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.
I have spent the past several years translating this book, and in doing so, often confronted problems of visibility, readership, and taste. Why would an anglophone reader—say, a reader in the United States, which is where the publisher of the English translation is based and where I am from—pick up this novel? Should such a reader feel a sense of identification with the story it contains? That is to say, must there be “universal” elements of a story that are widely relatable, if such a thing exists? As a translator, is it my responsibility to guide the reader towards understanding, to make the contextual terms and stylistic features of this book legible to a new audience unfamiliar with the setting at hand?
These are not simple questions to answer, and they certainly focus on only some communities of readers in the diverse English-speaking world. And yet, when thinking about the problem of visibility in fiction and specifically the (dis)appearance of postcolonial sites in literary production, thorny problems around anglophone literary markets, identification, and alienation are necessarily at play. If my role as a translator is to identify and translate fiction that will—or should—appeal to a wide range of anglophone readers in global centers, it is also my responsibility to articulate what the terms of such appeal are, which is as ethically challenging a task as the very transformation of a novel from one language to another.
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In 1986, the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson published a polemical article, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” conceptualizing the difficulties of expanding the anglophone canon to include postcolonial literatures, specifically for readers in the United States. Central to Jameson’s argument are the questions of appeal and taste, familiarity and discomfort. A fundamental claim he makes is that an appeal to include postcolonial literatures on the basis of being “great” (on the terms set by texts already included in the canon) does a disservice to the project of inclusion itself, first because such a claim frames all works of literature from these parts of the world as derivative or belated literary forms, and additionally because the argument erases formal features that might mark postcolonial texts as different. Jameson proposes that the very problem of the canon is the way in which it strictly delineates the limits of the “aesthetic sympathies” of contemporary American readers, sheltering them from a range of political sentiments that foreground questions of sovereignty and the nation.
Pushback against Jameson’s article was swift, and while critics applauded his effort to question the canon and address visibility for postcolonial literatures in the United States, they took issue with the spatial categories at the heart of the argument. The most significant response came from Aijaz Ahmad, who critiqued Jameson’s use of the categories “Third World” and “the nation.” The former, he claimed, is heterogeneous and cannot be considered as a coherent theoretical category, and the latter a political ideology, artificially prioritized. Years later, Jameson published a rejoinder to Ahmad’s critiques in a chapter of the book Allegory and Ideology, in which he added nuance to his earlier emphasis on specifically national allegory, showing how texts from places once deemed part of the Third World also conceptualize forms of collectivity at different scales.
These arguments have numerous complexities that I am not able to do full justice to here. However, even decades after the landmark exchange and at a moment in which the canon is no longer seen as a given in classrooms or public discourse, several of the problems around literary readership posed at the outset of these debates remain unresolved. The weight of Anglophone literary interest still tilts towards the west, and the works that make it into English translation are disproportionately from European languages. Numerous translators, publishers, and institutions actively push against this imbalance, but many appeals to readers draw on notions of universal relatability and standards of quality as the basis for promoting postcolonial literatures.
In thinking with People from Oetimu, I’d like to propose an alternative possibility to the question of how readers in major anglophone centers might relate to texts from the Global South. Fiction that imagines the world from its so-called “peripheries” may in fact upend the way we perceive the concept of the “center” itself, reorienting the weight of worldliness towards the edge, the margin, the contact zone. It is in this subverted representation of entrenched geopolitical and symbolic power imbalances that the anglophone reader may find themselves on a new map, identifying not with universal elements of a story, but with fresh imaginaries of how we are enmeshed in political formations.
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I became the writer for my friends at Nesam Elementary School. I would write four-page stories in my exercise book and my classmates would take turns reading them aloud, commenting on them, or adding in story ideas. I crafted tales in which the hero was a young kid who went on holiday to his grandmother’s, or a student in Java, or a child who put out a fire at Gambir Station in Jakarta. That sort of thing. But I never wrote about Timor. Later, I realized that, when I would write, Timor felt very distant. It wouldn’t even come to mind. Even though I lived in Timor, everything I read (in the world of literature) brought me closer to Gambir Station, to the National Monument, or to middle class families in Jakarta with two kids, the likes of which I’d learned about in library books, all provided by the state. I was alienated from my own home.
