Jerasaun foun: Timor-Leste’s independence generation

To explore the concept of postmemory in Timor-Leste, it is important to understand how intergenerational politics are critically shaped by the nation’s political history. This can be characterised by periods of ‘constraint and consent’ throughout struggles for sovereignty from various colonial powers.Footnote ¹¹ Chinese and European traders were drawn to the island of Timor for sandalwood. In the sixteenth century the local population consisted of multiple princedoms.Footnote ¹² When the Dutch and Portuguese split the island between them, their influence remained limited to the coastal trading post. However, from the seventeenth century they began to enforce a more direct form of colonial rule on the broader population. On the eastern half of the island the Portuguese extracted sandalwood, spread Catholicism and repressed local uprisings against colonial rule.Footnote ¹³ In 1943, the Japanese brutally occupied the territory until the end of the war, when the Portuguese returned.

In 1974, as Portuguese colonial power waned, two dominant East Timorese political parties, Frente Revolucionária do Timor-Leste Independente (FRETILIN) and União Democrática Timorense (UDT), emerged with different visions of the path independence should take. Civil conflict between these two groups was inflamed by Indonesian propaganda aimed at provoking insecurity, with an eye on oil resources and territorial expansion.Footnote ¹⁴ On 28 November 1975, FRETILIN declared independence; however, just 10 days later the Indonesian military invaded the territory. The military occupation remained for 24 years (1975–1999), during which Indonesian-occupied East Timor lost up to a third of its population, approximately 200,000 people, to violence and famine.Footnote ¹⁵ After the fall of Indonesian dictator Suharto in 1999, citizens of East Timor took part in a successful referendum on independence which was followed by a violent and destructive retreat of Indonesian forces. This was followed by a period of UN transition before the territory became the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste in 2002.

For over three centuries East Timorese have been the victims of mass violence.Footnote ¹⁶ Portuguese, Japanese and Indonesian occupations are in living memory. These experiences have shaped national identity and caused frictions in the independence era. The observations of these historical transitions by various East Timorese actors, as well as multiple foreign observers, have shaped the national imagining of Timor-Leste through diverse, fragmented accounts and political ideologies.Footnote ¹⁷

The current politics of the country emphasises the generational divide between those who experienced the Indonesian occupation as adults and those who did not, as well as those who supported the resistance and those who did not. The political struggles and desire for freedom are echoed in current struggles against the intergenerational hierarchy of the past and a desire for moving forward. The national political discourse has moved from one that memorialises past struggles to one that projects visions of modernity and development.Footnote ¹⁸ This discourse must also grapple with the changing demographics of Southeast Asia’s youngest nation. Leaders of the resistance against Indonesian occupation, such as Xanana Gusmao and Jose Ramos Horta and others of this generation, referred to as elder brothers (maun boot sira), make up the political elite. These leaders of the resistance and veterans of the conflict are the jerasaun tuan, the older generation who were adults at the time of the occupation and who played a role in the conflict. The jerasaun tuan are referred to as the 1975 generation, a name derived from the year of the Indonesian invasion. While the jerasaun tuan still dominate national politics, the demographic shift means that the younger generation now make up a large part of the voting age population.Footnote ¹⁹ Political parties thus must offer strong youth policies or face rising youth dissatisfaction, as seen in the Gen Z Movement protests that spread across Asia in 2025.Footnote ²⁰

The new generation, the jerasaun foun, is sometimes described as the post-conflict generation, and in some ways they share many qualities with what Hirsch describes as a ‘generation of postmemory’.Footnote ²¹ According to Hirsch, the postmemory generation is affected by the trauma of those who came before them. The jerasaun foun includes those born around independence, approximately 25 years old, up to the age of 40 or 45. They are also known as the 1999 generation, the year of the referendum on independence and the violent end of the Indonesian occupation A large portion of Timorese in adulthood today were old enough to have experienced part of occupation and the violence in the aftermath of the 1999 referendum. Many others also experienced periods of instability and violence which followed from 2002 to 2008.

The jerasaun foun certainly consider themselves distinct from the older generation of resistance leaders. However, the category of a postmemory generation isn’t as yet applicable to Timor-Leste’s jerasaun foun. In provocation to Hirsch’s concept of the postmemory generation, Susan Rubin Suleiman suggests that we consider them the 1.5 generation. By this she means those ‘…too young to have had an adult understanding of what was happening to them, but old enough to have been there…’. Footnote ²² In other words, they are those in between the generation who experienced trauma directly and the postmemory generation who experienced it indirectly.

The 1.5 generation face challenges distinct from that of their elders. Bunkong Tuon describes how the 1.5 generation in Cambodia are suffering the traumas of their parents but do not have real knowledge about them.Footnote ²³ The ‘traumatic 1.5 generation memory, with its gaps and mysteries’ is different from the first generation’s traumatic experience but is still as oppressive. Bunkong Tuon gives an example from Lan Cao’s novel Monkey Bridge, where the main character Mai describes how she feels like ‘an outsider with inside information’.Footnote ²⁴

Experiences of conflict might be transmitted to a postmemory generation in affective ways that are not narratively coherent or even fully understood.Footnote ²⁵ In Timor-Leste, however, the jerasaun foun have memories of the Indonesian occupation as children or young people. They were passive subjects in the struggle for independence, but now have the responsibility placed upon them to develop the nation to honour those who they witnessed suffering and dying for their present freedom.Footnote ²⁶ Young people thus feel constrained by a generational hierarchy, hampered in their action while being told they are crucial to national development. It is common in Timor-Leste to hear younger people say that the older generation must pass away before they will have any power to make real change. Sara ten Brinke has described young Timorese today as ‘citizens in waiting’, keen to implement positive changes in their country, but marginalised by their age and experience.Footnote ²⁷ The jerasaun foun become increasingly frustrated by the pressure from the older generation to work hard and develop the nation, even though there are too few jobs and funds available to them. They are expected to participate in development, while treated as passive in the process.Footnote ²⁸

