Those great historical heroes of Timor-Leste, natural spirits and forces — lulik [sacred] lands, lulik stones, lulik mountains, lulik water, sea, and wild animals — , pioneers of liberation together with the People of Timor [Povu Timor] conspired ukun-rasik-an against exploitation by the Suharto Regime in Timor.Footnote 1
Commemorating the ninth anniversary of Timor-Leste's restoration of independence and the people's suffering during the Indonesian military occupation (1974–99), a university student wrote this on 20 May 2011. The excerpt associates the Timorese people with their national space, which goes beyond the human and physical realm: it mentions the permanent human population, but together with other beings, the animals, (super)natural forces and sacred landscapes. He refers to sovereignty, but what exactly is the Tetun phrase, ukun-rasik-an? Literally read, ukun-rasik-an (rule-self-own) is understood as a conspiracy against an external ruler in which the deceased heroes, the people, animals, spirits, and landscapes of Timor participated. What do such Timorese expressions reveal about their resistance, culture and history? How should they be emplaced in the cultural and political landscape of Southeast Asia and the broader world?
This blog post intrigued me, also because it was not the first time that I encountered such expressions of the notion of a sacred struggle that included non-human agencies. When I served in the United Nations’ Electoral Support Team in Timor-Leste (UNEST) from 2009–10, the team had to give up elections in several villages in Baucau which were associated with the ‘rebels’ and ‘gangs’ who boycotted the village elections. Timorese colleagues told me, ‘they are another kind of heroes demanding a true independence’ because their struggle was betrayed by the current ‘independence’ given by the United Nations. Later I learned that these veteran groups were called CPD-RDTL (the Popular Council for the Defense of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste) and the Sagrada Familia, and attracted thousands of people with their claims of representing the ‘true FRETILIN ideal’, military prowess, messianic visions, and magical power.Footnote 2 Repetitive such encounters forced me to situate my own presence in Timor in the lineage of various colonial powers — Portugal, the Netherlands, external forces during the Second World War, Indonesia, and the American ‘war on terror’. I started suspecting that East Timor's anti-Indonesian war might have been a holy war for some people whose revolution is yet unfinished (luta continua).Footnote 3
As a historian of modern Timor, I identify the origin of such contemporary political language in the Frente Revolucionária de Timor-Leste Independente (FRETILIN, the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor). Indeed, many Timorese political keywords including ukun-rasik-an, ukun-an, maubere, hamutuk (togetherness), traidor (traitor), and solidariedade (solidarity) were employed and modified through the movement during the turbulent period before and during the Indonesian Occupation. Historically, FRETILIN as a political party was born in the context of the decolonisation of Portuguese Timor in 1974, after two centuries of Portuguese rule from Dili. At the time, there were other parties such as UDT (which advocated for a confederation with Portugal) and APODETI (which advocated for integration with Indonesia), but FRETILIN was the first to demand full independence for East Timor. Its founders were educated young intellectuals in their 20s and 30s who articulated their stance in Lusophone leftist rhetoric and anti-colonial ideology.
However, FRETILIN became more of a movement when it strategically incorporated the rural Timorese population, often labelled as maubere, the personification of the poor, downtrodden, and genuine Timorese. As the party identified more and more with the maubere, the likes of ‘bishops of resistance’, ‘holy (wo)men’, ‘(wo)men of magic’, ‘(wo)men of extraordinary power’ and isolados (people who lived as small upland communities) joined and led East Timorese guerrilla forces and popular movements during the Indonesian Occupation. Thus, the East Timorese resistance was composed of apparently contradictory elements: secular and religious, elites and commoners, and urban and rural. After the martyrdom of some FRETILIN leaders such as Nicolau Lobato and Vicente Sahe, the elite politicians themselves came to be considered as messianic figures who would return from Mt Mindelo and Mt Casa dos Morcegos respectively to save the Timorese people.Footnote 4 The challenges to the post-independence FRETILIN government (2002–06) and the United Nations by groups such as Colimau2000, CPD-RDTL, and Sagrada Familia, requesting the realisation of ‘true independence’, cannot be interpreted in their terms without an acknowledgement of the diversity within the popular movements in Timor.Footnote 5
Based on this view, this article explores how the FRETILIN in 1974–75 communicated their political vision, the idea of a national space, and a sense of belonging. It analyses political language, songs, and spatial imaginings of the FRETILIN movement in its formative period with an emphasis on the significance of local ideologies in the Tetun language. I argue that, like the classical prophetic texts, the FRETILIN political manual and songs may have inspired people in more than one way. Furthermore, this article shows that arguably, FRETILIN heavily relied on aspects of Austronesian and Southeast Asian culture to mobilise the Timorese people despite an international political posture of not belonging to either Indonesia or Southeast Asia.
The article begins by briefly discussing theoretical issues regarding nationalism and national space in East Timor. Then, I will introduce historical and metageographic background to the emergence of FRETILIN. This section explains FRETILIN's positioning at the time and its historical role in East Timor's nation-building. Then, I textually analyse FRETILIN's political manual. This manual is a core text for understanding FRETILIN's political language in Portuguese and Tetun, and how it emplaced Timor. The third section investigates how the national anthem of Timor-Leste and FRETILIN's party anthem produced different images of the nation. The lyrics of the two songs were written by the same poet, Francisco Borja da Costa, but contain different themes and styles because they were aimed at separate audiences. A comparison of these two songs enable us to see how FRETILIN actually employed the terminology defined in Portuguese and Tetun versions of the political manual. Finally, the article will conclude with a summary of the findings and main arguments.
Resistance and nationalism in East Timor and Southeast Asia
Here I provide an overview of the literature on nationalism and resistance in East Timor and Southeast Asia, and complement it with some primary sources. Like this article, the pioneering Australian scholarship on East Timorese nationalism and resistance from the 1970s to the early 2000s focused on the East Timorese nationalists’ independence movement.Footnote 6 However, seeing the situation from abroad, academics could not gauge the diversity within the international and Timorese movements for an independent East Timor. Their framing of ‘East Timor vs Indonesia’ presented the situation as a competition between two distinct nations emerging from two colonial territories. This narrative presented José Ramos-Horta, Xanana Gusmão, and Bishop Carlos Ximenes Belo, internationally recognised leaders, as representative of the East Timorese nation.