Felix Nesi wrote these lines for a speech he gave in Indonesian about his relationship to literature and politics in 2020, a speech I translated into English for Asymptote Journal several months later. As is evident from these reflections about his childhood, visibility and representation were always central issues for the writer, long before Felix and I met and discussions about an English translation of his novel began.
Born in Nesam, a town sandwiched between Kupang (the capital of West Timor) and Dili (the capital of East Timor), Felix grew up in a space that had long been positioned as a vanishing point within the Indonesian literary tradition. People from Oetimu took form as Felix grew more conscious and intentional about which stories to write, and how to narrate them. Communities in West Timor and in many other areas of eastern Indonesia are ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and economically marginalized within the country as a whole. Rarely are representations of these islands seen in its political centers, as most prominent cultural institutions are located on the island of Java and represent Javanese culture or urban life in Jakarta. Numerous historical factors gave rise to this marginalized position, some of which are grounded in Suharto’s New Order dictatorship (1965–1998), a rightwing developmentalist regime that promoted the use of a formalized Indonesian language in lieu of engaging local languages, labeled cultural traditions from eastern islands as backwards and uncivilized, and standardized historical narratives, such that local histories from communities on the margins of the nation were erased from public discourse. It is also a site that has experienced waves of colonial and state violence. The western half of Timor had been colonized by the Dutch and the eastern half by the Portuguese; when the east gained independence in the mid-1970s, major political factions demanded sovereignty while the already-independent Indonesian state tried to absorb East Timor into its borders. The protracted, violent struggle between Indonesia and East Timor continued for decades until East Timor gained independence in 2001, after the fall of the Suharto regime and Indonesia’s transition to democracy.
Reacting against the state-sanctioned print narratives of Indonesian national culture that he grew up with, Felix wrote his debut novel, People from Oetimu, for his community. He wrote from a place of unresolved rage at the physical and cultural violence he witnessed firsthand, carried out by the military, state bureaucrats, the Catholic church, and patriarchal structures. He also developed a literary register that would allow his peers to hear their own voice in printed literary prose. When young people gather for parties on Timor, someone often interrupts the drinking and conversation to tell a story to the crowd, weaving together a compelling, dramatic, often humorous retelling, yet one punctuated with stories of violence that communities on the borders of conflict experience on a near-daily basis. People from Oetimu condenses this tradition into a narrative voice: Felix recounts political tragedies with a dedication to intricacies of character, an acute sense of satire, and an attention to both literary Indonesian prose and the texture of spoken language, which contains expressions in Uab Metô or Tetum as well as Timorese dialect.
People from Oetimu thus attends to histories and linguistic specificities that rarely appear in Indonesian literature, let alone in English translation. More interesting than the mere fact of representation, however, is how the novel situates those histories vis-à-vis political centers. The many narrative threads in the novel express the tensions between layered colonial occupations and national movements. Playing with problems of linguistic and cultural visibility even in the original Indonesian, People from Oetimu is not simply the narration of marginalized histories, but rather a work of literature that takes for a key theme the very problem of the center and periphery, defamiliarizing readers with official national narratives of the nation.
One example of this defamiliarizing move is the backstory of Am Siki, a character in the novel who lived through Dutch colonial rule and Japanese occupation, and whose adversarial relationship to the Indonesian nation I also discuss in the afterword to my translation. While interned as a forced laborer under the Japanese, Am Siki burned a labor camp to the ground before fleeing to the mountains to hide. Years later, he emerged in a town, where he saw an unfamiliar flag flying—that of a new, independent nation. Wondering about this new system of governance, Am Siki asks a simple question: Did the people of Indonesia speak Uab Metô?
“Of course not,” the people replied. “But now we have a new language called Indonesian. If you want to learn it, they come teach it here in the lopo once a month.”
Crestfallen, Am Siki felt a sharp pain in his chest. Foreigners kept coming one after the other, but none of them had any interest in learning his language. Every time it was the Timorese who were forced to decipher the meaning behind unfamiliar sounds that emerged from foreigners’ lips: Portuguese, Dutch, Japanese, and now Indonesian.