The jerasaun foun clearly face challenges that are different to their older counterparts. However, there are of course overlaps and inconsistencies. Hirsch characterises an actor used as an example of Suleiman’s 1.5 generation as someone who ‘blurs generational boundaries’.Footnote ²⁹ For Suleiman the 1.5 generation is less of a serious category and more provocation to address the vagueness of bounded generational categories.Footnote ³⁰ She asks ‘[s]hould another line be drawn between children and adolescents? (Perhaps we should speak not of a 1.5 generation, but rather of a 1.3 or a 1.7 generation, depending on distance from adulthood.)’.Footnote ³¹ In other words, who decides when a generation, or a conflict, starts and ends?

Suleiman’s provocation draws attention to the arbitrariness of temporal and spatial markers to remind us of the temporal and spatial complexities of postmemory. There are distinct hierarchies and identities within what is considered new and old and these are subject to change. However, for now the jerasaun foun can be described in broad terms as the independence generation, incorporating both those living and those born since independence.

Yet while the category of postmemory generation doesn’t neatly fit Timor-Leste’s jerasaun foun, postmemory remains a useful concept to think with. When discussing population and demographic change in Timor-Leste, it is important to ask how people are counting and identifying themselves.Footnote ³² Far from blurring boundaries, the generation of ‘75, and generation of ‘99 are distinctions that Timorese make themselves. The older political elite have derogatorily called the ‘99 generation supermi after the popular brand of Indonesian instant noodles.Footnote ³³ This derogatory term refers to the Indonesian-educated younger Timorese, suggesting that they are soft, lack strength and have an instant attitude, wanting things fast and quick without putting in the hard work. A subcategory of the jerasaun foun is the millennium generation, those born after 1990, raised and educated around the time of the transition to independence, and primarily educated in the Independent Timor-Leste education system.Footnote ³⁴ Yet another subcategory is Gen Z, which links the youngest of the generation foun to a global movement of protests that took place in 2025 across Asia. Even after accounting for hazily defined generational labels, there is a distinct hierarchy in Timor today in which the young people are considered politically inexperienced as they don’t know what life was really like during the Indonesian era.

Theoretically, postmemory is malleable, denoting power and temporality. The concept both signals looking backwards and moving forwards. The postmemory generation may have their lives shaped by past struggles for independence and risk having their own life stories ‘displaced or dominated by their ancestors’.Footnote ³⁵ Yet, the connection of the postmemory generation to the past is not necessarily about remembering the past, but about mediating it with ‘imaginative investment, projection, and creation’;Footnote ³⁶ this is sometimes referred to as postmemory work.Footnote ³⁷ Timor-Leste’s jerasaun foun are mediating the past and engaging in postmemory work in their own ways which are both enabled and restricted by their access to digital technologies.

The digital, postmemory and reproduction

In Timor-Leste digital technologies proliferated in the 2010s, albeit quite unequally. When I first visited in 2016, for example, smartphones and laptops were available for purchase in the capital but were of poor quality and prohibitively expensive. Cheaper models were sourced from across the border. Internet connectivity was woefully slow, and despite improvements it remains amongst the slowest in the world and the most expensive in Southeast Asia. Even though Starlink launched in Timor-Leste at the end of 2024,Footnote ³⁸ when I visited in mid 2025 it had neither increased internet speeds nor lowered prices. A more crucial issue for rural areas is electricity. Some smaller villages must rely on small solar panels. On the national grid, rolling blackouts are not uncommon, and power surges damage electrical devices. This makes charging and maintaining digital technologies challenging. Nonetheless, today in Dili tech stores are multiplying at local malls, and students gather around laptops at internet hotspots in public parks. Due to high costs and slow connectivity, Timor-Leste’s jerasaun foun are ‘waiting for signal’.Footnote ³⁹ This includes finding creative ways to be digitally present on and offline.

Even though digital engagement in Timor-Leste is sometimes limited or low-tech, the digital domain provides an open repository, a place of public and private record through the likes of YouTube, Facebook, WhatsApp and TikTok. A place where recorded events can be accessed and uploaded to when electricity and internet connections allow. Here creativity is free and open without the need to pay for printing or having to wait for government or NGO funding. There is also a responsibility to witness events: to record and share.Footnote ⁴⁰ To create digital reproductions of everyday events including birthday parties at home and customary events at ancestral houses, or to record public concerns such as a road blocked by a landslide or a village without water and electricity. It is also a place to remember events of the past, reproduce photos of the independence movement and celebrate national remembrance days.

The concept of postmemory is embedded in the process of reproduction. Hirsch outlines how photographs, an example of postmemory work through which generations transmit experiences, exist and survive in generations of reproduction and reproducibility.Footnote ⁴¹ Although the jerasaun foun are not yet a postmemory generation, they are nonetheless participating in activities that Hirsch describes as postmemory making. This includes the building of awareness of past events through narratives or images shared between generations and the imaginative responses to the transmission of memory—all of which are part of postmemory work.Footnote ⁴² Postmemory work is infused with temporal future making that is part of the social and political reproduction of the next generation.

To give one example, in 2025 a group of jerasaun foun held a music, poetry and art event on 7 December, the anniversary of the Indonesian invasion, in Dili, Timor-Leste’s capital city. The poster read ‘INVASION: The Past becomes Hope for the Future’ (Invazaun: Istoria Pasadu Sai Esperansa ba Futuru). The poster that was shared on Facebook and WhatsApp used silhouetted graphic designs to depict paratroopers descending from a plane (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Poster for creative event titled ‘INVASION: The Past becomes Hope for the Future’

Figure 1 Long description

The poster features the title 'INVASION' with the date '7 Dezembro 1975' and the phrase 'Istoria Pasadu Sai Esperansa ba Futuru'. It depicts silhouetted paratroopers descending from a plane. Below, there are logos for 'The Troopers Chapter ii' and event details: '7-12-2025 Jardim Motael [Coffee & Music] Sun 8 PM'. A guitar illustration is also present.

