Towards a Postcolonial Politics of Relatability: Translating People from Oetimu by Felix Nesi

The novel opens on the night of the 1998 World Cup Finals—Brazil versus France, a total letdown of a game, televised across the world, and in this story, viewed by a large crowd of disappointed drunks at a police station at the southern edge of a fictional town, near the border between Indonesia and East Timor. The men supported Brazil and hated the French, since the Brazilian players approached soccer like a dance while the French team reminded them of Dutch colonizers. Little did these disheartened viewers know, but that sporting event would become the occasion for an insurgent attack on the town, causing cross-border conflicts, generations old, to resurface. 

The novel in question is People from Oetimu by West Timorese writer Felix Nesi. It is a story that takes place on borders—literally, on the border between two countries, but also on the borders of five languages, in the space between city life and rural backlands, at the crossroads of competing colonial powers, and at the knife’s edge dividing political factions. Though its opening pages are framed by a global sporting match, the book narrates the doubly marginalized site of West Timor, half of an island in Indonesia that rarely gains visibility in national cultural discourse, not to mention in English-language narratives of global history and politics.