.
They are frequently read as discourses that posit a postcolonial future that
will have erased the inequalities and injustices of a colonial past, frequently
limiting themselves to calls for the end of colonial rule in what is perceived
as a blind leap into a tenuous nationalistic project. Given the disastrous circumstances faced by East Timor after
Portugal’s chaotic and cowardly withdrawal, and the subsequent Indonesian
invasion of 7th December 1975, it should not be surprising that the
territory’s poets – whether in exile or as members of the internal resistance –
would turn to a lyric of liberation, aimed at those determined to oppose their
country’s invaders.2 Moreover, the temporal extent of East Timor’s
experience of colonialism and of the struggle against the colonial presence,
means that the discourse of liberation dominates in the lyric tradition of a
nation that finally achieved its independence in 2002. For some critics,
however, such domination represents the continuation of a binary logic
supportive of imperialist power-structures, as Bill Ashcroft (2001) contends in
his analysis of resistance: ‘The problem with resistance is that to see it as a
simple oppositionality locks it into the very binary which Europe established
to define its others’ (13). Instead, Ashcroft proposes a view of resistance
where the colonized engage with the colonizer in a mutually transformative
process, so that ‘one of the key features of this transformative process has
been the entry, aggressive or benign, of post-colonial acts and modes of
representation into the dominant discourse itself, an interpolation which not
only interjects and interrupts that discourse but changes it in subtle ways’
(14).
Part of this transformative process, according to Ashcroft, occurs through
the colonized’s ‘consumption of colonial discourse’, and the expenditure of
‘cultural capital’ (40-44). The culture of the colonizer can be consumed by the
colonized subject without a concomitant loss of agency, and then expended in a
form that has transformed the original into a local product, with the
capability of being in turn consumed by the colonizer, making it part of the
metropolitan cultural landscape. In this way, ‘[w]hile the availability of a
dominant imperial or global culture as ‘capital’ appears to marginalize
traditional culture, it may enable that traditional culture to take sometimes
radical and exploratory forms’ (43), so that
Cultural capital lifts the colonized subject out of a
simplistic binary of opposition or a myth of passive subjection. Despite the
power of colonial representation, a power which Said examines in Orientalism, despite the ubiquity and
influence of the tropes by which colonized subjects are marginalized, the
colonial subject is never simply a tabula
rasa on which colonial discourse can inscribe its representations: his or
her engagement of the culture presented as capital may be extremely subtle
(44).
Once again, we can note in Ashcroft’s articulations a concern to
avoid seeing opposition in “simple” binary terms, and the preoccupation to
instil agency into the colonized subject through a transformative engagement
with colonial discourse where that engagement is characterised as “subtle”.
Such “subtlety” may be essential in artistic production undertaken under the
limitations of colonial rule, but it became even more urgent for a considerable
period in the case of East Timor, as cultural representations of East Timorese
authorship produced whilst the country was under the control of the colonizing
powers were also produced under dictatorial regimes. This means that under
Salazar and Caetano in the case of Portugal,
and General Suharto in the case of Indonesia, the production and
consumption of culture, both in the colonies and the metropolitan centre, are
activities seriously conditioned by state censorship.3
Bearing these
points in mind, what are we to make of Borja da Costa’s “O rasto da tua
passagem”, a poem that accuses the Portuguese colonizer of cultural aggression?4
Does the phantasm of a binary logic haunt the following verses?
Silenciaste
minha razão
Na
razão das tuas leis
Sufocaste
minha cultura
Na
cultura da tua cultura
After pointing to a list of crimes perpetrated by the Portuguese
which emphasises a dichotomy between that which belongs to the Timorese (‘meu
corpo’, ‘minha alma’),
and those elements belonging to the colonizer (‘teu império’, ‘tua religião’),
the poem ends with the vision of a future of liberation:
Na ponta da baioneta
Assinalaste
o rasto da tua passagem
Na
ponta da minha baioneta
Marcarei
na história a forma da minha
Libertação
A principal concern of this poem is not so much to highlight a
subtle or positive transformation of the colonizer’s culture, but rather to
point an accusing finger at the dominant discourse’s attempt to suffocate the
poet’s cultural subjectivity – an attempt that has necessarily failed. The
evidence for that failure is the poem itself, which also represents a lyric
articulation that has fused both native and external poetic traditions,
combining the use of parallelisms characteristic of oral literature with
imagery not normally associated with ‘the rich, earthly lore of village life,
of the countryside and every day activity’ (Jolliffe, in Costa, 1976: 15), thus
contributing to the continuing evolution of Timorese literary expression.5
However, such an articulation, which may reflect Timorese oral traditions and
combine them in a written form that expresses nationalist concerns (Jolliffe,
in Costa, 1976: 10), is clearly marked as different from the Portuguese
‘other’. Even if the ownership that is underlined in ‘minha razão’ and ‘minha
cultura’ need not necessarily be translated as standing in metonymically for
the nation’s reason, or the nation’s culture, it is nevertheless couched in
oppositional terms, an opposition that the poetic voice believes will be
resolved through the colonized subject’s liberation from colonialism.