Credit: Kafe Trotoar, 2025

The memory of the invasion is harnessed to present a variety of art and music. This signals the creative way that jerasaun foun are engaging in postmemory work. The organisers of this event are drawing on the past to present creative material as ‘hope for the future’. The participants included those who experienced the day itself and the resulting occupation. The memory of the invasion and subsequent occupation are evoked digitally, and the descending paratroopers are reproduced using graphic designs and generic stock images that are not particular to the event or location. Here digital engagement is both offline and online. The event takes place in person, but digital technologies are used to express, promote and record the event itself. The poster is reproduced through sharing via social media, including WhatsApp and Facebook and smartphones and cameras document the live performances. Through this event, the 1975 invasion is transformed from an experience of violence and oppression to one of creativity and hope. The past is reproduced, transformed into hope for the future, through the digital as a medium.

While reproduction has typically been associated with the biological event of giving birth, feminist scholars theorise reproduction more broadly as a biological, social and political process of remaking life.Footnote ⁴³ I bring postmemory work into conversation with a popular concept used in reproduction studies, reproductive justice. As an interdisciplinary feminist framework reproductive justice is both an activist tool and analytical lens. It emerged in response to dominant forms of reproductive rights activism that centred the struggles of predominately white middle class women for contraception and abortion. Reproductive justice, however, is built on a social justice approach to consider intersecting inequalities of race, gender and class and their impact on people’s ability to fulfil their reproductive desires, be it to have or not to have children, and to raise children in a safe environment. Beyond equal access to sexual and reproductive health care, reproductive justice has been used as a lens to explore the effects of cultural and environmental destruction on reproduction in the contexts of colonial violence.Footnote ⁴⁴ In other words, reproductive justice advocates for the right to reproduce the next generation, biologically, socially and culturally in safe environments that sustain life.

Reproductive justice as an activist tool and analytical framework shares similarities with the concept of postmemory. Firstly, postmemory and reproductive justice both emerge from a history of violence and injustice. The element of postmemory work that is about both awareness of events and a responsibility to represent and recreate them aligns with the social justice element of reproductive justice. The multiple ways in which we can fulfil our ‘reproductive destinies’ needn’t only be concerned with the biological aspects of reproduction, but the cultural, social and political ways we engage in reproducing life.Footnote ⁴⁵ Reproductive justice thus acknowledges the wider structures that shape the process of reproduction in all its forms.Footnote ⁴⁶ Beyond that, reproductive justice has the ability to encompass activism and scholarly work that shows other creative ways to shape reproductive futures. This may include challenging past injustices and imagining futures that enable a safer, more equal social environment for the next generation.

While some would argue that reproductive justice has been coopted and taken beyond its intended usage, Loretta Ross prefers to position reproductive justice as ‘intersectional feminist activism’ which ‘offers amazing flexibility and adaptability to allow multiple interpretations that invite elaboration and clarification’.Footnote ⁴⁷ It is precisely the defiance of positivist interpretations and its malleability that allow the reproductive justice praxis to be explored.

I take Ross’s invitation here to think about postmemory work as a form of reproductive justice praxis. The jerasaun foun are imaginatively projecting and recreating the past and engaging with digital formats to reproduce social memory and transform political history in the aftermath of the occupation. Using the 1975 invasion and subsequent brutal occupation as inspiration for a creative event that brings hope for the future is one example.

Reproductive justice as a concept helps to solve the issue of temporal boundaries around categories of generation, particularly in the case where there is not quite a distinct postmemory generation. In turn, the concept of postmemory work provides somewhat of an answer to the search for the more creative ways, beyond biomedical health or technical environmental policy, that inequalities linked to past conflict and trauma can be reimaged. Postmemory work allows me to describe the creative forms of remembering and reimagining that are less well theorised in the concept reproductive justice. I thus argue that one way reproductive justice can be enacted is through postmemory work.

The digital offers itself as a medium that makes postmemory work more effective through its replicability. As a reproductive medium the digital, particularly audiovisual formats such as artwork, photographs, video and audio, transmits to a wider audience over a longer period time. Remembering and transmitting are made more powerful through digitisation. Both on and offline, their replicability allows for engagement regardless of internet connection.

As a form of social activism, digital recordings now provide an important avenue through which to witness events. Witnessing has been an important tool of resistance in Timor-Leste since the occupation when the Indonesian government suppressed news from inside the territory. During this time radio and audio recordings were a key mode of communication between resistance groups and the outside world. Footage of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, filmed by the journalist Max Stahl, brought an international audience and much needed attention to the violence and oppression in Timor-Leste.

Audiovisual media continues to play an important role in civil societies in Timor-Leste today and is enhance by digitisation. Radio, in both digital and analogue forms, plays an important role in media and communication. Community radio stations funded by the Secretary of State for Communications (SECOMS) constitute a key network across Timor-Leste.Footnote ⁴⁸ Many community radio stations, staffed largely by jerasaun foun and younger volunteers, live stream via websites and applications. Community radios are considered grass roots media in Timor-Leste, and particularly active stations increasingly engage in multimedia reporting with video and photographs, which are shared on websites and via their Facebook pages. Below I present some of the ways radio journalists and community members are recording reenactments of conflict and customary practices. These enactments allow conventional intergenerational and gender hierarchies to be challenged.

