Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface: The Dead, the State, and the People in Timor-Leste
- Introduction: Martyrs, Ancestors and Heroes: The Multiple Lives of Dead Bodies in Independent Timor-Leste
- Part I Ancestors, Martyrs and Heroes
- Part II The Dead in Everyday Life
- PART III The Dead and the Nation-State
- Index
11 - On the Politics of Memory: Cult of Martyrs, Contested Memories and Social Status
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface: The Dead, the State, and the People in Timor-Leste
- Introduction: Martyrs, Ancestors and Heroes: The Multiple Lives of Dead Bodies in Independent Timor-Leste
- Part I Ancestors, Martyrs and Heroes
- Part II The Dead in Everyday Life
- PART III The Dead and the Nation-State
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Afonso Savio and Commander Falu Cai were active members of the Resistance. Their respective deaths took place in times of extreme hardship, surrounded by controversy regarding circumstances and culpability. When Timor-Leste regained independence, clouds of doubt hung over their memories, preventing them from being honoured as true heroes of the liberation. Their families mounted strategies to fight those contested memories and to establish a hegemonic narrative that restored their martyrdom to the national pantheon of heroes. Funerary arrangements and memorials were organized to enshrine their new condition. More than material gains, it is argued that the driving force behind their families’ efforts was a goal of obtaining recognition of a specific social status in a highly hierarchical society.
Keywords: contested memories, martyrdom, memorials, hegemonic narrative, social status, social hierarchy
Introduction: Jorge Luis Borges in Timor-Leste
In January 1944, isolated in his native and rather peaceful Buenos Aires watching from afar while World War II ravaged the planet, Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) wrote a very short story entitled ‘Theme of the Traitor and the Hero’, later included in his Ficciones (Fictions). Presented as an idea for a longer piece to take place ‘in an oppressed, tenacious country’, it is set in Ireland in 1824. Fergus Kilpatrick was ‘a conspirator, a secret and glorious captain of conspirators’ who opposed the English domination, and ‘perished on the eve of the victorious revolt which he had premeditated and dreamt of’. As people commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the victorious revolt of which Fergus was the symbol, Ryan, one of his great-grandchildren, is preparing to write a biography of the hero. What he finds is a secret that leaves him astonished: Fergus had betrayed his companions. Having been exposed in a meeting of his fellow conspirators, ‘he signed his own sentence, but begged that his punishment not harm his country’. His assassination was prepared by his friends in such a way that the blame for the act would fall on their enemies. Fergus's allegedly innocent blood could then be vindicated by his followers and feed the anticipated revolt. As such, the plan transformed ‘the traitor's execution [into] an instrument for the country's emancipation’. Ryan gives up writing his book.
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- The Dead as Ancestors, Martyrs, and Heroes in Timor-Leste , pp. 263 - 282Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020