Helen Hill and Michael Leach, political scientists, attribute FRETILIN's success to creative methods of political campaigning and their nationalist credentials. They used historical sources that this article reexamines, such as FRETILIN's political manual and party songs, and I owe much to this literature.Footnote 7 However, existing work has not distinguished between FRETILIN's campaigns in different languages. As a result, they overlooked some significant differences between FRETILIN's presentation abroad and their campaign in Timor. Toward audiences abroad, FRETILIN combined ideas drawn from secular histories, colonial borders, notions of sovereign nation-states, and anti-colonialism. In an attempt to discredit the Indonesian claim that the Indonesians and the East Timorese were the ‘same people’, the FRETILIN of the 1970s tried to present East Timor as a South Pacific country struggling to liberate itself from Portuguese colonialism rather than a part of Southeast Asia.Footnote 8 This discourse has influenced how pro-East Timor Western media and academics have understood the country. Tetun keywords such as maubere and ukun-rasik-an became party tags that expressed affiliation to East Timorese nationalism as part of international anti-colonialism, self-determination, and the defence of human rights. When circulated through the media in foreign languages, however, they lost their native Tetun implications.
Benedict Anderson argues that the necessary technological condition for the earlier popular national-imagining was the emergence of print capitalism, vernacular literature and colonial schools.Footnote 9 In Portuguese Timor in the 1970s, school education was limited to the elite minority, and print capitalism was largely absent, especially in the spaces outside of the capital, Dili. Even the FRETILIN pamphlets were imported from Lisbon in limited numbers due to the lack of printing facilities. Moreover, the level of East Timorese illiteracy in 1974 was an estimated 80 to 90 per cent of the population.Footnote 10 In other words, it is not plausible to assume that written documents influenced the majority of Timorese living beyond Dili.
Thongchai Winichakul argues that modern maps played a crucial role in the spread of official Thai nationalism, and I share the interest in the construction of national space.Footnote 11 Anderson applies Thongchai's theories to Indonesian and East Timorese nationalism and argues that colonial maps enabled the East Timorese to imagine the territory of East Timor as separate from Indonesia.Footnote 12 Michael Leach studied a map in a FRETILIN literacy manual in which the districts within East Timor, including the enclave of Oecusse, were depicted as holding each other's hands as an example of FRETILIN's national imagining.Footnote 13 These technologies assisted East Timorese imaginations of East Timor as a national territory. But these authors should have noted that there were competing maps produced by the Indonesian government and earlier Timorese advocates of the irredentist notion of a ‘united Timor’ in which the colonial borders were erased. Unlike the case of Thailand, the East Timorese were exposed to more than one competing national-imagining from the use of several modern maps.
As for the construction of space, there is a large volume of literature on imagined geographies, place studies, and area studies. In Timor-Leste Studies, Maj Nygaard-Christensen and Angie Bexley's edited volume is an important intervention to question the fixity of East Timor as a territorial category of study. The chapters by the editors, for example, examine how external factors such as the United Nations and Indonesia shaped the domestic political discourse in post-independence Timor-Leste.Footnote 14 In slightly different ways, Andrey Damaledo and Takahiro Kamisuna's works demonstrate a need to reconsider East Timor Studies by pointing out the much wider sociopolitical space of the East Timorese people, especially within Indonesia.Footnote 15
This article considers national space as socially constructed, but also points to the inspirational power of place. As human geographers define, place is a meaningful space for people.Footnote 16 While self-determination and human rights are universalist, place has a particular claim based on local context. Thus, an ideology of place more effectively mobilises when utilising the particular cultural code of a society. This article demonstrates that FRETILIN writers utilised East Timorese cultural code, and it reveals that the Timorese culture of resistance was highly comparable to preceding Southeast Asian resistance movements.
Yet another body of scholarship has investigated the relationship of nationalism, symbolism and material culture. The most relevant study is Catherine Arthur's article on Timor-Leste's national flag published in this journal.Footnote 17 Arthur explores the historical transformation of FRETILIN's role in the creation of the national flag and its original meaning and historical transformation through the Indonesian Occupation and the independence of Timor-Leste. Arthur emphasises the semantic transformation from FRETILIN's original symbolism of ‘independence, freedom, colonialism, and ignorance to overcome’ toward ‘struggle (funu) and suffering (terus)’ which became keywords during the Indonesian Occupation. I will revisit these two sets of symbolism in a later section to point out official and popular interpretations of the FRETILIN movement.
There are possibilities for expanding the scope of comparison between the Timorese and broader Southeast Asian cultures of resistance. Easily detectable commonalities include the role of pilgrimage sites, rural prophets, millenarian messages, and the usage of amulets and rituals to attain invulnerability.Footnote 18 For example, Robert Dom, the journalist who stayed with the East Timorese guerrillas in 1990 wrote as follows:
[Taur Matan Ruak] explains to me about lulik, which might be defined as the East Timorese version of lucky charms, but is taken far more seriously. While all the guerrillas wear crosses or carry pictures of the Virgin, nothing is as important as their individual lulik. This can be anything — from a twig to a photograph to an old Portuguese flag — the essential thing is that the individual believes it will protect them … One of the wounded guerrillas was shot in the stomach. I watch him clutching a bruised abdomen and am told that somehow the bullet didn't enter because his lulik protected him. I can almost believe it, because these people seem indestructible. One of them is said to have been shot thirty times, another carried a bullet in his belly for weeks before coughing it up and Taur Matan Ruak himself says he was hit on the head by a mortar. They were all saved by their lulik, of course.Footnote 19
In the same report, Dom wrote about an invulnerability rite too:
Haksolok and others strangle three cocks in front of a makeshift altar of candles and bark while a shaman intones Latinic litanies. It's a startling synthesis with Catholic icons prominent as local whisky is passed round as communion and the entrails of the cocks are read. What this oracle reveals is that the East Timorese have had a hard life for twenty years and should keep on resisting.Footnote 20
Dom does not contextualise these aspects in a coherent Timorese worldview. But, such beliefs in amulets and invulnerability rites were also detected in pre-colonial and anti-colonial Southeast Asian resistance movements. Footnote 21
Thus, there are similar political, spatial, and cultural aspects in Timorese and Southeast Asian resistance movements and nationalism. Against this background, this article employs textual reading and linguistic analysis to FRETILIN sources in two languages. This approach is informed by Reynaldo Ileto and Vicente Rafael's scholarship on Filipino resistance and nationalismFootnote 22 as well as Dionisio Babo-Soares’ analysis of Timorese political vocabulary.Footnote 23 This article emphasises differences and translations between Portuguese and Tetun. Tetun in the 1970s did not share the cultural capital to express precise Western political ideas such as territory, nation, and secularism. Their vocabulary in Tetun, therefore, differed significantly from the rhetoric they used in Portuguese and English. Even if they used words such as ‘independence’ and ‘nation’, these words could be interpreted differently by rural Timorese, who did not have long and constant contact with the state, nor had much media exposure to these ideas.
