Invasion
After a dream a couple of weeks back, I was inspired to buy a new copy of Timothy Mo's The Redundancy of Courage. Published in 1991, the novel is a fictionalised account of the 7th December 1975 Indonesian invasion of Timor-Leste, a small territory that had just declared independence from its coloniser Portugal less than a week before. (This after getting the green light from Henry Kissinger, who believed that southeast Asia didn't need a “Cuba”.)
I hadn't realised it was the fiftieth anniversary of the violent day around the time my dreams encouraged me to seek out the novel. I'd just remembered how deftly he had created this distant world for the reader, and invoked the sense of dissociation that occurs with the fog of war descends on a city.
After re-reading the powerful first chapter, which ends with the true-to-life Indonesian special forces mass murder of political prisoners on the capital city's docks, I stopped.
I needed to understand how Mo was able to conjure these scenes.
In a piece he published just over 10 years ago about a visit to the country, now independent at last, Mo shared that just like me, many Timorese readers could not believe he was an outsider. Many thought his pen name was meant to sound like a garbled “Timor”. From the moment it was published, his text circulated among political prisoners in Indonesia, just like it circulated among people in Dili when I lived there a decade later, a dogeared paperback that had been devoured over and over again.
I did not get an answer for Mo's craft, his secret. It seems plausible that in the late 80s, he was personally friends with now-president José Ramos-Horta, whose character of a different name he gently mocks in the text. But Ramos-Horta was not present the day of the invasion, he had been sent to the UN to plead for help. Mo must have debriefed multiple witnesses, sought out numerous archival sources.
In any case, this book is by far the most effective account of the invasion of Timor-Leste. And it is fiction.
I think what Mo proves is there is something simultaneously beautiful, horrifying, sensorily fragmentary and perhaps so ineffable in a dissociative way about an invasion (and subsequent military occupation) that only an artist can do it justice.
I meant to write this blog post in a couple of weeks time, but it feels so relevant today given the US' direct attack from the sky on Venezuela.
Like the current invasion by the US, Timorese had anticipated the Indonesian invasion for months. (Australians will remember the October 1975 Indonesian special forces killing of Australian journalists in the border town, Balibo.)
Mo's protagonist says
In fact, the invasion hardly took us by surprise. We'd all been expecting it. The weeks, months, of move and counter-move, the destabilising, the broadcasts of our neighbour, the marching songs, the relentless playing of their anthem, the incessant messages of support for the Almagamationists, that is the party who favoured integration with the larger neighbour, the incursion over the mountains, the burning of villages and crops, had evoked a popular mood of near-hysteria. We'd been waiting for it, sure, but when it came it was still a shock. Like being struck in a bar if you're a peaceful person: even as you know the shock of the blow, you cannot acknowledge it has been struck, refuse to believe in the enormity.
I aim to create an audio file of this first chapter as soon as I can, so that anybody can appreciate it in their preferred format.
In the meantime, there are copies for borrowing on the internet. But if you can, please support Mo directly himself, as he battled with the UK publishing industry and ended up re-publishing the book himself in 2002 (an echo of Timor-Leste's own re-independence that very same year!)