Reproducing the past: Independence Day

Radio Mauloko Maubisse is named after a prominent ancestral house in the mountain area of Maubisse. Mauloko refers to a loving or caring man and Maubisse is a strong man. Thus, the qualities of ‘strength and love’ represent the radio’s values. Joaquim de Fatima Coutinho, the head of the radio station in Maubisse, is a prolific local journalist and, under his leadership, the radio station is much more than a space for audio journalism. It is a space for community discussions, organising disaster relief and health outreach programmes, and resolving local conflicts. Daily, the radio station is a place for news about community events or happenings; at other times it is a centre for discussing social issues, arranging media projects between journalists, and organising NGO collaborations. The radio station is also a living archive of community media and documentation. Its recordings exist offline on the station’s computers and online via its website and Facebook page (see Figure 2). By observing, and collaborating with, Radio Maubisse Mauloko, I came to learn how community journalists were recording the jerasaun foun’s reimagining of the past.

Figure 2.

Radio Kommunidade Maubisse Moloko webpage https://radiomauloko.org/, last accessed on 20 May 2026

Figure 2 Long description

The webpage displays a section titled 'Notisia Mauloko' with three news articles. The first article features an image of a person in traditional attire, accompanied by a headline discussing cultural coordination. The second article shows a group of people in a room, with a headline about community activities. The third article includes an image of a classroom setting, with a headline related to educational initiatives. On the right, there is a 'Trending' section listing topics with small images. The layout is divided into two columns, with news articles on the left and trending topics on the right.

In Maubisse, on 20 May 2016, the town held their annual celebration for the restoration of independence. Timor-Leste celebrates its original declaration of independence on 28 November 1975, the day independence was declared from Portugal and days before the Indonesian occupation. 20 May 2002 was the day that the UN’s interim administration of East Timor (UNTAET) ended and the day the territory formally became the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste. It is a national holiday, and most towns hold some sort of celebration—sometimes receiving some funds from the state to do so.

In Maubisse, the day of celebration starts with the heads of villages (suco) bringing the Timorese flag to the main flagpole in the centre of the main town. Here everyone gathers to see the public servants, including schoolteachers and health workers, assemble onto the main square, followed by the veterans, the local customary leaders and representatitives, then by older high school children who march and conduct the flag hanging ceremony. During the 2016 celebrations in Maubisse I headed out with the local journalists to document the occasion. Gusti, a volunteer at the local radio station, ran around snapping official photos of the parade while I remained part of the crowd, taking candid photos from a shaded distance. After several hours of processions and speeches, the formalities ended; the local leaders headed for refreshments and the celebrations really began. The main square descended into dancing, dahur, a circular dance where people hold hands to form a circle then step inwards and outwards in time to the music as the whole circle slowly rotates. Periodically somebody took a cap or scarf and danced alone with it in the middle of the circle before awarding it to someone else, effectively nominating them to take the centre stage.

After the dancing, performances by different youth groups began. The first performance was a play put together by the high school drama group. It reenacted the struggle for independence, with half of the group dressed as Indonesian soldiers and the other half as Timorese farmers and resistance fighters. Gusti and I moved up close to film the scene. The drama started out seriously, with Timorese farmers being ordered to line up and sing the Indonesian national anthem. They were shouted at and shoved violently. This was depicted to happen over the course of several days, with the violence getting worse each day. There were sniggers from the young crowd, whether at the violence, the awkwardness of the situation or the bad acting, it wasn’t clear. An elderly man at the front of the crowd scolded them ‘Don’t laugh, you don’t know’, reminding them that they had not experienced the conflict. However, the humour of the crowd built up and at the end of the play, when the Indonesian military shot dead the Timorese farmers, the crowd roared with laughter. Gusti and I stood there filming it. Later I asked some friends about people laughing at the performance. In reply, they said ‘Oh they are just being rude; they are stupid and don’t know how to behave.’ By the end of the play, all the Indonesian soldiers and Timorese ended up being shot dead on the floor. At the last moment, one Timorese stood up, pulled out a Timorese flag hidden in his sleeve and waved it in the air, declaring victory. Everyone cheered and the play was over.

Having attended the 20 May celebrations in Maubisse in 2018, 2019 and 2024 and 2025, I’ve learnt a version of this play or drama is reenacted every year. While not, nor expected to be, historically accurate, the play shows the triumph of the Timorese over the Indonesian in the face of adversity and suffering. It shows the suffering of the citizens and the lives lost in the independence struggle. Each year it is reenacted by a different class from the local high school. In 2024 the video, recorded by the head of the Maubisse radio station, Joaquim de Fatima Coutinho, made it onto the radio’s Facebook page (see Figures 3 and 4). The video however is grainy, reflecting the poor upload quality, which is notably better in photos (see Figure 5). The video post received some congratulatory comments, 15 likes and 13 shares, but it was just one of hundreds of photos and videos shared from the Maubisse Independence celebrations in 2025.

Figure 3.

Photo of drama group reenacting story of independence, wearing blood stained t-shirts and watched by the crowd

Figure 3 Long description

A large crowd is gathered outdoors, featuring a mix of men and women, some dressed in traditional attire. They are positioned in the foreground, facing the camera. The background shows a mountainous landscape with clear skies. Several flags are visible on the right side, adding to the festive atmosphere. The setting appears to be a public event or celebration, with numerous people filling the area, creating a lively and vibrant scene.

Credit: RACOM Maubisse, Joaquim de Fatima Coutinho, 20 May 2024.

Figure 4.

Screenshot from video recording of drama about the violent struggle for independence

Figure 4 Long description

A large crowd is gathered in an outdoor setting, watching a performance. Several people are lying on the ground in the center of the scene, while one person stands among them, appearing to be part of the act. The crowd surrounds the performers, with some individuals taking photos or videos. In the background, there are buildings and a mountainous landscape visible. The scene is lively, with many spectators observing the event.