This article explores FRETILIN as a movement (rather than a political party) by re-investigating FRETILIN's political manual and songs, and how they were interpreted by broader audiences. East Timorese people rely significantly on oral means of communication, such as village meetings, songs, radio broadcasts, and speeches in the development of their identification with East Timorese nation.Footnote 24 Tetun is the most commonly used language in such discussions and media among the Timorese people. A careful reading of FRETILIN Tetun texts reveals that they could not simply copy ‘secular’ and ‘territorial’ nationalisms as in the Portuguese language campaigns. Instead, FRETILIN's Tetun campaigns and Timorese participants were influenced by family relations, holy landscapes, social structure, and other cultural elements that are embedded in Tetun and broader Austronesian/Southeast Asian traditions. Due to this, there were varying perceptions about FRETILIN and what it stood for among local actors and the international commentators.
East Timor's emplacement: Historical and geographic background
This section overviews the historical background to the emergence of FRETILIN so that we have a common understanding about the ways in which East Timor had been emplaced in various geographic scales. It is important to note that Portuguese Timor had previously been imagined as part of: Timor Island as a whole, the Lusophone World, and ‘Insular India’ (contemporary Island Southeast Asia and the South Pacific).Footnote 25
Timor Island is physically located at the eastern end of the Lesser Sunda Islands. Since the pre-colonial period, the island has been largely populated by people who were Austronesian language speakers, with a minority of Papuan language speakers of Bunaq, Makasae, and Fataluku. Historians and anthropologists believe that the island had a larger polity centred in Wehali, a south-central village currently in the Belu regency of West Timor. The island took part in the early modern Asian trade as an important provider of sandalwood and beeswax, and developed political relationships with Indonesian polities such as Majapahit, Ternate, Makassar, and Larantuka.Footnote 26
Timor was also a crossroads of various European colonial powers too. Europeans began visiting the island since the sixteenth century, and intensified their colonial rule in the late nineteenth century. The Portuguese and the Dutch settled along the northern and western coasts respectively, and eventually separated the island through territorial treaties.Footnote 27 This dual colonialism in one island created both territory-based anti-colonialism and irredentism.
The twentieth century brought about further transformation. In particular, colonial ‘pacification’ and Catholic missionaries’ activities contributed to the spread of Christianity and the Tetun language. The language of relative latecomers, Tetun of the Belunese, became a sort of lingua franca on the island by the mid-twentieth century.Footnote 28
During the Second World War, Timor was occupied first by the Allied Forces then by the Japanese. After the war, the Dutch territory joined the newly established Republic of Indonesia while the Portuguese reoccupied the eastern half and the enclave of Oecussi. The Timorese in the Dutch territory became ‘Indonesian’, while the educated population in Portuguese Timor became ‘New Portuguese’. Thus, both Indonesian West Timor and Portuguese East Timor were incorporated as peripheral spaces of nation-states centred in Java and Lisbon respectively.Footnote 29
If we look at local history, Timor had been ethnolinguistically heterogeneous. Nineteenth-century Portuguese sources refer to over sixty kingdoms on the island. There are dozens of language and ethnic groups. As the Portuguese and Dutch colonial presence was historically thin, they relied heavily on Timorese collaborators in maintaining their ‘possessions’. This resulted in a diverse and complex local history of collaboration and resistance by various Timorese principalities.
Therefore, anti-colonial sentiment was not unanimously shared by all Timorese people when the decolonisation plan was proposed in April 1974.Footnote 30 The Timorese Democratic Union (UDT) suggested a gradual independence, maintaining the old ties with Portugal. On the contrary, the Timorese Popular Democratic Association (APODETI) espoused a democratic integration with Indonesia. More ominously for FRETILIN, Indonesian political elites showed an interest in Portuguese Timor's integration as the twenty-seventh province of their country. These were the meta-geographic claims against which FRETILIN's leaders had to develop their stance.
A significant historical role of FRETILIN was the creation of the mainstream East Timorese nationalist political culture out of an ethnically diverse territory, one which was moreover at the crossroads of various external powers. FRETILIN's central committee believed that they had to generate Timorese people's sense of spatial belonging to fit into the notion of an independent East Timor. After observing the first reactions of Indonesian statesmen, Alarico Fernandes and José Ramos-Horta suggested that FRETILIN must insist that Portuguese Timor is part of the South Pacific rather than the Indonesian archipelago. Fernandes and Ramos-Horta further suggested that FRETILIN should actively look for scientific proof for this argument. FRETILIN's leadership decided to imagine their country as being outside of Southeast Asia despite its physical location within the Indonesian archipelago.Footnote 31
Francisco Xavier do Amaral, the FRETILIN president, publicly described the Western capitalist world, including the United States and Portugal, as well as Indonesia as ‘imperialists’ and ‘fascists’. He also identified UDT and APODETI as local ‘agents’ of the imperialists. On the other hand, he labelled the revolutionary forces in Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam, Cuba, and Indonesia as ‘international solidarity’ for the Timorese people. Thus, he presented FRETILIN's local struggle as part of the global confrontation between the rich minority and the poor majority.Footnote 32
Eventually, the rivalry among FRETILIN, UDT, and APODETI as well as international meddling resulted in a civil war in August 1975, and this invited the Indonesian invasion. The East Timorese nationalist movement was widely consolidated after the Indonesian invasion through the common experience of suffering and war.
Language and the production of national space in FRETILIN's political manual
In this section I analyse Tetun and Portuguese languages as ‘technics of transmission’.Footnote 33 Portuguese was the official language of the Portuguese Empire. FRETILIN's central committee used Portuguese to communicate their solidarity with other Portuguese colonies (‘overseas provinces’). On the other hand, Tetun functioned as a technic to approach the Timorese commoners. Furthermore, the latter was suited for political egalitarianism and building a nation separate from Portugal and Indonesia.Footnote 34
FRETILIN's Manual e Programa Político (henceforth, political manual) is a core text to interpret how the party leaders imagined the nation and its space. As a party for a ‘total independence’, FRETILIN's first task was to help the Timorese people understand the necessary conditions of a sovereign state such as self-determination, permanent population, and national territory. This manual was drafted in Tetun and Portuguese by Abílio Araújo (according to his autobiography), and was used in their workshops, radio broadcasts, and informal meetings.Footnote 35
The contents of the political manual written in the two languages were significantly different: the corresponding sections had different paragraph numbers, and some parts discussed different topics under the same heading. One obvious reason for such discrepancy is that the two languages belong to radically different linguistic families, and do not share grammar, vocabulary, or even worldviews. FRETILIN could not just directly translate their ideas from Portuguese into Tetun. In other words, there was a certain degree of liberty to manipulate this untranslatability.
