Laloran justisa

[asakiyume]

I keep on promising word-content, but the will is weak. Instead, have some pictures.

In the interim between Tetun classes, my classmate and I have been practicing, in part by watching the drama Laloran Justisa, Waves of Justice. It's subtitled in English, and I'll listen over and over to catch and try to learn the Tetun phrases. I take screenshots from it and then we ask each other questions about them in Tetun. But I love them also just for daily life in Timor-Leste, unspoken things that are conveyed:

Here Anata is crying because her daughter is sick (because people have been illegally dumping motor oil, and it's contaminated the groundwater) and her house is a mess and the legal-aid people will be coming soon. But what I was interested in was (a) the bed on a mat in the corner, the fact that she's got her husband's fighting cock attached to her toe by a string, and the nature of the mess: the footwear, the little toys--I spied a tiny pink plastic chair and could imagine a child playing house with it.



Here, Anata, her husband Rui (in the green shirt), Rosa, the public defender, and Eduardo, who works for a public-aid NGO, go to the well to get the water sample that's going to end up proving that the groundwater is contaminated. It was fascinating to see the plastic container repurposed to be a bucket, to see the cover for the well (with a rock to hold it down--but also that the director (Bety Reis) had had all the children cluster round to see what the grownups are up to. Very real!



When they're drawing the water, Rui points out the auto shop that he's sure is the source of the problem. "He's sure about many things," Anata says sourly. "He was born sure." There are lots of great lines in the show. At one point one guy asks another if he wants to get their band back together and the guy says, "I would rather swim naked in a pool filled with crocodiles." --So that's a no! But later he comes round, and when he's talking about what changed his mind, he says, "You can try to ignore music, but it constantly reaches out to you." ^_^

Here, Tinho, a boy who's not in school (he came down to Dili from Ainaro! Where I visited!), and Cisco, a boy who is, join together because they're both worried about a teacher, Inêz. (She's been teaching Tinho to read in her off hours and fighting the headmaster over the lack of schoolbooks at Cisco's school. The headmaster has been diverting the books and selling them in another part of Timor-Leste, and when Inêz starts investigating, he gets her fired.) What I like is how the two boys just drape arms over each other like that on first acquaintance. (Tinho did earlier demonstrate his chops as a soccer player, which Cisco appreciated, so maybe they already sense they're destined to be buddies.)



And this is just a market scene I liked. The girl in the foreground is playing with a bit of string. The director has lots of beautiful shots like this.

Comments

[sovay]

the drama Laloran Justisa, Waves of Justice.

I didn't realize Laloran-morna's name was Tetun! (If you talked about it at the time, I missed it. Morna is used for water?)

Those are some beautiful everyday shots.

[asakiyume]

I didn't mention it! It was my own entertainment, and not really relevant for the story. "morna" means "warm" for things like water. So "Laloran-morna" means Warm Waves, which was what he was the god of.

It's very funny now to be studying the language for real, I keep on grinning.

(I had done online study before I went, and I have a very basic dictionary, and those were the basis of the names I stole from Tetun. Some names are pure invention. Other that come from Tetun are Malirin (meaning "cool" or "cold") and Kadiuk, which means crab. From the first story there's Ohin, which means "today," which isn't really relevant to his personality, but "Lian," his name when he's redeified, means "language," so that's appropriate.)

[sovay]

"morna" means "warm" for things like water.

The first dictionary that came up in a search didn't seem to have the word at all, then I found "manas" and was trying to figure out if "morna" was some kind of declension (like classical Greek μέλας "black, dark" whose feminine form is μέλαινα), then I found a dictionary which translated "warm" as "manas uitoan; (water) morna," which was what I was looking for but also interested me by its specificity. Do you know why the two different (or are they related) words?

It's very funny now to be studying the language for real, I keep on grinning.

I think it's wonderful that you are.

From the first story there's Ohin, which means "today," which isn't really relevant to his personality, but "Lian," his name when he's redeified, means "language," so that's appropriate.

I like that a lot.

[asakiyume]

"Manas" is "hot"--it can be used of water, air, anything. "uituan" means "a little," so "manas uituan" is "a little hot" = warm... which is actually something I've heard said, as opposed to "morna," which I've only experienced in the dictionary.

I *don't* know if they're related. Tetun is related language-family-wise to Indonesian, and in Indonesian, "hot" is "panas," which seems close, sound-wise (other words that are the same or similar that I've run across are uma (tetun) and rumah (Indonesian), meaning house; lima, meaning "five" in both languages, and sala (T) and salah (I) meaning wrong, incorrect, or guilty<--that last meaning discovered by watching this show ;-) )

[amaebi]

Now I have to reread the saga in al its glorious two parts.

[asakiyume]

^_^

[asakiyume]

Oh, and water is "bee" (pronounced "bay") for general water. Bottled water is called "akua"--> from a brand of bottled water.

Very tangential

[amaebi]

I was surprised to find that, ss I read your tidbits and looked at the stills, that I'm kind of starved for a life of more visceral problems and fewer problems that arise from human insistence that we must all inhabit some of the cheesiest and tawdriest literature ever.

Unfortunately many of the visceral problems are also of human construction.

Re: Very tangential

[asakiyume]

Yeah, the thing that's satisfying about the show is that when people struggle to right wrongs, they're ultimately successful, and the fights never devolve into spin or redefinitions. No "**you're** actually the cheaters and **we're** actually the heroes because ... "

And yeah, most of our problems, if not of human construction, are made worse by some aspects of human nature.