Because of Am Siki’s backstory, Felix’s use of expressions and terms in Uab Metô throughout the novel take on a political valence, throwing into question triumphalist narratives about Indonesian independence. The story narrates the limits of the collective imagination of a national political community. Indonesia is flipped on its head, appearing as it is seen from its self-defined peripheries, from its othered communities.
Such moments of meta-linguistic reflection pair with the overall narrative impulse of the text, which is fundamentally tragic and comic, never heroic. Am Siki was awarded a medal by Indonesian bureaucrats for his brave actions against the Japanese, an honor he rejected in part because he had confused the Indonesian word for nation, bangsa, with the name of a man interned with him at the labor camp, and in part because he cared more about his horse’s wellbeing than a symbolic honor bestowed upon him by a governing entity:
As Independence Day approached, rumors spread that Am Siki, the disappeared savior of the Indonesian nation, was living in Oetimu. State officials visited the town to meet the famous man and invited him to visit the big city on August 17th so that he could be awarded a medal. He was, after all, a hero.
“I’ve told you before, I’m no hero, and I had no intention of saving Bangsa. Besides, what’s a medal? If it’s food, just give it to my horse. That way, if I die, her descendants will live on.”
The officials were confused, but the chief jumped in to explain what was going on: Am Siki was speaking in metaphors.
“Save the medal for his children,” the chief clarified. “That way, when he dies, his descendants will receive the honor.”
The Indonesian bureaucrats nodded for a few moments, noting down the information, and never returned to Oetimu again.
Everything about Am Siki’s backstory could fit cleanly into the official narrative of the Indonesian independence, which is why the state would bestow upon him a medal of honor. But Felix crafts a character who is invested in his local material realities, uninterested in an abstract polity centered elsewhere. State actors appear in Oetimu only when it is strategic, and official histories connect to local ones only when it is politically expedient. In narrating how the state relates to its marginalized geographies, Felix lays bare absurd disconnects between ways of speaking, ways of thinking, and ways of constructing value.
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I first met Felix in 2019, after he gave a reading from People from Oetimu at Salihara Arts Centre, an important Jakarta cultural institution. Felix had become a phenomenon in the Indonesian literary scene after his novel was awarded a major national literary prize. By that point, People from Oetimu enjoyed an audience far larger than Felix’s original readers—his friends in West Timor—and far less aware of the intricacies of cultural and political life on the island. Problems central to the question of interlingual translation—especially classic debates about how or whether to “domesticate” unfamiliar features of a text for a new audience—were already present in the initial publication of the work. Indeed, the first edition of the novel, released by the Jakarta-based publisher Marjin Kiri, included a glossary of terms from the many languages represented in the novel and explanations for the acronyms referring to political parties in the East Timorese struggle for independence.
My initial encounter with Felix’s novel was not through the print copy, but rather through the passage read aloud to the large crowd at Salihara. Not only did I enjoy the privilege of listening to one of the better fiction readings I have ever attended (Felix has a dynamic stage presence), but I had the opportunity to experience the novel in a crowd, sensing the reactions of listeners around me—I noted what the audience found funny, what caused tension, and what came across as poignant or powerful. Felix chose to read a segment of the novel that satirizes a Timorese man, Linus, who as a young boy was ordered by Indonesian soldiers to climb a palm tree and cut down coconuts for the troops to drink. A surprise attack from a lizard blending into the bark of the trunk led Linus to topple to the ground, and the soldiers goaded Linus to shoot his scaled assailant. The episode became a landmark experience in the boy’s life: The incident made him determined to join the armed forces and kill enemies of the state, who he likened to the lizard, lying in wait to attack innocent civilians.
This is a particularly funny moment in the novel, and I found myself laughing alongside others present at the event. The passage was of course effective because of its humor, and it would read well even if a reader had no contextual knowledge about Indonesia or Timor. But I began to think, as I listened, that it was all the more powerful for its layers of relevance to the crowd that night in Jakarta: The passage focused on a young boy in Timor, but it also depicted expectations around masculinity in the Indonesian military and the simple yet effective mechanisms of Indonesian state propaganda.
