Pires Laranjeira
Portuguese Literature Center / University of Coimbra
Joana Ruas is a writer who has lived an important part of your life in areas such as Angola, Guinea-Bissau and East Timor, very close or even within regions of war, which combines the character of civic activism techniques and chronicler of historical research and memory, through written and oral testimonies. It has been documented amply in the collective memories and the construction of individual memories, through his own experience, one whose improvement Maurice Halbwachs theorized for the purpose of critical consciousness. He won the full right to participate by their seriousness, galarim those who, for his life, the practice of writing, illustrating a lusofonia plural, not a surface effect and easy, but the examination of the past in an effort to explain interweaving lives of sustained role in history.
The book Chronicles Timorese, Joana Streets, edited by a new seal of Vila Nova de Gaia, the Calendar of Arts, is composed of four texts: "D. Manuel Salvador da Costa dos Remedios "(20 pages)," The safe and the sword "(36 pages);" Sheets in the woods "(53 pages) and" Fulan Mutin (White Flower) "(137 pages). This set of texts for extended during the twentieth century the analysis that the battle of tears (2008) made the Timorese people, but in this case relating only to its beginning. Both volumes are subordinated to a generic title: The stone and leaf. The stone of reality and the leaf area of (re) creation, representing the memory of chronic or art and poetry and welcome the visitor peace and tired of the hardships of life.
The four "chronic" are fictions based on the history of Timor-Leste, including a cycle time significantly since the establishment of the Republic in Portugal until the mid-60s, with emphasis on the euphemistically called "wars of peace" (which actually were always a war of extermination and repression hateful, extending beyond mid-twentieth century), or years of occupation of the territory and to crush the popular uprising and surveys of local kingdoms against the colonial occupiers.
In a stripped-down style and chronicler, Joana Ruas reasoning has interesting traditions and customs, the history of Timor, with the various ethnic groups and religions, countries and political ideologies in coexistence and confrontation for decades, against a backdrop of destruction and death, resulting in the construction of a new nation-state. Amid the fighting and human suffering, have a place of love and poetry, often with extreme delicacy and emotion. It is also a lucid analysis of the female condition of subservience to men and the web of social and hierarchical relations between natives and occupants of the territory of East Timor, where some characters can break conventions, humanizing relations over the track violence.
It is a book of testimony differed, that is, appealing to the memory of historical events related to the formation and the emergence of a new nation in the world. Appears to remind us of the crimes, secured by the colonial wars and local or global, the Portuguese, Indonesian or Japanese might commit, as well as murder or loose groups of innocent people of the Timorese people, the despotic and arbitrary exercise of power colonial era, an era of darkness in which the woman - oriental, black or white "second" - lived as the weakest link in the chain and the social pyramid.
The title of the book, the author uses the term "chronic" to suggest that we are in the presence of texts they intend to report the facts, events - which we found to be historical - as if they were chronic medieval or Renaissance. But its status as a writer leads us to associate this file to the production of fictional texts supported by historical facts, as if, as a deferred, the passage of time, testify through fiction, as one chronicler deferred, as someone who simulated to be present at the time of the events, and therein lies the fascination of this kind of fiction that is not presented, however, as historical fiction, unlike the novel during the battle of tears, that, yes, claiming truthfully recounting the history of this battle and its context. Something like to become a journalist, a witness or participant through the illusion of recovery, but with a note of poetry and anthropological study break out regularly. If there is no place for humor or irony, the proper distance that is typical of post-modern and fanciful, while excess pretending he was named the serious tone and dramatic chronicle of witnesses, even though this type of chronic, the first text on King of Laleia and Laclubar, is coated with a technique close to the stream of consciousness, more appropriate to the memorial almost intimate the protagonist-hero.
The book Chronicles Timorese, Jane Streets, edited by a new seal of Vila Nova de Gaia, the Calendar of Arts, is composed of four texts: "Manuel Salvador da Costa dos Remedios" (20 pages), "The safe and the sword "(36 pages);" Sheets in the woods "(53 pages) and" Fulan Mutin (White Flower) "(137 pages). This set of texts is extended during the twentieth century the analysis that the battle of tears (2008) made the Timorese people, but in this case relatif only to its beginning. Both volumes are subordinated to a generic title: The stone and leaf. The stone of reality and the leaf area of (re) creation, representing the memory of chronic or art and poetry and welcome the visitor peace and tired of the hardships of life.
These fictions historicizing not simulate the transport of total and perfect player for the time reported, because, as evidenced in "safe and sword", are referred to the Timorese Fernando Sylvan and his text, after the period described, theorized that the formation the East Timorese people and the leaven of the nation over the 400 years that two teams played socio-political power over the people and their cultures, resulting in what the narrator calls "a mosaic of disturbing people in transit (...) form ( ...) combinations open or tightly closed to survive "(p. 45). With this motto, we know that fiction does not pretend that the actions took place exactly the way narrated. Rather, the narrative is assumed as ideologically marked by the option to show how powerful the time they destroyed people, families, clans and property and the consequences for that region. It is therefore an ideological operation, through fiction, to show how the powers that be (church, local government leaders Gentiles, landlords and military), a complex historical process and blood, eventually building a new entity policy and a new collective identity.
