AntiColonialism – Reichstag fire in Indonesian

Felix K. Nesi is in his mid -30s, an even young author. In the Nautilus edition, his first book recently appeared in German, the novel »The People of Oetimu. A guaranteed real story from Timor «. There are too little German publishers who dare to do something. This publication is daring, but the book, including Maja Bechert’s great transshipment design, is excellent. It catches the eye and the eye, it feels comfortable.

Nesi was born in Nesam-Inana, a village in the west of the island of Timor, part of the southernmost province of Indonesia, East Nusa-Tenggara. He studied psychology and researched the Dutch slave trade in Timor, which was most bearable next to sandalwood. His story band “Usha Membunuh Sepi” was released in 2016, and in 2017 he founded a street book store, a library and the literature festival “Kencan Buku Fesek”-a real cultural worker.

In Indonesia he won various prizes with “The People of Oetimu”. In 2022, Felix Nesi Writer was in Residence at the University of Iowa. You don’t really have to poker to bring such a man to the market in Germany, even if it remains a market, which sometimes seems to benefit from glass showcases.

Felix Nevi exposes systematic violence in and against Timor and its social consequences. He lets those responsible reveal himself to the ridiculousness. The plot plays between 1974 and 1998, but actually only on July 12, 1998, the day of the World Cup final between France and Brazil. Nesi tells a circular history, flashbacks and flash forums, all in the ethnographic, political and historical context.

In the fictitious village of Oetimu, the young Sergeant IPI, who is the only village police officer usually act like a lawless, invited the men of the village to his guard in order to look far and wide on the only TV. The actual occasion, however, is his upcoming marriage with the new beauty Silvy. It is applied thickly, especially with food.

And then suddenly a killer command storms the estate of Martin Kabiti, who was just part of the football event, who, as a Proindonesian officer, was responsible for massacre in the population of East Timor. Lucking television has never been certain: As a result, the stories of the persons involved in this incident are recapitulated, in partly wild blinds: Zapping Timor TV, at the remote control: Felix Nevi. He takes us on the journey, sends us to Lisbon, in 1974, where Timor’s decolonization began with the climbing revolution. Now they are all thrown into the story: Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese and Indonesians, everyone wanted to do the Timorese on the collar and record profit.

Ipi’s mother Laura, whose parents were part of the Portuguese colonial administration in East Timor until 1975, is incorporated, tortured and raped as a young woman in the civil war. She finally gets through and finally arrives after an odyssey half starved to Oetimu, where she is absorbed by a man worshiped by the villagers as a hero who is said to have burned down a labor camp during the Japanese occupation.

General Suharos Putsch from 1965 is also an issue, and the subsequent cleansing of political opponents and what was spent on it: Reichstag fire in Indonesian. Up to a million real or supposed communists or government -critical students were murdered not to forget the genocide on the Chinese in Indonesia.

NESI generally holds back with numbers, relationships are often only indicated. It is a novel, not a non -fiction book. In 1975 Suharto marched into East Timor. In the subsequent massacres, more than a third of the population were eliminated. With Helmut Kohl, who visited Indonesia four times during his tenure, Suharto connected a lifelong friendship, for the German armaments industry, Indonesia was the purest gold source.

Nesi drags us from massacre to massacre. It is striking that all reasonably personable persons, we say, have limited life expectancy. Nesi does not paint the horror as colorful as the Isaac Babel or Ernst Jünger preferred to do, but he apparently seen and understood his quentin Tarantino. The art of NESIS is to convert all the horror with a kind of humor, which is sometimes even funny. Logical, in the worst dictatorships there was always laughter.

At NESI, the patriarchiat is described as unteachable and therefore very dangerous. Java’s hegemony in the historiography is a thorn: »People in Jakarta write history books and send them to the province, and sometimes you don’t even find East Nusa Tengara in it. The children grow up here and learn history without their history. “

Felix K. Nesi: The people of Oetimu. A guaranteed real story from Timor. From the Indonesian and with an afterword by Sabine Müller, Nautilus, 312 pages, born, 25 €.