With this experience, I began rethinking the concept of relatability in literature. Relatability is typically defined in terms of characters or events that resonate with a reader on a personal level, but I believe it may also arise from insightful or striking depictions of political relationships that emerge between distinct and incommensurable experiences. Perhaps, for some readers, the appeal of Linus’s satirical coming-of-age story lies in a feeling of identification with the young boy. But I can only speak for myself, and as a reader invested in Indonesian cultural histories, it was not a sense of connection with Linus that drove my interest in the narrative. Instead, what I found compelling was how his character developed in relation to broader political and cultural structures; Linus was not Linus in isolation, but a character imbricated in structures of prestige and power at once local to Timor and of broad national relevance.
After listening to the passage about Linus, I purchased a copy People from Oetimu and tore through the novel. As I read, I noticed that as much as the characters’ lives connected Timor to Indonesia as a whole, so too did various passages hinge on Timor’s position within global geopolitical formations. There are several obvious examples of this connection: Colonial occupation and the political dynamics those occupations caused are of course the result of geopolitics. But the novel also situates Timor in the world in more subtle and unexpected ways, and these moments made me convinced that readers in the United States would find a translation of the novel to be more than a good story, but also a relevant, relatable text in my political reconceptualization of the term.
The viewing of the World Cup Finals that frames the novel’s narrative threads is one example of how the characters of the book are placed in relation to other sites. As Ronaldo fails to score time and time again, one man blames the United States for paying off Brazil’s star player to tank the game, while others whisper under their breath that the US has no such power:
One man with a cooler head than most explained that America couldn’t possibly be the cause of all chaos in the world. The United States is a small country run by a bunch of idiots convinced they have superpowers, he said. Indonesia is wracked with turmoil because the country was cursed when the masses challenged President Suharto.
In a satirical vein similar to that of the passages critiquing the national honors bestowed onto Am Siki, Felix upends the power dynamics in representation that separate a marginalized site like Timor and a political center like the United States. American readers will see themselves in the pages of People from Oetimu—not necessarily in the experiences of the novel’s characters, but instead in the new maps and world political imaginaries that characters in the novel construct, debate, and satirize. In a telling coincidence, in Allegory and Ideology, Jameson likens the complex interconnectedness of local, national, and international collectivities to the various scales at which soccer leagues function. People from Oetimu portrays these layered dynamics, but in a way that recenters attention to sites seen as operating at the margins of this world-political arena, symbolically disrupting the monopoly on interpretive power held by subjects in global centers.
English similarly appears in the text, prior to my translation of the novel. When Linus goes to university, he tricks his father into sending him a higher and higher monthly allowance to cover his habit of drinking and visiting prostitutes with his army friends by using obscure English words to explain unexpected additional “study” fees. His father believed him, going into debt and selling off the family’s ancestral land because he refused to admit that he had no idea what those English words meant: Such ignorance would surely mean they were backwards and uncivilized, while Linus’s “skill” with such expressions was proof enough that he was getting the education they paid for. Uab Metô is explicitly discussed in relation to Indonesian, and Indonesian appears in relation to English; characters at once reveal and play with the symbolic power imbalances between languages at not only national, but also global, scales.
These elements of the novel presented me with unique opportunities for the English translation of People from Oetimu. When I began working on the translation, I savored the moments in the novel in which I perceived a density of Timorese themes or context brushing up against global storylines—in which moments of potential identification for readers in geopolitical centers lay on the same page as opaque, difficult sections of text. In more concrete terms, I adored the following type of passage and tried, in my translation, to represent the waves of political, spatial, and linguistic scales than run through Felix’s prose:
Next to the reading room was the dining area at the back of the rectory. It held a long table lined with twelve chairs. On the wall to the left was a huge painting of Jesus eating penpasu alongside fifteen old men wearing Timorese sarongs—an image reminiscent of the last supper, minus the table. None of the old men had any teeth, and as a result, anyone who saw the painting couldn’t help but ask why the artist would depict a scene of people sharing a meal and choose to make everyone toothless. Father Yosef couldn’t give them an answer, since the painting was attributed to a French artist who faked his death and ran to Timor in an effort to escape the stifling European art world. He became known as Kaes Muit Aseket; for all the years he lived on the island, he only came into town to draw or ask questions about pigments used to dye yarn until he was killed by people from the north who assumed that all white men are thieves.