Credit: RACOM Maubisse, Joaquim de Fatima Coutinho, 20 May 2024. https://www.facebook.com/100023172396811/videos/pcb.1581025326013199/808862634524444

Figure 5.

Screenshot from video of drama group reenacting the struggle for independence, showing a actor wearing East Timorese flag rising up from the violence

Figure 5 Long description

A wide shot shows a crowd of people gathered around a group of people lying on the ground. Three flags are attached to a pole on the right. Buildings and mountains are in the background.

Credit: RACOM Maubisse, Joaquim de Fatima Coutinho, 20 May 2024.

The state’s narrative of the struggle for independence shows the dead are martyrs of the cause. Rui Graça Feijó and Lia Kent examine the memorialisation, customary practices and everyday activities which show how the dead matter to the living in the country’s independence era.Footnote ⁴⁹ Yet there are significant inequalities in remembrance. The veneration of some dead, those considered martyrs and heroes, over less visible civilian victims reproduces inequalities and political hierarchies that undermine the supposed inclusivity of a liberal nation-state. While such memorialisations have been examined from a focus on death, this reenactment can also be seen through the lens of reproduction.Footnote ⁵⁰

The young people’s laughter at the reenactment seemed to chime with the way people often talked about the conflict, largely by way of telling stories and jokes and sometimes accompanied by the phrase hamansa duke lui tanis, meaning ‘It is better to laugh than to cry.’ I found that people rarely talked directly or publicly about their personal experiences of the conflict.Footnote ⁵¹ For example, in Maubisse during a community festival, one male youth leader stood in front of a crowd, tears in his eyes, crying about suffering of the community during the Indonesian occupation and expressing his gratefulness to the Catholic community for their support. After several minutes, a religious leader stepped in and discouraged him from lamenting about their suffering, proclaiming that time had passed.

Silences abound. People preferred not to talk about the occupation and the preceding civil war due to trauma and the local political divisions that continue to this day. However, there seems to also have been an acceptance of the suffering and an inclination to move forward because the national political narrative has moved from one of remembrance and suffering to one of development and the future. National leaders for example have declared an end to the mourning of the conflict through the enactment of a Kore Matan Nasional, a customary practice in which the mourning of a person, often a year or so after their death, is declared to be over.Footnote ⁵² In declaring a national end to the mourning for those lost during the Indonesian occupation, national leaders were seen to be drawing a line under the conflict, now memorialised on the state’s terms: statues of nationally recognised leaders and sufferers, heroes’ graveyards and lifetime payments to military veterans and their families.

However, groups of people, including many in Maubisse, feel some disdain for the recognition those outside of the capital city received during the national memorialisation and valorisation. Feminist scholars of reproduction have addressed the need for the indigenisation and decolonisation of institutions and historical narratives;Footnote ⁵³ however, unpacking the local divisions when it comes to enacting reproductive justice remains a challenge. The diversity of experiences during the Indonesian occupation means that not everyone’s experience fits the national narrative. Many in Timor-Leste were members of the UDT party which had fought against FRETILIN before the Indonesian occupation. Frictions between the two groups, and villages caught on either side, still run deep. FRETILIN, which emerged as the victors, were not always on the right side of the violence.

The reenactment of the independence struggle and the response from the young audience is just one way in which the younger generation are remembering a struggle that they were not fully part of but may have experienced through being caught up in the violence of independence, or through the older generations recounting of experiences of living ‘in the forest’ in guerilla encampments or hiding away from Indonesian authorities. Others were displaced or allowed to stay in their homes depending on their level of collaboration. The simple narrative told by the high school students, one of struggling against all odds, of everyone being killed until the last person remains to fly the Timorese flag, is a story that is reenacted every year. It cannot capture the experiences of everyone in Maubisse, but the young people enact a sequence of events in which everyone can be included. As people’s memories and divisions are dampened, and as the radio station continues to document the dramatisation in this unified version, independence serves as a peacebuilding narrative, smoothing over local divisions. In addition, the playfulness and laughter pokes fun at a period of suffering, providing a form of comic relief for the younger generation often caught up in sombre and serious national memorialisations led by the older generation. Jokes about violence can be seen as a form of protest under oppressive regimes.Footnote ⁵⁴ In addition dark humour has been found to be widespread among victims and survivors, as it functions as a complex mechanism for coping with anxiety and fear, for fostering group cohesion and for critiquing perpetrators.Footnote ⁵⁵ This dramatisation, not of the past but of the memory of it, by the younger generation reclaims some of the narrative for the younger generation.

Hirsh argues that photographs, especially analogue ones, exist and survive in generations of reproduction and reproducibility. As aura and authenticity fade in the process of mechanical reproduction, and now digitalisation, and as the relations of the image to the original contents of its productions erodes, the changes images undergo mirror the movement from memory to postmemory.Footnote ⁵⁶ In a similar way, this reenactment or play on the struggle for independence is reproduced year after year, its authenticity does not fade in the process of machinal reproduction, rather it is mediated by the performers themselves, and it is captured digitally on film, as a recording to be found in the informal archive of the radio station or a grainy video online.

While a return to customary practices after the Indonesian occupation has been widely recognised as a form of peace making and healing,Footnote ⁵⁷ a return to such practices is also a way of speaking ‘beyond trauma’ for communities in Timor-Leste.Footnote ⁵⁸ Similarly, these reenactments can be considered another part of remembering and post-remembering.

A play or theatre performance mediates between the past and the present in its reenactment of past events. The reenacting or telling of the story in itself acts on one level, but what happens when the event is recorded and the recording digitised, shared and archived? What sort of documents do such performances then become? Or, with little bandwidth to share the recording online at the time, might such uncirculated archives emerge in the future bearing different meaning?