There is little of
Ashcroft’s ‘subtlety’ in the message conveyed by “O rasto da tua passagem”,
which is not surprising given the poetic context into which Borja da Costa had
inserted it. Jill Jolliffe explains that the majority of his poems included in
her edition of the poet’s work comes ‘from a typescript folio prepared by Borja
da Costa in October 1975, entitled ‘Revolutionary pomes in the struggle against
colonialism’ (11). The title is revealing, in that it presents Borja da Costa’s
lyrical discourse in terms of an oppositional struggle, and the date confirms
that the poems collected within this folio are brought together after the end
of Portuguese colonial rule. In fact, the date is subsequent to the departure
of Portugal’s interim administration in August 1975, following the brief civil
war between Fretilin and the rival UDT in which the former emerged as the
winners.6 It is a period dominated by the aftermath of Portuguese
colonial rule, the brief but violent struggle over the future direction of
Timor, and the increasing number of incursions into Timorese territory by the
Indonesian military. It is in this setting that Borja da Costa’s poems emerge,
and the urgency of the call to ‘destruir/e acabar/com o peso/e
opressão/colonial’ in “O Povo Maubere não pode ser Escravo de mais ninguém” can
be read not only as a reaction against the after-effects of Portuguese colonial
rule, but also as a rallying-call to resist any other nation’s imperial
designs. However, it is the very language of resistance, evoking violent
struggle, which leads Ashcroft to pose the following question:
[W]e might well ask whether this armed or ideological
rebellion is the only possible meaning of resistance, and, more importantly,
whether such a history leaves in its wake a rhetoric
of opposition emptied of any capacity for social change. Observing the way in
which colonial control was often ejected by national liberation movements only
to be replaced by equally coercive indigenous élites, we might well ask: What
does it really mean to resist? (20).
The suggestion raised by Ashcroft’s question is twofold and
interconnected: that violent or ideological opposition should be avoided in
favour of ‘subtle and sometimes even unspoken forms of social and cultural
resistance’ (20); and that the violent overthrow of colonial rule gives way to
other oppressive regimes. As to the first element of this question, “O Povo
Maubere não pode ser Escravo de mais ninguém” sees the Timorese struggle as a
necessary means of overcoming both the colonial oppressor and the internalised
fear of the colonized, and the terms in which this is posed are neither subtle
in themselves, nor do they inscribe subtlety into the struggle that must be
undertaken:
É preciso
lutar
p’ra vencer
e acabar
com o medo
servil
However, it is not within such liberation poetry that we can find
evidence of any future internal oppression, as the colonial subject it opposes
is the sole source of unjust rule, whilst self-government – whether equitable
or not – is beyond the immediate horizon of this lyric discourse. That is not
to say that Borja da Costa does not touch upon the ideal society he envisions
for Timor, but such visions will not be put to
the test by Timorese independence until long after they were represented
poetically. It is misleading to take our current knowledge of certain
postcolonial regimes to subsequently accuse liberation poetry and oppositional
discourses of engaging in a nefarious binary logic – the discourse of
liberation does not of itself necessarily lead to undemocratic societies, as
these can arise not because of such
discourses, but despite them.7
The liberation
poetry of East Timor, therefore, sites
injustice within the colonizing subject, and victorious opposition to colonial
power is seen as the essential means of achieving freedom from oppression.
