Indonesia. Unless you are Indonesian by birth or marriage, the name might conjure images of peaceful havens in Bali, stunning batik textiles, or the aroma of premium coffee. Felix Nesi is determined to change this. Nesi is a rising Indonesian novelist and short-story writer who draws on his West Timorese roots to interrogate themes like religion and power in a way that is both culturally specific and universally relevant. His debut novel, Orang-orang Oetimu, won the Jakarta Arts Council Novel Competition in 2018 and was recently released in the United States under the title People from Oetimu, translated by Lara Norgaard. Nesi’s decision to position his fiction in his native West Timor rather than Indonesia’s political and cultural center, Java, is also a notable marker in the diversification of contemporary Indonesian literary voices.
People from Oetimu opens with a benign, nostalgic scene. The year is 1998 and villagers from the fictional Timorese town of Oetimu have gathered to watch the World Cup final between Brazil and France on one of the town’s two working TV’s. Nesi barely allows us to acclimate to this setting before he peels back the layers of this harmless gathering to reveal a deadly dilemma and catapults us back to the turn of the twentieth century to excavate how a routine watch party turned lethal.
The themes of religious and political power that emerge from People from Oetimu are not surprising for a nation that has been repeatedly colonized, and continues to be fractured on religious lines in spite of the official national endorsement of Islam. But what makes Nesi’s novel unique, given the parts of Indonesian culture that are more recognizable to non-natives, is that the religion he highlights is grounded in West Timor. Catholicism, rather than Islam or an indigenous religion, is the dominant spiritual power. This emphasizes that for Timor, the Portuguese, rather than the Dutch, have been the strongest (or at least the most recent) European presence. While ancestral spirits hover in the background, they seem to have less sway over characters than the imported church that Nesi goes to great lengths to expose as corrupt, but which his characters seem alternately unable and unwilling to shake.
The Catholic Church does not just act as a vehicle for religious criticism in People from Oetimu. It’s also a significant tool Nesi uses to deconstruct power and sexuality. Maria, Father Yosef, and Sergeant Ipi eventually emerge as potential protagonists for the novel—although the book’s cyclical structure makes this difficult to discern at first. They each have tumultuous relationships with Timor’s dominant religious affiliation.
In spite of her name, Maria is either overtly or covertly opposed to Catholicism for much of the narrative, although she finds herself inextricably linked to the Church due to family ties and —perhaps too predictably — a forbidden romantic entanglement. Through her eyes, we see the church as yet another foothold for the Javanese government in Timor, and another iteration of male domination and sexual exploitation.
Father Yosef is a brilliant young priest who devotes himself to revitalizing Saint Helena High School, a dilapidated boarding school, after a disconcerting dalliance with his own youthful lusts. We see his genius transform Saint Helena’s from a charity operation run by local nuns to a national contender whose monthly arts and culture festival attracts international tourists. But in spite of his good deeds, Yosef continues to be silently martyred by a romantic passion that no amount of penance can eradicate. It is at this point that Nesi plants what could be interpreted as a warning to non-Indonesian readers into the novel:
“A few tourists wrote up reviews of the festival for the newspapers with high praise for the school, calling it a civilized institution. That sounds nice enough, but if you read any of those reviews slowly, thinking critically about what they wrote, you’d quickly see that those compliments had more to do with the arrogance of the city people who penned them than about the school itself. In those backwards, eastern islands, there’s a school that tries to be as we are – and even though these people are actually primitive and unrefined, at least they made an effort, so we (as properly sophisticated people) should support the institution.”
It’s not hard to discern Nesi’s warning to readers—and critics—who might try to patronize his work with comparisons to Western authors or impose their own socio-political agendas onto his text.
From a purely textual standpoint, a troubled student at St. Helena’s also provides a bridge back to Oetimu and Sergeant Ipi, whom we met in the novel’s tumultuous opening pages. Perhaps one of Nesi’s strengths is that the significance of his characters emerges over time, compelling us to meander through his narrative slowly, contemplating possible meanings of each twist and turn, much like the residents of West Timor must have sought to make sense of their changing socio-political ecosystem throughout the twentieth century. The downside of this construction is that some of us may find ourselves too adrift at certain points, especially when Nesi zaps us back to the moment the novel begins, albeit with a much clearer understanding of which characters to watch as the scene replays, and why they make the choices they do in the unfolding violence. We also understand that Sergeant Ipi is not merely a police officer who respects neither church nor state except as they serve his own self-gratification, but is rather the product of generations of racial and sexual violence.
While People from Oetimu could perhaps best be characterized as a “literary experience” rather than a traditional narrative, the themes that Nesi presents from a minority Indonesian perspective make it an insightful touchpoint for anyone interested in broadening their grasp of post-colonial life in Southeast Asia.
Grace Utomo holds an MFA in writing from the Savannah College of Art and Design, as well as bachelors’ degrees in English and healthcare administration from California Baptist University. Grace is the author of Walking with Grace: Embracing God’s Goodness in Trauma and Hello, God: Seeking the Lord When Words Fall Short. Before pursuing writing, Grace studied violin performance at the Eastman School of Music under Charles Castleman.