In my research on Timor-Leste, I’ve questioned what reproductive justice in Timor-Leste might look like, particularly in the wake of cultural oppression and genocidal massacres, and in the divisions that still exist between different political and intergenerational groups.Footnote ⁵⁹ How are people’s memory work employed as part of this process? Rather than conventional legal justice processes, I argue that young people’s engagements with reenacting the past, in some cases editing or rerecording it, are part of the process of reproducing the future in ways that are perhaps more generationally just, or in the examples that follow, more gender equal.

Reimagining the past and recording future possibilities

In Timor-Leste the jersaun foun are reminded about the sacrifices and struggles of the past by the older brothers (maunboot sira) whom they must respect and follow. Gender relations in Timor-Leste today have been significantly affected by periods of conflict and occupation.Footnote ⁶⁰ The persisting dominance of male liberation fighters is labelled maubootizmu, which translates as big-brotherism.Footnote ⁶¹ Berta Tilman Perira describes maunbootizmu as a ‘set of unwritten hierarchical rules’s that emerged after independence. Maunbootizmu places older male national liberation fighters at the centre of social life. This ‘sreproduces a culture of subordination, dependency, obedience and passivity’s. However, feminist and youth groups, including many who would consider themselves jerasaun foun, are challenging gender hierarchies through political activism and in their creative reimaginings of customary traditions.

One such reimagining took place at a week long environmental youth camp in Maubisse in 2018. The Permaculture camp, organised every two years by Ego Lemos and his organisation PERMATIL (Permaculture Timor-Leste), was an opportunity to bring young people in Timor-Leste together to share and celebrate knowledge about local environmental resources. Community journalists from Maubisse and neighbouring districts were reporting on the camp’s activity. The finale of the youth camp, dubbed ‘FinFest’, involved a celebration of traditional Timorese cultural practices. In 2018 this took the form of a reenactment of a traditional marriage exchange ceremony. FinFest brough together artists, musicians, and young people to organise a large enactment of a barlake ceremony, in particular the part of the process known as prenda where families meet to discuss and negotiate marriage exchange. Actors and participants donned traditional clothing such as black or colourful woven cloth (tais), gold-coloured metal disc pendants (belak), and the bride and prospective grooms wore crescent-shaped crowns (kaebuak).

As we waited for the participants to get ready, I asked my friend what she thought about barlake. Dianna, a member of a youth co-operative, explained that it was an exchange of gifts between a man’s and a women’s family when they marry. This was a part of customary practices known generally as kultura. Discussions about barlake in Timor-Leste can sometimes be contentious. Marriage exchange practices are a gendered issue with economic implications for families. In patriarchal lineages women marry ‘out’, leaving their families’ ancestral house to join their husbands’. They may also be expected to live with their husband’s family, although this is sometimes negotiated depending on work or education opportunities. Despite barlarke being considered as an exchange, the gifts required of the man’s family, the wife-takers (gifts ranged from several hundreds to thousands of dollars, and included numerous horses and buffalo), were often much more expensive than that required of the women’s family, the wife-givers (who gave pigs, tais and alcohol). Barlake was therefore a significant financial burden for family members, and especially for the groom’s side of the family. It also created or redefined relationships between in-laws (fetosaan-umane) and their respective ancestral houses. Entering a marriage alliance traditionally means that gifts will continue to be requested and exchanged between the two families at funerals and other customary events.

Anthropologists have detailed practices of barlake and discussed its different forms and changes over time.Footnote ⁶² During most customary practices elder brothers and uncles negotiate on behalf of the families. Yet, interestingly, in this reenactment of Barlake at the youth camp, the jerasaun foun took the lead. Groups of actors ran up the nearby hills. A pony and a goat were borrowed from a local resident. One of the FinFest leaders joined a group of young people, representing his ‘family’, with a young female activist posing as the bride-to-be. This group were the wife-givers (umane). A camera drone filming the event and hovered incongruously over them. Another group went up a nearby hill side. They posed as wife-takers (fetosaan). A third group, a competing group of wife-takers, marched in the other direction to the opposite hill. As the wife-givers set off on a walk around the large camp with the bride-to-be, a group of wife-takers approached them, running down the hillside, drumming and banging gongs. They called across to the wife-givers for the prospective bride to marry their prospective groom.

‘Not enough, not enough, bring a buffalo!’ the wife-givers yelled back, jokingly demanding more appropriate gifts. The first group of wife-takers walked away, the young people laughing as the older actors tried to keep a straight facing. Next the second group of wife-takers approached the bride-to-be, running down the hill. They had a small goat in tow, the prospective groom riding on a pony. After some shouts back and forth between the two groups, jovial and teasing, it was agreed that the marriage between the bride and groom, and the alliance between the families, could take place. Both groups erupted in excitement and started dancing. The bride and groom were helped on to the pony, and everyone piled into the middle of the field to dance around them, singing songs that had been played at the concert the night before. Everyone had their phones out, and photographers ran around taking photos.

This festive celebration was quite different to processes of barlake I had witnessed taking place among families, which was often fraught with tensions and hierarchies. In negotiations long and serious talks took place between the male elders of the family, while women and young people waited behind closed doors or peaked through windows. This reenactment also had none of the bitter-sweet resonance of the barlake I discussed with young people, who bemoaned the economic burden and family friction involved in their marriages. In my conversations with my friend Dianna and numerous other women and young girls, most reported that barlake shouldn’t be used to make money; they stated that it was primarily about a women’s dignity and her value to her family and the husband’s family. This value wasn’t primarily defined in economic terms; rather the economic exchange reflected the gain and loss of a family member and the accompanying social implications. Dianna was adamant that the cost or value (folin) asked for by the bride’s families (umane) from the groom’s families (fetosaan) needed to be reduced. She explained that although barlake was sometimes referred to as bride price (feto folin), the custom wasn’t about selling women; instead it was about a woman’s dignity (dignidade) and her value or worth (valour). This for Dianna was part of the identity of a Timorese woman and she didn’t agree with people who said it was simply selling women. If a woman was married into another ancestral house without any negotiation, it implied that she had no value to her family or her ancestral house. Dianna herself was about to negotiate a symbolic exchange of gifts between her and her fiancé’s family. Knowing that her finance’s family would be unable to provide anything more than a token sum of one buffalo, she had requested that her father and uncles don’t ask her fiancés family for much more. Her father, who was in agreement, told me this was modern practice, and the important thing was his daughters happiness and that the young couple be able to build a life for themselves.