The first paragraphs of the political manual introduce FRETILIN itself and Timor as a land:
FRETILIN, lia fuan ida hateten Frente Revolucionária do Timor-Leste Independente. Fretilin hakarak halibur ema hotu hotu ne be hadomi duni nia rain, ho ema hotu ne be lakohi Kolonialismu, atu buka buat ida deit. Hasai Povo rai Timor nia hosi Kolonialismu nain sira nia okos, hodi fo duni liberdade rai Timor hodi buka dalan los, atu bele hetan duni liberdade. Lakoi Kolonialismu ca ema seluk atu ukun rai Timur, atu rai Timur bele hetan nia ukun rasik (Independente) ho nia moris diak.Footnote 36
Only a careful exegesis would enable a sufficient translation of FRETILIN Tetun texts. Here, we should be content with a makeshift. It roughly translates to:
The word FRETILIN means Revolutionary Front of Independent Timor-Leste. FRETILIN desires only one thing, which is to bring together all who love their land and dislike colonialism; [The party] brings the inhabitants of Timor out of the colonial master's rule, provides true liberty, and finds a right way: We don't want colonialism or another people's rule in Timor, and desire Timor to find ukun-rasik (Independent) and a good life.
In comparison to the corresponding part in Portuguese, where FRETILIN is said to pursue ‘progress, peace, and liberty’, words such as ‘progress’ and ‘peace’ were simply dropped. As for the anti-colonial rhetoric, FRETILIN imagined Timor as a national space owned by its inhabitants.
FRETILIN often borrowed Portuguese terms. The Portuguese words in this paragraph (made italic) include FRETILIN's name itself, Kolonialismu (colonialism), liberdade (liberty), Povo (the People) and Independente (independent). It is likely that these words had already been used by the inhabitants of Dili, but may or may not have been understood by the rural populations, who had limited contact with the Portuguese. Thus, the people outside the capital too had a certain freedom to interpret what FRETILIN meant by these words.
The first pages of the manual explain some of these European words in FRETILIN's party name, especially ‘Front’, ‘Revolutionary’, and ‘Independence’. In clarifying the concept of ‘Front’, the manual refers to the political situation that all the Timorese political parties faced.
Bolu Frente, tanba lakohi timur oan sira fahe malu. Ita nia aman sira la hetan liberdade bain hira sira halo funu hasoru Kolonialismu nain sira (funu Kamenasse, Koba, Kotubaba, Laklo, Ulmera Manufahi, Vikeke) tanba sira la buka hamutuk, hodi fo liman ba malu.Footnote 37
[We] call [ourselves] Front because [we] do not want the children of Timor [timor oan sira] to be divided from each other [fahe malu]. Our fathers did not find liberty when they engaged in war against colonial masters (the wars of Camenassa, Coba, Cotubaba, Laclo, Ulmera, Manufahi, and Viqueque) because they did not seek togetherness [and didn't hold] each other's hands.
And,
Partido barak mosu tan, mosu tan. Maibe ita timur oan sira la ukun an ida. Rai ida ukun rasik an ona, mak bele halo partido barak. Oras ne, partido barak hanesan ne atu halo ita fahe malu deit ….sira sadik timur oan sira bolu balu Kaladi balu Firaku …. Maibe ita hotu hotu mesak rai ida deit, mesak timur oan deit.
The number of [political] parties increase. But, we the children of Timor have never ruled ourselves [ukun an]. If it is already ukun-rasik-an as One land [rai ida], then [we are] able to have many parties. At the moment, many political parties merely divide ourselves altogether…. They provoke the children of Timor by calling half of them Kaladi and the other half Firaku …. But you all [have] only one land and [you] alone [are] the children of Timor.
The situation of fahe malu (divided from each other) was perceived to be real by the leaders of FRETILIN, UDT and APODETI. Unlike UDT and APODETI, which supported foreign intervention by viewing the division as inherent in Timorese relationships, FRETILIN judges the colonialists and Timorese collaboration with them as the causes of the divisions among the children of Timor. At the same time, FRETILIN accused the pejorative designations of ethnic groups such as Kaladi and Firaku as another cause of division.
The next part explained the idea of independence. The Portuguese version was written in easily recognisable language of nationalism in the 1970s: ‘Independence is the only way for the real progress and development of the People of Timor-Leste.’Footnote 38 But, in explaining the concept of ‘independence’ to the Timorese, the question remained in Tetun: Whose Independence? Tetun lacked an equivalent of the general term for ‘nation’ or ‘ethnic group’. The term ‘Timorese’ was used in various ways in the Netherlands Indies, and Indonesian and Portuguese territories, and there was no exact translation of ‘East Timorese’. As for ‘East Timor’, there was a Portuguese translation that is ‘Timor-Leste’, but the Tetun equivalent, ‘Timor Lorosae’, had not been invented yet. To remind the reader, the colonial boundaries did not contribute much to the creation of a geo-body in late Portuguese Timor. The boundaries between the districts inside the Portuguese territory were more important in the post-Second World War era because the government prohibited ‘uncivilised’Footnote 39 native movement across the districts. Thus, while the elites were connected in the schools and in the social world of Dili, the ‘uncivilised natives’ were physically fahe malu (divided from each other).
In regard to ‘nation’ as a spatially limited entity, it is important to keep in mind Timorese terminology concerning foreigners. The Tetun word for ‘foreigner’ is malae. Presumably, the word originated from ‘Malay’, because the Malays were the first outsiders who often visited the island. This theory reinforces the view that Timor had close relations with the Malay World historically: the place name of ‘Timor’, means ‘East’ in Malay. According to Paulo Castro Seixas, however, ‘malae’ can be used to refer to anyone, including other Timorese who have come from outside in comparison to the ones who stayed. Footnote 40 Europeans were often distinguished as malae mutin (white malae). Both people from Africa and Melanesia are called malae metan (black malae).Footnote 41 But, the Timorese civilizados could be categorised as malae in rural Timorese perspectives as well. Thus, those signified as malae could include Europeans, Africans, Malays, the Timorese civilizados, and mestiços (mixed-blood population) of Dili, depending on the speaker's stance.