This encapsulates the violent and absurd collision of so many worlds: canonical Catholic imagery and traditional Timorese culture, a man self-exiled from the European art world and far-off communities, both friendly and antagonistic. This tangential micro-history of fictional events, moreover, hinges on a lack of understanding, a gap in comprehension: The people from the north had no clue the French artist had no intention to steal, nor did the French artist appear to know that he might be received with such suspicion.
This gap in comprehension also structures the very language of the passage. The nickname for the artist is Kaes Muit Aseket, which roughly translates to “Lost White Guy” in Uab Metô. Given that the nickname is in Uab Metô and not Indonesian, this is a moment in the text that even readers in Indonesia would not be able to understand. I could have translated “Kaes Muit Aseket” immediately for my readers, allowing the joke to land smoothly, without interrupting the flow of the passage. But such a move would flatten out the linguistic and cultural texture in a novel filled with such rich and varied terrain. Instead, I followed the cues of the Indonesian publisher, glossing the nickname in a brief multilingual glossary at the back of the book.
I myself was one of the readers who needed to refer to a gloss in order to understand the nickname. I speak Indonesian, not Uab Metô, and this was one of many instances in which consulting and collaborating with the author was indispensable to the English translation of the novel. Felix and I developed a close professional relationship that began with an in-depth interview about People from Oetimu and grew through extended conversations about the thematic and formal moves in the novel. After taking on this translation project, our conversations turned to more granular issues. I would send drafts of my translation to Felix, and we would discuss whether my English expressions matched the tone of an idiomatic turn of phrase, or if they correctly framed a term included in the glossary. At one point, we had an extended exchange about the fermentation methods for producing sopi (a Timorese palm wine featured in the book), and at another, Felix and I both drew maps of the rectory that hosted the lost Frenchman’s painting so as to double check that I understood the layout of the building (the floor plan is important to the plot).
These conversations were indispensable to my translation of the novel and, I would argue, to the very concept of translating across difference. The act of translation brings a reader intimately close to a text in ways that are not always immediate, and that are often shaped by relational dynamics: that of the translator to source and translating languages, the translator to the author, the translator to the historical and political context of the source text, and so on. Because I learned Indonesian in cultural and political centers on Java, my translation of People from Oetimu was informed by research and dialogue, by gaps in knowledge that I worked to address and make meaningful rather than obscure.
Creating a smooth experience of reading might allow an English-language reader to immediately comprehend every element of the book, but it does a disservice to a novel like People from Oetimu. Crafting an experience of distance from the narrative at strategic moments is not an ornamental move to whip up local color. And while these features of the text create gaps in comprehension, those gaps are part of the novel’s fictional world. Readers will find themselves in the pages of the novel, but always in relation to communities in Timor.
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When cities like Kupang and Dili—or a fictional town like Oetimu, for that matter—appear in English translation, problems of visibility and opacity, familiarity and discomfort, are especially important. These problems are often already present in the source language text, since the stories depict places that are multilingual and set on the borders of nations. People from Oetimu makes that very position its central theme, depicting connections between geographies and histories, all of which run through the intertwined storylines of characters from Oetimu.
Many celebrated works of fiction published over the past several decades depict the varied modes of connection and disconnection in a globalized world. But reading such texts that center on postcolonial cities, expressed in languages that are underrepresented in anglophone publishing, offers the unique opportunity to see a new map of the world as it is imagined from these other perspectives.
Lara Norgaard is a literary translator and PhD student in comparative literature at Harvard. Among other things, she writes about collective memory of state violence, leftist cultural circulation between Latin America and Southeast Asia, and histories of anti-communist military dictatorships. Her essays can be found in publications such as the Jakarta Post, Public Books, and Asymptote Journal. She was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Grant for her translation of 24 Hours with Gaspar by Sabda Armandio, and her translation of People from Oetimu by Felix Nesi was released by Archipelago Books in 2025.
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