As Kelly Silva has written, in Timor-Leste, debates for and against the practice of barlake show how marriage transactions are associated with different forms of exchange. Dianna’s position on marriage could be characterised as fitting into gift exchange, in that a woman’s family were compensated for her leaving the family. The arguments against barlake however suggests that this exchange turns the women in to a commodity. Silva argues that this distinction, between gift exchange and commodity, produces a social distinction between people in the rural areas (deemed uncivilised and likely to sell their daughters) and those in the urban areas who consider themselves modern and who will not commodify their daughters.Footnote ⁶³ In fact, Silva argues, this lack of consensus about what barlake actually is enables people to fulfil commitments to both local customs and global expectations of modernity.

Dianna’s position on barlake, as a tradition to be upheld and which was not about the commodification of women, was similar to that of Sabina, another friend at the youth camp. Sabina also thought that barlake was not something that should be stopped, but that the payments needed to be controlled. For example, in her neighbouring village of Hatubilico, Sabina told me that people have lots of children because they ‘are looking for daughters’ (buka oan feto). While girls might leave the household, they could bring you wealth if the family received a large barlake, so families wanted an equal or larger number of daughters than sons. Receiving barlake in this way, Sabina explained, was no good. Barlake should be treated as a cultural practice, and not a means to get rich, or people would keep having children to try and have daughters.

An elder nurse from one of the local clinics told me that it was only in more recent times that barlake started to get outlandishly expensive. In her opinion, this was due to people making more money from the coffee plantations in her home area of Emera, and people feeling able to request more in return for their daughter’s hand in marriage and for the alliance between the families. When conversations about barlake took place, people always bemoaned the inequalities it produced, the unequal treatment of women and girls, the economic burden on men’s families, and the future expectations around married life and how many children the couple should have. At the same time, rarely did anyone advocate for barlake to be abandoned; rather, they explained how it might be practiced differently.

At the youth camp, barlake was reimagined in a way that reproduced intergenerational and gender relations differently from that of everyday customary practices. Events that brought wife-giving and wife-taking groups together were typically fraught with tensions: people were conscious of their roles and responsibilities and nervous about costs. Were their gifts acceptable? Would there be trouble later if they hadn’t given enough? Married-in women and daughters of hosts were conscious of looking and keeping busy, helping with food and children, and welcoming guests. Older men were concerned with specific practices of kultura, the order of events and presentations that should follow ancestral practices to appease ancestral spirits. Within these alliances, most people were wary of inadvertently fuelling tensions by not bringing adequate gifts. These were all part of negotiations that accompanied a wedding, and they were always a cause of stress and tension for the young married couple, be it on account of their economic situation or in the expectations to start a family. Couples, and especially the women, could come under tremendous strain if they do not or are unable to have the children expected by their in-laws or their own families, particularly in situations where gift exchanges have taken place.

The jovial reenactment of a barlake exchange at the youth camp had none of these concerns or pressures. The wedding party buzzed with a sense of play and freedom. It was also performative, with flashing phones and the sound of a camera drone filming from above. Despite two youth leaders directing, the young people were free to act out whichever positions they liked—old man, old woman, in-laws on the brides or groom’s side—yet they were not in a real family hierarchy. This was not their family and responsibilities were absent. Future social relations were not at stake, and the reproduction of a new generation was not required.

The conviviality reflected what a community liaison and activist once suggested to me the first time I arrived in Timor-Leste, that in the past barlake was never about money; instead, it was an exchange of skills that were needed for the community. If a woman could make clay pots, or weave tais, and raise children, she had skills that constituted part of the exchange for making a stronger community. Skills and resources, human or otherwise, were needed. The youth camp FinFest celebration appeared to resist the commodification of barlake and the social tensions that came with it. At its centre was a symbolic exchange of resources, conviviality and freedom from hierarchies and economic concerns.

Alongside its association with the commodification of women, Barlake has also been condemned as patriarchal dominance and theorised as a precursor to violence against women.Footnote ⁶⁴ However, rather than cast Barlake as one homogenous practices, Eugenia Urania da Costa Correia reminds us that different ethnic groups in Timor-Leste practice barlake in slightly different ways, and we must remember that even clans that are socially and politically matrilineal feature patriarchal practices.Footnote ⁶⁵ In other words, is not barlake but patriarchy that is the problem. Done differently, as Carolina Maria Sofia Boldoni suggests, barlake could become part of the solution to resolving domestic violence, but only if Timorese women are included in the conversation.Footnote ⁶⁶

The reenactment by a group of jerasaun foun of a sometimes contested and differently interpreted tradition showed how the independence generation of Timor-Leste were reimagining a barlake that was unconstrained by intergenerational hierarchies and gender inequalities. The reenactment obliviated the arguments and clashes that sometimes emerge as families discuss the barlake that ought to be paid (and which sometimes remains a lifelong debt). Freed from kinship obligations, the reenactment of the barlake ceremony allowed its participants to imagine reformed practices that lessened social inequalities.