Today, FRETILIN's most famous slogan is Mauberism, and it might be viewed as a concept that unites the East Timorese nation. After the Indonesian Occupation, this term came to symbolise FRETILIN's solidarity, brotherhood and egalitarianism with broadly defined Timorese people, especially after the agreement between FRETILIN and UDT to form the National Council of Maubere Resistance (CNRM) in 1986. However, in 1974, it was not yet a broadly exploited term in Tetun rhetoric, for it had its own problems. Maubere was not an ethnonym, but a personal name common in the Mambai speaking uplands. Araújo and Ramos-Horta said that the Portuguese used the word as a pejorative identification of the ignorant and backward Timorese.Footnote 42 Historical sources corroborate that it was pejoratively used by some Portuguese and ethnic Chinese in Dili and Maubisse (a Mambai speaking area) to refer to the ‘native’ population.Footnote 43 Some Timorese opposed FRETILIN's use of the word, probably due to the racial connotation in it privileging ‘pure Timorese’ while excluding mestiços. Other sources demonstrate that it was avoided in the Eastern districts such as Viqueque and Lautem.Footnote 44 The reason CNRM changed its name into the National Council of Timorese Resistance (CNRT) in April 1998 should be understood in this context.Footnote 45
Under this condition, the political manual used collective nouns of the Timorese to enable imaginations of supra-village communities such as Povo rai Timur (People [Portuguese word])-Land-Timor] and timur oan sira (Timor-child-plural).Footnote 46 For example, timur oan is used in a sentence as follows:
Fretilin hakarak independéncia lolós ba rai Timur ho timur oan sira.Footnote 47
Fretilin desires genuine independence for the land of Timor and the children of Timor.
Similarly, Povo rai Timur is used in a sentence such as:
Tan sa mak Fretilin hateten katak nia deit mak bele koalia hodi Povo rai Timur nia naran?Footnote 48
Why does Fretilin argue that only they can speak as the People of the land of Timor (Povo rai Timur)?
The expression timor oan was not new in 1975, since similar expressions such as oan timor were known to Portuguese observers as an equivalent of ‘the natives of our territory’ by the 1920s.Footnote 49 Timor oan is still a commonly used term for collective Timorese in the post-independence period.
Discourse analysis of space and place is important here because the Timorese audience in 1975 did not necessarily imagine the territory of East Timor when FRETILIN called for an independence of timor oan and Povo rai Timor. The word rai meant un-demarcated ‘soil’, ‘earth’, and ‘land’. Timor oan (child-Timor] does not specifically refer to the inhabitants of the Portuguese part of Timor. The objects of the phrase, therefore, did not necessarily exclude the Indonesian West Timorese when it was used. To understand that timor oan referred to connecting oneself to ‘our land’ (East Timor), the listener needed a basic knowledge of Portuguese and at least an understanding of the Portuguese word for ‘East’ (Leste).
The FRETILIN manual told that ‘independence’ means ukun-rasik-an (rule-self-own). The word ukun is normally translated as ‘to rule’ or ‘to govern’, etymologically from the Malay word hukum (law). However, ukun means more than ‘to rule’. For example, ukun la iha (not having ukun) means ‘being rude’. Also, the biblical notion of the Ten Commandments is called ukun fuan sanulu (the Ten ukun Fruits). Therefore, ukun is not only political, but also ethical. Both rasik and an mean ‘own’. But, again, we should investigate what exactly the manual said about ukun-rasik-an rather than assuming its meaning.
The manual stated that, by achieving the state of ukun-rasik-an, the People ‘can just find what they want’ (bele hetan deit buat ne be nia hakarak).Footnote 50 It also defined ukun-rasik-an/independence under two conditions; an expulsion of old European colonialism and defending the land from neo-colonialism.Footnote 51 FRETILIN explained neo-colonialism as a situation in which other countries invest money in Timor, but the children of Timor must obey foreign money-masters (osan nain).Footnote 52 Thus, the concept of ukun-rasik-an contained meanings associated with expelling the colonialists and liberation from various forms of exploitation.
The Tetun manual provides hints to interpret more recent Timorese political language as well. Since 2002, some Timorese groups such as CPD-RDTL and Sagrada Familia have objected to calling the post-independence political situation ukun-rasik-an, and prefer to call it ukun an (self-rule without rasik). For Timorese veterans who fought against Indonesia from 1975 to 1999, the phrase ukun-rasik-an refers to the aim of their struggle, whereas ukun-an (self-rule without rasik) refers to a variation of independence granted by the United Nations.
The justification for popular interpretations of ukun-rasik-an rests on two points. The first is the usage of rasik to imply consanguinity. For example, Mary, mother of Jesus is inan-rasik (rasik-mother) of Jesus Christ, but Joseph is not aman-rasik (rasik-father) of him. Analogically, ukun rasik could be interpreted as a biological child of Timor, a political order defined by blood-ties. Therefore, while ‘independence from birth parents’ does not contain any strangeness in English, the equivalent in Tetun — ukun rasik an husi inan-aman rasik — is quite unthinkable because rasik means biological relations. Furthermore, if ukun rasik (independence) means a biological child (oan rasik) to be born in the future, by definition, it should be delivered through the suffering (terus) of the Timorese people and the Motherland (rai inan). With such implications, the post-2002 political system designed by the United Nations and the returnee leaders (for example, Mari Alcatiri) were viewed as ukun an, an independence without rasik ties. A ‘true independence’ (ukun rasik an loos) should come out of the FRETILIN ideal in 1975 and the wartime sufferings.
Another was a social revolutionary interpretation of ukun-rasik-an, a critique of the economic dominance of foreigners. Since FRETILIN's original political manual defined ukun-rasik-an as the emancipation of the children of Timor from foreign money-masters, those who stuck to FRETILIN's ideal in 1975 viewed the United Nations’ interim administration (and the ‘independence’ given by the UN) as ‘neo-colonial’. Footnote 53 The revolution was unfinished in this view. Such ambiguity of the phrase ukun-rasik-an allows a variety of perceptions, and the contents of ukun-rasik-an in the post-2002 official view, 1974–75 FRETILIN manual and blood-line interpretations may be different and contradict each other.