Borja da Costa makes this clear in the final stanzas of “O grito do soldado
maubere”, where the violence of the ongoing struggle for liberation is seen as
something that Fretilin combatants will not shirk from in their willingness to
attain Timor’s liberty:
O sangue vertido
Não deixou de escoar
Nas
veias dos soldados mauberes
E
o soldado maubere
Ergueu
a sua espingarda
E
sacudiu das suas costas
O
peso da criminosa influência
Dos
galões colonialistas
Em
defesa do Povo Maubere
Enfrentou
as balas assassinas
Encurralou
os criminosos
E
enchendo o coração de estoicidade heróica
Gritou
– NÃO ao
assassínio
– NÃO ao
colonialismo
–NÃO às garras dos
vândalos na carne do
[Povo Maubere e no
solo de Timor Leste
SIM com
FRETILIN
Para a
LIBERTAÇÃO TOTAL
Blood is spilt in a struggle that sees the Fretilin soldier raising
his rifle to aim at colonialism and its poisonous influences, which have
corrupted those supporters of the UDT that murderously turned against their
fellow Timorese. What Borja da Costa sees as the ‘peso da criminosa
influência/Dos galões colonialistas’, will be replaced by ‘a LIBERTAÇÃO TOTAL’,
but only through direct opposition. However, for Ashcroft, the belief in such a
strategy becomes an admission of failure, as it reinstates the power of
colonialism in the very attempt to abolish it through violent struggle. In
Ashcroft’s view:
The most tenacious aspect of colonial control has been
its capacity to bind the colonized into a binary myth. Underlying all colonial
discourse is a binary of colonizer/colonized, civilized/uncivilized,
white/black which works to justify the mission
civilatrice and perpetuate a cultural distinction which is essential to the
‘business’ of economic and political exploitation. The idea that ‘counterforce’
is the best response to the colonialist myth of force, or to the myth of
nurture, both of which underlie this civilizing mission, binds the colonized
into the myth. This has often implicated colonized groups and individuals in a
strategy of resistance which has been unable to resist absorption into the myth of power, whatever the outcome of their
political opposition (21).
The exercise of colonial power as the articulation of a civilizing
mission was certainly the reason offered by Salazar’s regime for Portugal’s presence in Timor
and elsewhere. However, the success of the colonial power’s attempts to position
the colonized subject within the negative half of a civilized/uncivilized
binary cannot be seen as either durable or all-encompassing. Writing in 1977 on
the resistance to the Indonesian invasion, Abílio Araújo refers to the myth of
Timorese passivity propagated by Portuguese colonial discourse:
Ao silêncio sepulcral que
parecia amortalhar o cadáver de um povo inanimado contrapôs-se um vasto
reportório da autoria dos cantores do colonialismo português sobre a
“fidelidade secular” daquele povo para com o seu colonizador, repertório que,
por tantas vezes repetido, se tornou monótono e que hoje assume nova tonalidade
qual lamúria de carpideira a desfazer-se em prantos farisaicos ou lamentações
de saudade pungente (7).
The lack of agency ascribed to the Timorese by
Portuguese colonial discourse is shown as failing to take account of ‘um povo
que em quatro séculos consecutivos nunca soube o que era depor as armas para
submeter a cerviz ao jugo estrangeiro’ (7), or to properly describe ‘a
sentinela Maubere que, camuflada por entre as copas das árvores ou colada aos
íngremes penedos continua a espreitar pela alça do cano da sua espingarda ou
pela direcção da sua flecha encostada ao arco vergado, o novo intruso, o novo
agressor indonésio’ (8). The need to remember a time
when – despite the false image disseminated by colonial propaganda – the
Timorese resisted the Portuguese presence through force of arms, becomes a
springboard toward reinvigorating the resistance to the new colonizers. These new invaders are also identified by
Araújo as sharing ideological equivalences with their Portuguese predecessors,
since their colonialism represents ‘a insaciedade e a ganância capitalista e
imperialista de dominar para explorar’, and ‘eles tentarão por todas as formas e
por justificações das mais variadas impor a sua
ordem’ (12).
It is the imposition of a discourse and structure emanating from a
metropolitan centre that fosters the discourse of opposition and liberation
that are regarded with distrust by some postcolonial critics. Parry, however,
voices some dismay at the stance taken by such theorists, arguing that ‘[t]hose
who have been or are still engaged in colonial struggles against contemporary
forms of neo-colonialism could well read the theorizing of discourse analysts
with considerable disbelief at the construction this puts on the situation they
are fighting against and the contest in which they are engaged’ (26). In the
circumstances that Parry is referring to, the material conditions that exist
under colonialism are not sufficiently evident in the analysis undertaken by
certain postcolonial thinkers, where the importance of the textual and its
linguistic implications take precedence over imperialism’s physical aggression.