They are "stories" that help to understand the modern formation of Timor-Leste in its connection to Macau and the Portuguese crown, and then the Republic, and the Catholic Church, offering resistance to the spirit of liberalism and republican democracy, if and finishing the fight for self-determination and independence, and are thus the practice secular and civic aggregation, the republican spirit. As early as the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that arose in wars that would be a proto-independent, involving some beneficiaries of war and local businesses against the Dutch and their allies. In Timor, since the sixteenth century, marketed to the sandalwood tree (whose products have applications in perfumery and medicines), honey and wax. The valuable sandalwood trade sustains conflicts over the control of trade routes, alliances ethnic, tribal and clan, related services and European crowns dependencies religious. Only in the nineteenth century is introduced coffee culture to the loss by Portugal of Brazilian productions, from 1822, and because the coffee Sao Tome and Principe led to cocoa.
Entering the twentieth century was made under the nightmare of wars of pacification, "so dubbed by soft historiography of the Portuguese, under the consulate of the Governor Celestino da Silva, sent by the Crown, which left a trail of blood and domination in all similar to what happened in other colonies. East Timorese and Chinese - because of their interconnection management and commercial - have always been seen as sworn enemies of the West Timorese and Indonesians are not negligible either the religious role of Christianity in East or Islam in Jakarta.
In the second story, "The safe and the sword," the Governor Filomeno da Camara, sent by the young Portuguese republic, has inherited a haunted by the Dutch East and West Timor. Narra is the defeat of D. Boaventura de Manufhai, given the repressive policy, bloody, Governor Filomeno, with its attendant horrors and violations and follow the changes ideo-political character of a perspective in fictional shows that clutter your body and your "moral-borne illness "(the episode reinforces the mirror), rate of body disorganization of the Timorese people, in what appears to be a brilliant combination between the troubled psyche and the status totem pole of power, Freud, Foucault, Bourdieu and Arendt did not disdain to subscribe. We saw, in rapid strokes, in their transition from republicanism to a kind of Caesarea and the subsequent assumption fascist and eventually lead the revolution tramontana April 1925 and involving themselves, then in May 28, 1926. Later, in the early 30's, according to recorded history, Filomeno abruptly ended his career in colonial Angola, when confronted with a popular uprising, for which ordered a brutal crackdown.
In telling the story of Governor Filomeno and repression of East Timorese, the writer Joan Streets is put into context understandable Inkay life - the Loving Mother or Grandmother - who was the widow queen of Boaventura da Costa Fernandes Soto Mayor, King Manufahi, the land of thousands and thousands of coffee trees, formerly of sandalwood. When young, Inkay had been raped by Lt. Luis Alves da Silva, the wife of which the first wife of Bonaventure, called Kaisery, make friends. The same Inkay in 1974, received a delegation from FRETILIN (Front for the Liberation of Timor) and let himself be photographed with leaders of the Timorese people, as Nicolau Lobato (later died in combat), Ramos Horta (Foreign Minister), Borja Costa (also died during the invasion Indonesia), Leopold and Joaquim Jose Luis Guterres. In 1978, Inkay would die of hunger as a result of the invasion of East Timor by Indonesia. His story, a kind of life story to appeal to sociologists' professional reports, implies a certain acceptance of the inevitable passage of time, a philosophy that seemed subdued resignation, perhaps, instead, a metaphysics of survival that allows the continuation of generations and, therefore, the building of the nation-state.
The scene in the mirror, where Filomeno is frightened by what they see (or, as some philosophers of ethics, the eyes and face do not lie, it is impossible to hide, simply read them out), seeing in its own look at the image of the young warrior who had killed an unequal fight, because he just wanted to save the horse he loved as a little god no, this scene mirror / speculative return the face of the disaffection in itself, the inability to give others. The scene of a Narciso upside down, contemplating the horror of his own face, is symptomatic of the prevention of certain historical actors can understand and accept a different philosophy of peace and of democratic and humanist, as present in the anthropological and poetic wanderings of these narratives.
The fact that the author noted theorists such as Adorno and Erich Fromm, or Marcel Mauss and, on the fictive, Rafael Toscano, an anthropologist and poet who appears in the Chronicle "Fulan Mutin (White Flower)" showing similarities with Ruy Cinatti indicates that in addition to a reading of history, giving density substantially to the essence of historical names, said concrete is mainly the thickness of a behavior that pulled the long term, it appears, at that precise moment, as appropriate to be a body crossed by doubts and anxieties. The fiction of Joanna Streets questions, thus the picture solid and unbreakable spirit of totalitarian psychopaths in power (see the thought of Filomeno about Absolute Power) for the transform, the incarnation of Filomeno of the House puppets of higher powers and wide that may subject to remorse speculate. At least it settles the question in this case of East Timor, remains to be seen whether it would be too humanizing these monsters straight out of prehistory to the depredation Republican defenseless people.