A final question on the manual that arises is how did FRETILIN distinguish themselves from other opposition groups, such as the UDT and APODETI? The manual contained sections labelled ‘Why FRETILIN does not want to create a Federation with Portugal’ and ‘Why FRETILIN does not want [to be] together with Indonesia’. In the section about a Federation with Portugal, the manual attacked UDT for ‘only seeking their own ukun-rasik-an’.Footnote 54 At the time, the UDT leaders, who initially supported the status quo, were considered as a group of Portuguese/Timorese mixed-blood population who had vested interests in the Portuguese colonial society. Thus the critique of ‘only seeking their own ukun-rasik-an’ implies that, by possessing rasik ties with Portugal, UDT leaders were therefore seeking to attain ukun-rasik-an as defined by a Portuguese heritage and experience, not a Timorese one. The section further argued that Timor would be poorer if linked to Portugal, since the latter was a poor country, they would need to suckle (susu) from Timor.Footnote 55 Thus, FRETILIN argued that a Federation with Portugal would result in neo-colonialism and rule by money-masters.
The next section targeted APODETI and Indonesia, actors that supported Portuguese Timor's integration into Indonesia. Although FRETILIN's rejection of assimilation into Indonesia was absolute in higher level discussions, the manual's attack on APODETI in Tetun was vague. Apparently FRETILIN was still struggling to formulate rhetoric against Indonesia. The anti-colonial narrative was evidently unsuitable to defend an undefined Asian territory from a neighbouring Asian state. Here I cite the section on ‘Why FRETILIN doesn't want [to be] together with Indonesia’ at length to scrutinise this problem:
Tanba Fretilin fiar metin Povo rai Timur nian. Fiar mos katak Povo deit mak bele foti rai ida ho mos halo Nação ida. Ema ne be la fiar Povo, la fiar nia hakarak ho nia beran, mak bele hanoin atu hamutuk ho rai seluk.
Fretilin hatudu katak iha buat ne, mos bele iha racismu. Tanba racismu la os deit mutin lakohi metan, maibe liuliu hanoin katak povo ida liu fali povo ida seluk, hodi povo ida bele ukun ho hanehan fali povo ida seluk.
Fretilin fiar katak povo rai Timur mos bele buka rasik nia dalan; iha mos ulun atu hili nia destino, ho mos bele ukun rasik an, hanesan sira seluk iha mundu tomak.Footnote 56
[We reject Indonesia] Because FRETILIN firmly believes in the People of the land of Timor. [FRETILIN] Also believes that only the People can seize one land [rai ida] and create one Nation. One who does not believe in the People, does not believe in their will and their strength, will think about getting together with another land.
FRETILIN demonstrates that this issue could have racism too. Because racism is not only the whites don't want the blacks, but above all, thinking that one people is superior to another people, and one people ruling another people.
FRETILIN believes that the People of Timor land can also seek their own [rasik] way; [We] have a head [or ‘leader’] who will choose destiny, and be able to [establish] ukun-rasik-an, just like others in the entire world.
The interpretation of this statement depended on the listener's understanding of ‘one People’, ‘one land’, and ‘one Nation’. The signifier for ‘one land’ (rai ida) could either refer to one's village, one's district, Portuguese Timor, or even Timor Island. One people's ukun-rasik-an (independence) could be extended as far as one can perceive being connected by blood-relations, in the same manner that UDT leaders supposedly sought ukun-rasik-an only for themselves by forming a federation with Portugal. In its objections to integration with Indonesia, the FRETILIN political manual was only able to define Indonesia as another land (rai seluk) and another people. The manual does not explain how racism and integration into Indonesia could be associated. While such an argument was perhaps acceptable for those who only had a vague idea of what Indonesia meant, for those who had rasik blood-relations with Indonesian-Timorese people, such a case was hard to sustain.
To wrap up the contents of the political manual, the national space of FRETILIN's audience is ‘the land of Timor’, vaguely distinguished from Portuguese Timor and Indonesia. But the metageographic separation was not explained in terms of colonial territorial borders. The manual explained Timorese independence (ukun-rasik-an) as the act of biologically-connected communities taking over the land from foreign colonial/money masters. Under ukun-rasik-an people would find ‘what they want’, equality, their own polity and means of production.
Songs and the national space
FRETILIN's political manual defined keywords (independence, ukun-rasik-an, front, rai Timor, ‘Timorese children’ and colonialism) and explained FRETILIN's programme through them. Then, how were the concepts employed in FRETILIN's campaigns? The section below revisits FRETILIN's literary/poetic material, and recontextualises them in the Timorese (or broader Southeast Asian) cultural world.Footnote 57
The lyrics of Pátria-Pátria and Foho-Ramelau were written by Francisco Borja da Costa, one of the most important FRETILIN poets, and this means that both are ‘elite texts’. Borja da Costa wrote various poems and songs both in Portuguese and Tetun.Footnote 58 His Tetun poems are known for their adaptation of the styles of ritual speeches that the wise men gave during local festivals and ceremonies. His Pátria-Pátria and Foho Ramelau presented FRETILIN in two different languages. A comparison of these songs reveals how the FRETILIN leadership communicated to foreign and local audiences. Pátria-Pátria was sung in Portuguese as a performance for foreign observers whereas Foho Ramelau was designed as propaganda intended for Tetun-speaking locals.
Pátria-Pátria: The national anthem in Portuguese
Pátria-Pátria is the national anthem of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste. The lyrics, however, are rather clichéd. To use Edward Relph's term, this song is ‘placeless’.Footnote 59 It refers to ‘Timor-Leste’, but does not reflect any particular sense of that space. Journalist Jill Jolliffe's memoir of Borja da Costa during FRETILIN's interregnum (from September to December 1975) recounts the atmosphere in which Pátria-Pátria was written:
In mutually broken English and Portuguese we would discuss Australian foreign policy. Timor, his country, was very tiny, he used to say. It was too small for the superpowers to care about. Their policies were based on expediency, but it was not expedient to offend Indonesia for the sake of a small country. Timorese would surely have to fight for themselves. It was clear Australia would not help; illusions were dangerous.Footnote 60
Partly due to such political concerns of Borja da Costa, the song reflects FRETILIN's appeals to an external audience rather than conversations among the Timorese.
Borja da Costa reflected his notion of Timor's place in international politics — rather than the local landscape — in this song. It was written soon after the civil war between the three Timorese political parties in August 1975 and FRETILIN's triumph, a brief period before the Indonesian invasion in December 1975. The song was primarily intended to be the National Anthem of the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste in 1975. With the Restoration of Independence in 2002, it was re-adopted as the National Anthem by the Constitutional Assembly dominated by FRETILIN.