Despite being recorded and documented, it remains difficult to find much footage of the reenactment online. Doubtlessly, many of the photos and videos sit in computer archives at the radio stations, or on forgotten memory cards and hard drives. Just like the recording of the high-school performance of Independence Day, which exists as a grainy video on social media, the recording of the reenactment of barlake exists. It has the potential to re-emerge in the future, showing how inequalities might be creatively reenvisioned.

Digital media as a medium of reproductive justice

As shown by the creative examples of jerasaun foun, events and practices in Timor-Leste are being reimagined in ways that position violence, oppression and inequalities differently. These recreations are also being recorded and reproduced through digital mediums that operate both on and offline. Their creation and existence hold possibilities for the future.

Media has played a key role in Timor-Leste’s past. The Santa Cruz massacre is one of many massacres that took place under the Indonesian occupation that is now remembered very differently from all the other massacres that took place without international witnesses and a camera. Max Stahl, the journalist who recorded the footage, reflected that witnesses to such an event provide a story that people can unite around.Footnote ⁶⁷ The footage of Santa Cruz thus became a recording that provided not only evidence of atrocities, but also united people in their hope for change in the future. What Stahl found unique about Timor is that the story is much bigger than the Timorese themselves. It relied on a group of people in an extreme situation to communicate their humanity to world. In his words, ‘Timor didn’t just keep on struggling until the end. It won by communication, by extremely skilful use of their story.’Footnote ⁶⁸

Rutherford writes that, for West Papua, the dream of independence lies in the YouTube videos made by activists. Although watched by very few, these videos preserve a space for Papuan independence. The video makers imagine attracting the world’s gaze and their productions bear witness to imagining of things that could be otherwise.Footnote ⁶⁹ In the same way recordings of reenacments that challenge gender or intergenerational heiraches in Timor-Leste can be seen to be preserving a space for future change. There is no shortage of activism or digital media, particularly short clips uploaded on Facebook and Tiktok. However, recordings of longer events and performances often don’t always get shared always get shared or discussed in the mainstream. They remain stored on physical devices, with no hope of being uploaded given the current bandwidths and technologies available to much of the population. Thus, this kind of memory work taking place in Timor-Leste is not necessarily producing instant change or always done with strategic intention. However, we must also acknowledge that the work behind social change is not just something ‘performed in the present; it is the process of crystallising a future.’Footnote ⁷⁰

Technologies and political change can happen rapidly, however, and in this way such memory work is poised, ready and waiting. The reenactments of Independence Day and of barlake creatively reproduce the past and in so doing create visions of future alternatives. In the case of the reenactment of independence, it obscures details that might be locally contentious and pokes fun at an often serious and sombre subject. Digital recordings of these events, from various angles, do not always tell one conclusive picture. Moreover, they are presented and shared online in snippets that become fragments of their viewers’ perspectives, thereby challenging the hegemony of grand narratives. In the future there is a possibility that these recreations will be more fully presented. Media in Timor-Leste could be poised for rapid change as the jerasaun foun and those that follow gain access to digital devices and online access that expand and accelerate such creativity. Reenactments of past events and reimaginings of past inequalities have the possibility to transform memories of violence, intergenerational hierarchies and gender inequalities to produce a more equal future. While future advances in digital technologies have the capacity to share these to a wider audience, jerasaun foun are not waiting. The postmemory work or ‘reproductive justice in praxis’ is taking place now. Recorded in local media archives or on individuals’ devices, it also has the possibility to resurface and allow for reinterpretations.

Lia Kent has argued that the final report of the Timor-Leste Commission for Reception Truth and Reconciliation (CAVR) proclaimed ‘grand narrative of forgiveness and redemption’ is not necessarily translatable into local concepts of truth, justice and commemoration, and that ‘individuals and local communities are attempting to ‘remake a world’ in ways that may differ markedly from the formal goals of official transitional justice institutions’.Footnote ⁷¹ Communities around Timor-Leste have found ways to mourn, express grief and commemorate the dead and missing using customary and traditional practices and beliefs. Local practices of memorialisation and commemoration can be understood as highly localised and deeply personal attempts to ‘remake a world’ by remembering the past and mourning.

Stahl stated that the multitude of narratives that made up the story of Timor-Leste’s birth of a nation led him to make the experimental film The Reconciliation I, the first of a four-part documentary about one week in 1999 in Timor-Leste.Footnote ⁷² The eventful week is told in long takes from different people’s perspectives, with no verbal commentary. Stahl calls his approach anti-news because it lacks the coherence or narrative of a piece of media made for a news outlet. Instead, ‘it documents the people at the centre of multiple co-existing stories, matters of life and death, competing without any definitive thread or conclusion’. The reenactments I saw in Maubisse had some of this in common. They took place on one stage, rather across a shared space, with different things happening in different parts of the performances, with no verbal commentary or narration. In both, there was very little to no dialogue. Similarly, there is no one version of barlake or Timorese independence.

In this article I have attempted to assess the specificity of reproductive justice in Timor-Leste within a context of tension between two generations; I have examined the role the digital plays in helping this young, be it 1.5 or postmemory, generation to find their own way of intervention in public discussion. They do this within a political situation that is not always open to them because of the hierarchies and social structures inherited from the struggle for independence. As the performances of Independence Day and barlake have shown, the independence generation are memory making, which is a form of reproductive justice in praxis. The past is being reenacted and reimagined, and digital recordings as a reproductive medium are transmitting more just and equal futures.

Local radio stations serve as archives of memory making poised to shape Timor-Leste’s story of the future. When the possibility to upload it and share it with a broader national and international audience occurs, justice can be reproduced in new ways for the future. Most archives and official history will document the official state narratives. However, radio stations hold recordings of the jerasaun foun’s engagement with official narratives and their own altered ones (such as the reenactments). These constitute local archives that are well poised to challenge official narratives when the postmemory generation fully arrives.