Thus, Parry considers that ‘theorists of colonial discourse will need to pursue
the connections between “epistemic violence” and material aggression’ (36).
Furthermore, the reluctance to assume the validity of liberation or
oppositional discourses stems from a valorisation of ‘difference’ that is
instantly suspicious of anti-colonial struggles that aim to replace rule by a
foreign power with a national system of self-governance. Parry explains her own
questioning of current theoretical views of ‘difference’ in the following
terms:
To question the deployment of ‘difference’ as a counter
to the negatively perceived ‘totalization’ is not to deny the fecundity of a
notion which insists on subjectivity as polymorphous, community as
heterogeneous, social formations as mutable and culture as vagrant. It is to
recognize that ‘difference’ has been diverted by a postmodernist criticism as a
theoretical ruse to establish a neutral, ideology-free zone from which the
social dissension and political contest inscribed in the antagonist pairing of
colonizer/colonized have been expelled (65).8
Such a diversion of difference negates the material conditions
created by imperial rule, which attempts to impose metropolitan values in
colonized societies, thereby looking to eradicate the difference that native
values represent. In so doing, the colonizer creates an imbalance in the
apprehension of reality, as the world is only to be understood using
metropolitan concepts and in terms that are beneficial to the metropolitan
centre. Differing conceptual frameworks originating outside the centre of the
world-system are dismissed as outmoded and as inimical to a world-view that is
increasingly generalized, although showing local variations within a global
structure.
I consider, therefore, the exultation of difference in postcolonial
criticism to lead sometimes to the entrance of imperialist values through the
back door when applied to discourses of liberation. In accusing discourses of
resistance of replicating colonialism’s binaries, such criticism equates the
nature of opposition as leading to another ‘monologic’ discourse to replace the
one propagated by imperialism. These criticisms also betray an understandable
distaste toward violence, as when Ashcroft laments that ‘resistance has
invariably connoted the urgent imagery of war’ (19). Such imagery was evident
in Borja da Costa’s poetry, and is also central to Jorge Lauten, as in the poem
“Não pisará Timor”, which depicts the killing
of an Indonesian soldier:9
Nasceu
nas barracas do Kampang
deixou
talvez uma mulher grávida
a
chorar nas escadas de Borobudur
Era
o primeiro na fila estreita
dei-lhe um só tiro
porque
são escassas as munições
Tirei-lhe
dos pés as botas de cabedal
não
subirá com elas os degraus de Borobudur
nem
pisará com elas
a terra sagrada de Timor
Lauten’s poem has positioned the Indonesian invader as the target of
Timorese resistance to his presence in ‘a terra sagrada da Timor’,
which may support claims that such liberation poetry perpetuates the
‘colonialist myth of force’, and that it raises the phantom of a false
nationalist consciousness. However, such a reading would ignore the
correspondences that are made between the Indonesian soldier and his killer in
Lauten’s poem, and to assign a supremacist intention to the discourse of
liberation that is not deserved.
The soldier who
leads the ‘fila estreita’ into Timorese soil is specifically identified as
being poor, since he comes from the ‘barracas do Kampang’, making him a victim
of the economic policies followed by the Indonesian dictator, General Suharto,
which have not only condemned him to poverty, but have also inextricably led
him to East Timor. Poverty is also the condition in which the liberation
fighter finds himself, reduced to stripping the dead soldier of his boots, and
making sure that he kills his enemy with a single shot ‘porque são escassas as
munições’. Both the Indonesian soldier and the Timorese liberation fighter are
victims of colonial oppression – the former of an internal neo-colonialism, and
the latter by the continuation of an external colonialism at the hands of a
nation that had itself experienced the effects of imperial rule. Indonesia is one of those ‘países do 3.°
Mundo que ainda ontem lutaram pela sua independência’ which now ‘se arvoram en
novos colonizadores’, and whose ‘classe dirigente identifica os seus interesses
com os da burguesia dos países capitalistas ocidentais e, como tal, não hesita
em explorar o seu Povo, hipotecar o seu País e agredir até outros povos que a
custo tentam libertar-se do jugo colonial das velhas potências’ (Araújo 13). Just as Araújo lays the blame for these new colonialisms on the
ruling elites of countries such as Indonesia, Jorge Lauten’s poem “humanises”
the invading soldier, thus avoiding seeing him as any more than a hapless
instrument of others’ imperialist designs. Its references to Borobudur, a
Buddhist temple in Central Java, also serve to create correspondences with the
concluding verse, ‘a terra sagrada de Timor’.