The song can be understood as a representation of FRETILIN's political ideology as expressed in the Portuguese language — a linguistic medium that references modern Western categories and is more accessible and familiar to outsiders:
The first line may sound like a tautology to today's Timorese, but it was a claim for the FRETILIN leaders in the 1970s: Our Pátria-Fatherland is ‘East Timor’, and it is also ‘our Nation’. In other words, it is also saying that Timor-Leste is a nation, not a multitude of separate communities. It also clarifies that the reference to ‘Fatherland’ is not Portugal or Indonesia, but the Independent nation of East Timor. The following stanzas refer to familiar themes of anti-colonialism and socialism:
The references to colonialism, imperialism, and exploitation appear to be borrowed from the vocabulary of African nationalist movements. Catherine Arthur, the specialist of Timorese national symbols, points out that FRETILIN's symbolism such as the party flag was inspired by Mozambique and Angola too.Footnote 61 For the FRETILIN leaders, especially for those who experienced other parts of the Portuguese Empire, African revolutionaries such as Amílcar Cabral and Agostinho Neto were sources of inspiration. However, these categories of nationalist struggles were practically absent in classical Tetun, although they were understandable for the revolutionaries of other post-colonial countries. Here Borja da Costa drew parallels between other Third World countries’ historical experiences and East Timor's situation by using the vocabulary of decolonisation and the Cold War.
The meaning of ‘struggle against imperialism’ in the second line is ambiguous, in part because of the third line, which rephrases ‘imperialism’ as o inimigo dos povos. Here, the poet intends povos to mean ‘the people(s)’ but it is not clear whether he was referring to the different groups of people in Timor or all the nations of the world. Thus, the enemy-imperialism may mean Portuguese colonisation or Indonesian interference. It may also mean FRETILIN's political rivals within Timor such as UDT and APODETI who preferred assimilation to either Portugal or Indonesia. Through a Cold War lens, it could even be interpreted as a call for a world revolution against capitalist domination.
Overall, even though this song refers to the word ‘East Timor’ (Timor-Leste) it contains nothing particular to the country. Most of the words in Pátria-Pátria are also found in Viva, Viva a FRELIMO and Angola Avante!, which were adopted as the national anthems of Mozambique and Angola respectively earlier that year (1975). Even the melody is similar to the two African anthems and various solemn Western military songs. The lyrics and the tone (if not the mimicry) of the national anthem are a message to outsiders: ‘East Timor is not very different from other colonised nations. Our struggle is like yours.’ Erasing Timor's uniqueness and regional characteristics presented it as one variation within the universalist revolutionary movements within Portugal's ‘overseas provinces’ and other former colonial societies.Footnote 62
This was the message that pioneering authors received from FRETILIN leaders. The books by Jolliffe, Hill, and Matsuno on East Timor are filled with the vocabulary of the movements in Portuguese overseas provinces: freedom, colonialism, self-determination, nationalism, nation, exploitation and imperialism. As a result, the vocabulary of nationalism, anti-colonialism, and socialism became a framework for FRETILIN's international claim for nationhood.
Foho Ramelau: Landscape, animism, and political spaces
In comparison to Pátria-Pátria, Foho Ramelau was more often played at local campaign events for the Timorese audience. It was also written by Borja da Costa and sung on Radio Maubere, and at political workshops and demonstrations. Masao Yamaguchi, the Japanese cultural anthropologist who stayed in Venilale in 1974–75, reported that the song was sung by the people in his fieldwork site: a non-Tetun-speaking eastern interior town far from the capital Dili.Footnote 63 Helen Hill also reported the spread of the song to other parts of East Timor.Footnote 64 Xanana Gusmao, the charismatic guerrilla leader, called this song ‘our national anthem’, and recalled that Foho Ramelau ‘was comforting to hear’.Footnote 65 The importance of this song in FRETILIN's local campaign is thus well known.
Foho Ramelau is the Tetun name of the highest mountain on Timor Island, located roughly 70 kilometres from the capital Dili. Its name in the Mambae language, Tatamailau, means ‘Grandfather of all’. This mountain has been a pilgrimage site for the Timorese people, traditionally as a place of ancestral worship, and more recently as the location of the Virgin Mary's statue. During the resistance against Indonesia, the FRETILIN guerrillas were based on another holy mountain called Matebian (literally, ‘the spirit of the dead’). Such beliefs placed the FRETILIN movement alongside various Southeast Asian resistance movements centred around ‘holy mountains’, and the broader tradition of Eurasian mountain worship.Footnote 66 The first lines read as follows:
Considering that Mt Ramelau symbolises the ‘Grandfather of all’, the first part of the song refers to Timorese/Austronesian ancestral and mountain worship. Here, the poet/singers are praising the personified holy mountain on which Timorese ancestral spirits are believed to reside, although FRETILIN was viewed either as a secular or Catholic party. The next stanzas goes on to the theme of colonial relations.
This section describes an analogy of the Timorese mode of ‘bondage/slavery’ and colonial relations. The reference to kinship — Grandfather of all /Children of Timor — is striking. The song locates the singer in the position of a Timorese grandchild, and the song is sung toward the ancestor-mountain.
Atan is translated as ‘slave’ or ‘hereditary servant’. Hans Hägerdal, the historian of early colonial Eastern Indonesia, writes that there were generally two types of slavery in Timor and broader Southeast Asia — a milder and a harsher variation of bonded status. There are slight disagreements among scholars about the terms and the nature of slavery in Timor, but it is generally agreed that prisoners of war and those who were sold to foreigners faced the worst fate.Footnote 68 Historically, even the chiefs were demoted to atan as punishment for their crimes, loss in war, or excessive debt. Timorese slaves were freed after several generations of service and they normally became members of a ‘freed people (the second class next to the chief)’.Footnote 69 In Foho Ramelau, the harshness of colonialism is emphasised as the ‘eternal enslavement of the Timorese children’.
The ‘new sun’ symbolises the coming of a new age as it was written after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, with an expectation of a forthcoming politically turbulent era. ‘Sunrise’ is also associated with the geographic ‘East’, so this line might also imply the birth of a new East Timorese nation.
Another word that requires explanation is ita. This word may mean either ‘you’ (singular) or ‘we’ (including the addressee). For example, ita bot nia naran means ‘your name’ while ita rua means ‘you and me’. Thus, the phrase ita rain used in the second line is a rather ambiguous concept of ‘your land’ or ‘our land’ (including the addresser and the addressee). As this song is sung in Tetun, ita rain in this context can mean ‘our land’ or ‘your land’. By hearing and singing about ‘our land’ in Tetun, the audience and the singers understood that belonging to the same community meant sharing a common language and land.
