Liberating East Timorese Liberation Poetry: Oppositional discourses and postcolonial theory

By Anthony Soares

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 7^th 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 25^th 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

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.