In doing so, Lauten deflates any initial sense that the poem is attempting to
reify Timor as a result of simple opposition
to the colonizing nation. Instead, the poem becomes a lament for the Indonesian
soldier, who will not only never see his wife again or his unborn child, but
will also never again ascend the steps of a place that is as holy to him as Timor is to the Timorese.10
The parallel that
is made in Lauten’s poem between the sanctity of Timor to the resistance
fighter and that of Borobudur to the
Indonesian soldier means that the poem’s nationalist sentiment does not
represent a desire for exclusivity. There is no impulse to simply exclude
others from an originary Timorese identity, since Lauten has taken care to draw
comparisons between the two antagonists, who face each other in a deadly
struggle because of the colonial need to rule the colonized and their land, and
not because of ethnic or nationalist divisions. Abílio Araújo expresses the
awareness of those involved in Timor’s
resistance to the new invader that they are not engaging in an isolationist
struggle, declaring:
Nós que pertencemos a uma
nação cujo Povo luta denodadamente para se afirmar como uma nação una que
também tem o direito a ser ouvida, ao analisarmos a formação da nossa
nacionalidade, fazêmo-lo no intuito de conhecermos as nossas próprias forças, a
força da nossa unidade nacional para nos batermos a qualquer hora e em qualquer
momento contra todos quantos procuram negar-se a reconhecer uma aquisição
histórica do nosso Povo – a nacionalidade. Fazendo-o, acreditamos não nos
afastar da solidariedade revolucionária com a luta dos outros Povos pela sua
total emancipação pelo que não podemos ser acusados de chauvinismo (12).
Araújo’s rejection of accusations of chauvinism is based on the
identification with other societies engaged in a similar revolutionary struggle
to overcome imperialist oppression of nationalist consciousness. However, some
critics may point to references to ‘uma nação una’ and ‘unidade nacional’ as
examples of the oppressive impulse to deny difference in favour of a single
identity that characterises discourses of liberation and opposition and, in
different circumstances, is also typical of the discourse of dictators such as
Salazar, Franco and Suharto.
Indeed, the need
for unity is a recurrent theme in much of Timor’s liberation poetry, as in
Borja da Costa’s “Kdadalak” (subtitled appropriately “Poesia de apelo à unidade
do Povo”), which begins, ‘Regatos convergindo transformam-se em rios/Os rios
juntando-se qual a força que se lhes opõe//Assim os Timores devem
juntar-se/Devem unir-se para se oporem ao vento que sopra do mar’; the poem
ends with the (capitalised) call, ‘TIMORES UNIDOS ERGAMOS A NOSSA TERRA’.11
Through the union of the diverse ‘Timores’ the colonizing enemy can be opposed,
and the construction of the Timorese nation can be undertaken, but this should
not be regarded as a project aimed at erasing difference. The erasure of
difference actually takes place at the hands of the colonizer, as Jorge Lauten
vividly demonstrates in his meditation on the numberless deaths of Timorese at
the hands of the Indonesians (and the Portuguese before them) in “Juntem os
nossos ossos”:
Juntem os nossos ossos
dispersos
há séculos
desde
as planícies de Alas a Bilibuto
dos
sopés de Ainaro a Lete Foho
Juntem-nos
empilhem-nos
osso sobre osso
como
escadarias brancas
subireis
então
soldados
de Djakarta
de
degrau em degrau
até
ao Tata Mai Lau...
The Timorese dead become an anonymous mass, piled high by their
Indonesian killers who failed to recognise their individuality in life, and now
look upon their featureless bones. They become an indistinguishable other, each
the same as the next, their individuality – their difference – erased by the
imperial gaze. And yet, Lauten’s poem carries an undertone of defiance, as its
inconclusive end leaves open the suggestion that, despite the unimaginable
suffering endured by the Timorese population, the Indonesian invaders will
eventually be repelled.