While knua (hamlet) and rain (land) refer to Timorese living space, the Western concept of ‘territory’ was still largely absent in the vocabulary of the rural Timorese population, and most probably it was only known to the educated elites. One message that a rural Timorese in the mid-1970s possibly received from the two sentences was that ‘political development in the broader world is an issue that affects the hamlet and the village where you were born’. The next part conveys the main point of the anthem:
According to Jolliffe, Borja da Costa explained the lines to mean, ‘take the reign of your own horse’, referencing the Timorese who had to take care of horses owned by the Portuguese.Footnote 70
The phrase ukun-rasik (independence) appears in the last line. As mentioned, rasik means ‘own’ and implies consanguinity, and one can read ukun-rasik as an ethical social order defined by blood ties. Moreover, the earlier references in Foho Ramelau to grandfather/children, a holy mountain, and birth-hamlets (mis)lead the listeners to connect the last line with the notion of political systems associated with their ancestors and animism.
Foho Ramelau as a whole establishes Tetun as a common language, colonialism as common experience and local landscapes as common spaces. But, it does not directly address the notion of territory, and nor does it use the secular understanding of language which Anderson listed as grounds for national consciousness.Footnote 71 In all the available FRETILIN Tetun texts from 1974–75, there was only one relatively unknown poem that clearly mentioned the land of Timor as ‘the Sunrise Half of Land’ (Rai Sorin Loro Sae nian).Footnote 72 Still, as Douglas Kammen points out, the imaginary geography of loro-sae (sunrise) could mean various spaces: the Eastern half of the island, the three eastern districts in East Timor (Lautem, Viqueque, Baucau), and simply ‘east’ from the person's location.Footnote 73
Foho Ramelau's metageography is expressed through the holy mountain as the source of Timorese ancestral ties, villages and hamlets as habitats, and the sunrise (associated with geographic East) as the beginning of a new age. Here, Nature, along with human community is strongly associated with FRETILIN's idea of ukun-rasik-an (self-rule).
To complement the analysis of natural forces in Foho Ramelau, it is helpful to combine it with another song written by Borja da Costa. In another popular FRETILIN song entitled Kdadalak (Streams), he compared the hamutuk (togetherness) of Timorese children to the streams that become one river:Footnote 74
Nanu'u timur oan sei hamutuk Like this, Children of Timor will come together
Hamutuk atu tahan anin sut taci United against the wind blowing in from the sea
Babo-Soares, in his dissertation, strongly associated the word hamtuk with Timorese nationalism.Footnote 75 In Kdadalak, the children of Timor may be ‘divided’, but they could come together like tributary streams flowing into one river. The national enemy is compared to the ‘wind blowing in from the sea’. This is interesting because in traditional East Timorese metageography, the sea is located towards the North (tasi feto) and the South (tasi mane). The actual Indonesian invasion in December 1975, was executed through the land border and from the sky. But, it is understandable to conceive FRETILIN's enemy as ‘the wind blowing in from the sea’ because, traditionally, both Europeans and Javanese visited Timor Island using sea routes. Again, the West Timorese did not fit with this image of the enemy.
Borja da Costa's songs could be read as the production of space for his political party and the new nation. It was expressed through terms associated with natural forces and landscapes. The source of Tiimorese-ness was consistently drawn from the island's interior such as the streams flowing down from the holy mountains and the sites of ancestral worship. Sunrise symbolised both the new East Timorese nation and the dawning of a new age. The external threats were imagined as the wind from the sea.
Conclusion
This article explores how the FRETILIN movement imagined the East Timorese nation and its space in the formative period of 1974–75. Then, it contextualised the movement in the Timorese and broader Southeast Asian cultural landscape. As I discussed, their international statements and performance deliberately cultivated East Timor as a part of an international anti-colonial and anti-imperial struggle within Cold War and decolonisation narratives. FRETILIN propagated that the Timorese belonged to the South Pacific rather than Indonesia (and by extension Southeast Asia). These attempts should be understood in relation to the contemporary political current of competing local and international ideologies, which included the notions of Timor as part of Portugal or Indonesia, Greater Timor, Indonesian anti-communism, and the ‘Timorese equals Indonesian’ theory, with metageography at the centre of the debate.
On the ground, however, there were deeper problems, because FRETILIN's leaders had to mobilise the rural Timorese population. This forced them to adapt the movement's rhetoric and practice to the cultural code of Timorese societies. FRETILIN worked to create the place called ‘Land of Timor’ (Rai Timor) for ‘the children of Timor’ (Timor oan or oan Timor) and ‘the People of the Land of Timor’ (Povo Rai Timor). The FRETILIN political manual and anthems imagined a subversive geo-body of ukun-rasik-an (self-rule by biological communities) that was written against the colonial geo-body, which was ‘Timor as part of Portugal which was part of Europe’. The Portuguese were redefined as ‘colonial masters’ (kolonialismu nain) and were excluded by the ideas of ukun-rasik-an and ‘the Children of Timor’. Eventually, the idea of ancestorship, blood-ties with holy mountains, messianism, holy men, amulets and invulnerability magic — typical features of Southeast Asian resistance movements — entered into the FRETILIN movement.
On the part of the rural population Foho Ramelau was sung beyond the native Tetun-speaking region. Through this song, non-native Tetun speakers learned that they had similar experiences: ancestral and holy mountain worship, hamlets, eternal bondage, and taking care of Portuguese-owned horses. They also rediscovered Tetun as the common language of communication — it was the lingua franca of the central and eastern parts of the island, including the Belu regency of West Timor. Finally, they came to share one phrase of utopia, ukun-rasik-an — though its meanings might have been understood in many ways. Arguably, this song functioned as a medium for the East Timorese to cultivate a national consciousness, creating an ‘imagined community’ though it was not strictly identical to the legal definition of East Timor or the secular notion of a modern nation-state.
This article explored official and popular languages of resistance through the study of a significant East Timorese nationalist movement. It complicates the picture by arguing that FRETILIN's language was based on a non-Westphalian notion of space and culture. From this perspective, while FRETILIN attempted to politically separate East Timor from the Indonesian archipelago, its language and culture of resistance had deep commonalities with preceding Southeast Asian resistance movements against colonial regimes and alien groups. Natural forces and ancestry were significant parts of the FRETILIN movement's rhetoric and appeal, and continued to characterise the Timorese popular resistance even after the ‘independence of East Timor’ in 2002. There is, however, a major difference in the post-UN period due to the violent experience of the Indonesian Occupation. Now East Timorese ukun-rasik-an is mainly imagined against the Suharto regime, not the Portuguese.
