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

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.