What will take
their place is the fruition of a nationalist consciousness that had been moving
toward the assertion of Timorese independence (with the active encouragement of
Fretilin), with varying fortunes, during the Portuguese colonial presence.
According to the country’s liberation poets, the future East
Timor will not be a nation where difference will be unjustly
subordinated to a supra-identity, as Borja da Costa’s “Ela vencerá”
exemplifies. The poem begins by considering women’s situation under colonial
rule, making clear her lack of agency:
Ela
que sempre consideraram
Objecto
de luxo e também de lixo,
Após
servida, logo esquecida
No vazio do quotidiano.
Her difference is alternately the source of momentary pleasure for a
patriarchal, imperial exploiter, at which point she becomes ‘Objecto de luxo’,
but she is ‘também de lixo’, as her difference denotes her inferior status.
That difference, however, does not function at an individual level, but rather
at the more general level of gender, where this classification and the
characteristics associated with it by patriarchal conventions subsume the
particular woman into a typology that denies her an identity that transgresses
those limits. However, the poem’s concluding verses claim that her autonomy
will come about once the present colonial society is overturned:
Ela
que tragicamente dilacerada
Para
tal sociedade,
Encontrará
a justiça
No
derrube da falsidade
E
implantação da igualdade.
ELA
... ELA VENCERÁ!
Equality here should not be seen as the imposition of ‘sameness’.
Instead, it is envisioned as the enabler for individual difference to be
recognised, existing within a society that will no longer tolerate the
oppression of a proportion of the population because of a more ‘general’
difference that is assumed to be deviant from or inferior to an imposed
standard. This is comparable to the identification of the Timorese by the
colonial powers as belonging to a general class of ‘other’ that is less than
the imperial ‘self’, leading to the loss of individual identity that in turn
gives rise to the possibility of colonial violence against an undifferentiated
mass of colonized subjects.12
The opposition to
the violent oppression of colonial rule voiced by the literature of liberation,
of which the poetry of Borja da Costa and Jorge Lauten forms part, is
unambiguous. For Aschroft though, the experiences of postcolonial Africa negate the value of such literature, blaming it
for the failures of the regimes that replaced the imperial nations:
If ‘resistance’
amounts to a massive miscalculation, in a decolonizing Africa, of the political
reality, the state of the revolutionary consciousness of the people and the
difference between independence and national liberation, then ‘resistance’
literature must share this failure (26).
In this sense the liberation poetry of East Timor is a prolonged
failure as, firstly, whilst other imperial powers proceeded to withdraw from
their colonies Portugal’s
dictatorial regime resisted similar moves, and then, subsequent to the
revolution of 25th of April 1974, the East Timorese saw one
colonizer being violently replaced by another. This means that other former
colonies had been experiencing the effects of what Ashcroft terms a ‘massive
miscalculation’ for some time, whilst East Timor continued to be denied its
right to self-determination by Indonesia and, consequently, its poets continued
to produce a literature of liberation. Their lyric discourse berated the
iniquities of colonial rule and voiced the independist aspirations of the
Timorese people, just as others were encountering the difficult realities of
emerging as an independent nation after centuries of exploitation. As Parry
points out in her criticisms of Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000), however, the failures of former colonies to turn the
aspirations voiced in the discourse of liberation into a reality results from
factors largely beyond their control:
Hardt and Negri appear uninterested in the circumstances
that have culminated in the retreats of almost all left post-independence
regimes, but they overlook that where the postcolonial nation-state is
complicit with the capitalist market, this is a consequence not only of
capitalism’s universal power but of an ideological choice made by the comprador
leaderships of many/ most new nation-states who refuse any moves towards
delinking the local economies from the global system (Parry 99).
A world-system currently exists that largely predicates the failure
of those nations that were once used to ensure the current success of those
other nations that regard themselves as inhabiting its centre. Therefore, and
in conclusion, it is unfair to dismiss liberation discourses as harbingers of
failure, or as promoters of unitary identities incompatible with the notion of
difference. Their oppositional nature is grounded in the material circumstances
that created them, and which we must be aware of in order to understand our
postcolonial realities. The lack of success of certain postcolonial nations is
a reality that lies beyond the horizon of liberation discourses, and may come
as a consequence not of the opposition to difference from these former
colonies, but of the imposition by the centre of the world-system of a global
‘sameness’ that promotes the false idea that local variations on a global theme
are indicative of difference. East Timor’s
experience of independence has only begun very recently, and its success or
otherwise is not inscribed within its poetry of liberation. What poets like
Borja da Costa and Jorge Lauten expressed were their hopes for a future of
liberation, and the horror of living under colonial rule – to dismiss their
work is to condemn us to an ignorance of our postcolonial world.