Similarly, the brutality is not direct combat, but by a peculiarity of Japanese escaped the withdrawal of its army, lost in the East Timorese territory, that we can realize the extreme violence of war. The Japanese occupation, the bombing of Dili, the disappearance of villages are summarized matters, that only the condition of the Japanese escaped the withdrawal of troops, their illegal status, suffering, death and slow death, recounted with delicacy and poetry, give expression ruin collective and direct effects and side effects. Anthropology around A-lulik, the sacred place of the dead, where he held sway and survives the nippon YASUKICHI establishes a chain of solidarity, spiritual charm and seduction between him and Timorese Duli as other comprehensive anthropologies inserted in these conditions, the search for authenticity and credibility, and is an impressive piece of sentimental beauty.
References to the poetic Japanese culture, including mentioning Bush or the Javanese culture, this story, and after others, the story of Angola, the journal Culture, revitalized in the late '50s, and the poet and activist Agostinho Neto, attest to the intercultural said in speaking of the will drawn up leaving the mark of policy options. In "Fulan Mutin" whose subtext is the traditional story of the White Flower, credit ratings, with detailed effects of real help to better explain the position of women in Beatrice, Angolan white "second", which, being a woman close to Timorese people by the spontaneous affection and bonhomie, the more he sticks by his humiliating wife kidnapped by a Portuguese husband "first" (Coimbra), opportunistic and unscrupulous. The letter that Beatrice receives from his brother Raul, lost in the colonial war in Angola, it clarifies the nature of the Salazar regime in the metropolis, raising it to release personal wedding, as the explanation of the alliance of Christians and Muslims against atheists and communists in Indonesia in the service of the Suharto dictatorship works such as lighting policy tumultuous time in Indonesia, who were murdered hundreds of thousands of supporters of the popular regime of Sukarno, showing how the pursuit of democracy has spread, then the East Timor. Beatriz is one of the main characters of these conditions, as it has to identify the adverse condition of women, though white and married to a Portuguese man. The prose of Joan Streets, emphasis will be placed at this point, pursues the ideal of redo and remember history, lest he fall into oblivion, not the carnival of wonderful fantasy, but for the purpose of stimulating show the mechanisms of construction of the power and ruin and misery of the people off guard and unprotected. The effectiveness of processes remembers journalism, the concept of gender reinforces chronicles, but with lyrical delicacy that certain embedded stories lend to the narrative, such as love and greatness of Inkay or Yasukichi.
The four chronic stroke-related narratives, kingdoms and historical actors and their real different, you're looking for a fresh lead the reader to approach the "question of East Timor," the construction of his journey toward the nation, homeland and independent country we know today . This course was built in the dialectical struggle of ethnic groups, castes and classes against the occupiers Portuguese, Malaysian, Dutch, Japanese, Indonesians and Australians. The sense of ethnos and convenor of the national civitas emerges from this primal struggle against dispossession and oppression.
Historical background to suffer an emotional confrontation, ethical and ideological in several episodes in which some players emerge as illustrating the general with their history and their behavior uplifting, giving thickness and cultural rights to their actions, explaining them better, not basically positivist way, but somehow recovering the idea, which seems correct, that certain attitudes are just the unfolding of the serpent's egg. In this sense, the condition of women of East Timor is embedded in a web of traditionalist patriarchal customs, and manly warriors and complex political alliances, in which the woman retains the role of reproducing, wife voiceless, godmother of the household and labor-intensive domestic subsistence. In adverse environments, is no small thing. What are some female characters - or as Inkay Duli - stand out as symbolic figures of courage to overcome the barriers between family and neighbors, to stand as prototypes on the way to emancipation from the tutelage ethnic origin, can not also be the result of the disturbance introduced society by colonial and war, with the intrusion aggressive, violent, the other in the stillness of the culture insulated. That is, the violence of colonization and war, domination and encroachment caused the revolt and determines the change correlated with access to modernity. With these conditions, we reiterate scary, once again, that since the eighteenth century to the twentieth century in both East Timor and in Angola, Mozambique and China, the entry of people in modern times is by means of weapons in the hands of men, the door of the massacre, robbery and sweep of some cultures.
Bibliography
CRISTÓVÃO, Fernando (org.) et alii, Dictionary theme-speaking, Lisbon, Text, 2005.
STREETS, Joana, Chronicles Timorese, Coimbra, Calendar, 2009.
RUAS, Joana, Body colonial, Coimbra, Spark, 1981.
STREETS, Joanna, The battle of tears, Coimbra, Calendar, 2008.