Fetishist Disavowal: On Felix Nesi’s “People from Oetimu”

It can be hard to read without projecting a use function onto a piece of writing—perhaps inevitable, since most literature is subject to market forces. Even the self-declared aesthete wants something: an encounter with the sublime, or an escape from utilitarianism. I’m drawn to Bruno Latour’s notion of the aesthetic, which recalls the word’s original etymology—a great work jolts us from our stupor to make us sensitive to something. What we want from reading depends on our circumstances, and for many readers, those circumstances involve witnessing incredible amounts of atrocity. Felix Nesi, who grew up in West Timor, has described reaching a point where he couldn’t write about anything unrelated to the violence he witnessed in his hometown. The result is a form of literature that, like Latour’s sensitizing jolt, asks the reader to think harder about what we’re looking for in those pages.