Source:
[in Paulo de Medeiros (ed.), Postcolonial
Theory and Lusophone Literatures (Utrecht:
Portuguese Studies Centre, Universiteit Utrecht, 2007), pp.159-175]
https://www.academia.edu/3740475/Liberating_East_Timorese_Liberation_Poetry
https://www.academia.edu/3740475/Liberating_East_Timorese_Liberation_Poetry
Notes
1. See Bill Ashcroft’s introduction
to his Post-Colonial Transformation
(2001), for a discussion on the terms ‘postcolonialism’ and ‘post-colonialism’.
2. See Artur
Marcos, “Textos e versões leste-timorenses: Traços para um quadro geral”, in Timor Timorense: Com suas Línguas,
Literaturas, Lusofonia... (1995: 157-170), in which he discusses the effects of the
struggle against the colonial presence on those involved in the production of
East Timorese cultural discourses. A valuable insight is given into the
withdrawal of the Portuguese administration from East Timor in João Loff
Barreto’s The Timor Drama (1982),
which is based on evidence given to the Permanent People’s Tribunal when it met
in Lisbon from
19-21 June, 1981.
3. In The Postcolonial Literature of Lusophone Africa (1996), Patrick
Chabal notes that ‘there are a number of historical factors which distinguish
sharply the former Portuguese empire from most other African colonies. These
factors have shaped the fate of Portuguese-speaking Africa
and have affected the development of its literature’ (12). One of those
distinguishing factors is ‘the social and cultural impact of the regime of the
Portuguese dictator Salazar (the Estado Novo, or New State)
on the African colonies’ (13). In a speech made in Cairo in 1961, the PAIGC
leader Amílcar Cabral, stated that, ‘[w]hile the colonial powers in general
accept the principle of self-determination of peoples and seek, each in its own
way, to resolve the conflicts which oppose them to the people they dominate,
the Portuguese government obstinately maintains its domination and exploitation
of 15 million human beings’ (1974: 10). As for East Timor
and the rise in a Timorese nationalist consciousness in the late 1960s to early
1970s, Jill Jolliffe (Costa: 1976) writes: ‘The political repression and
isolation under which the emerging nationalist movement operated in this period
was not only complete, but tightening. […] [T]he cocoon in which the Portuguese
fascist regime kept their South East Asian colony wrapped was total. Political
orthodoxy in the colonies, as in Lisbon, was maintained by the activity of PIDE
agents, secret police who infiltrated every institution of private and public
life’ (8-9).
4. This poem is
subtitled, “Poesia sobre a acção do colonialismo e a forma de libertação dos
povos colonizados”.
5.
My use of the term “evolution” here does not signify that Timorese
literature is “evolving” toward a particular point of “cultural maturity”,
especially any “maturity” privileging Western culture as a “promised paradigm”.
6.
Borja da Costa’s “O grito do soldado maubere” is a lyric retelling of
the confrontation between Fretilin and UDT, highlighting the Portuguese
authorities’ unwillingness to intervene and prevent the ensuing bloodshed. In
general terms, the União Democrática Timorense, regarded as a more conservative
political party with connections to the Portuguese administration, favoured
regional autonomy for East Timor within a
Portuguese commonwealth, whereas Fretilin, whose leaders were thought to be
inspired by socialist or communist ideals, defended the territory’s full
independence. This poem will be analysed later in this essay.
7. The realisation that independent
rule may not bring all that had been longed for during the struggle against
colonialism is not present within liberation discourse, but rather in
contemporary discourses that are located temporally within the postcolonial
world. It is this location that shapes Teresa Cunha’s remarks on the oral
narratives of East Timorese women, which ‘are structured by the lived relation
between the tragic past of the war and the uncertain future of independence
politics’ (Cunha, 2005: 90). Moreover, according to Cunha: ‘The privileged
source of information for the period is the discourse of and about the
resistance to the Indonesian occupation. In it, it is the men who are the
privileged authors and protagonists. Other realities and experiences are marginalised
and obscured’ (91). In this regard, the liberation poetry of East Timor that I
have seen is exclusively of male authorship, although there are instances of
poems dealing with Timorese women, as in the example of Borja da Costa’s “Ela
vencerá” (mentioned later in this essay), or Mali Manek’s “Camarada Bibere”.
However, in this context, it is interesting to note Benita Parry’s criticisms
of Gayatri Spivak’s theories of the subaltern: ‘The disparaging of nationalist
discourses of resistance [by Spivak] is matched by the exorbitation of the role
allotted to the postcolonial woman intellectual, for it is she who must plot a
story, unravel a narrative and give the subaltern a voice in history’ (20).
8. Laura Chrisman states the
following in relation to the reluctance to use the term ‘anti-colonial’: ‘The
predominance of the term ‘post-colonial’, over ‘anti-colonial’ (for instance)
has a number of intellectual consequences. ‘Post-colonial’, obviously, occludes
or erases the overtly political dynamics contained in the term ‘anti-colonial’.
It liberates those practitioners who term themselves post-colonial from the
messy business of political alignment and definition and yet simultaneously
endows them with all the benefits that accrue from the fashionable politics of
‘identity’ itself’ (210).
9. Reproduced
from Enterrem meu coração no Ramelau.
10. In his poem
in prose, “Enterrem meu coração no Monte Ramelau”, Jorge Lauten reflects on the
divisions between the Indonesian soldiers and the Timorese, which are the
result of Indonesia’s imperialist
designs, which keep them apart even in death: ‘Estou aqui e penso: nem a morte
nos pode juntar: vocês morrem pela ordem e pacificação na 27.ª província e nós
morremos pela nossa pátria independente’.
11. This poem also has a Tetum version, and the
equivalent verses quoted above appear as: ‘Kdadalak suli mutuk fila ué inan/Ué
inan tan malu sá ben ta’han//Nanu’u timur oan sei hamutuk/Hamutuk atu tahan
anin sut taci’; and ‘TIMUR OAN HAMUTUK TANE ITA RAIN’.
12. Although restricted to the African context, Sexual/Textual Empires: Gender and Marginality in Lusophone African
Literature (Owen and Rothwell, 2004), offers some valuable insights into
issues of gender and sexuality in the Portuguese colonial context.
Works Cited
Araújo, Abílio. Timor Leste: Os loricos voltaram a cantar.
Lisbon: author’s publication, 1977.
Ashcroft, Bill. Postcolonial Transformation. London
& New York:
Routledge, 2001.
Barreto, João Loff. The Timor Drama. Lisbon: Timor Newsletter, 1982.
Blunt, Alison and Cheryl McEwan. Postcolonial
Geographies. London & New York: Continuum, 2002.
Cabral, Amílcar. Revolution in Guinea: An African People’s Struggle: Selected Texts.
Ed. and trans. Richard Handyside. London:
Stage 1, 1974.
Chabal, Patrick et al. The Postcolonial Literature of Lusophone Africa. London: Hurst & Company, 1996.
Chrisman, Laura. “Inventing post-colonial
theory: polemical observations”. Pretexts
5 (1995): 205-212.
Costa, Francisco Borja da. Revolutionary Poems in the Struggle Against
Colonialism: Timorese Nationalist Verse. Ed. Jill Jollife. Trans. Mary
Ireland. Sydney:
Wild & Woolley, 1976.
Cunha, Teresa. “The Voices of the East
Timorese Women: After War, Before Peace”. Portuguese Studies 21 (2005): 90-100.
Enterrem meu coração no Ramelau. Luanda: União dos Escritores Angolanos,
1982.
Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge,
Mass. & London:
Harvard University Press, 2000
Marcos, Artur. Timor Timorense: Com suas Línguas,
Literaturas, Lusofonia... Lisbon: Edições
Colibri, 1995.
Owen, Hilary and Phillip Rothwell eds. Sexual/Textual Empires: Gender and
Marginality in Lusophone African Literature. Bristol:
University of Bristol Press, 2004.
Parry, Benita. Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique. London
& New York:
Routledge, 2004.
Timor Leste. Maputo:
Instituto Nacional do Livro e do Disco, 1981.
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