Asakiyume mita

Before I talk about some of my own thoughts on "Mauko Meets a Monkey," I'd like to highlight some of the things other people have brought up:

• cafenowhere talked about aspects of disability, what's considered a disability, and what needs healing (thread here);


• sartorias saw parallels with Chinese storytelling (thread here);


• wayfaringwordhack noticed common themes with the last story and mused on healing the land v. healing people (and then we got into talking about translation, storytelling, and different kinds of stories--thread here).


• amaebi enjoyed the celebration of daily life and wondered what jobs the brothers and sisters went off to do (a good question--I'll have to ask!), and I'm happy that many of you enjoyed the photos.

One thing that struck me--and this was true in the last story, too--was how, confronted with the supernatural or otherwise uneasy-making things, the characters' response is to just be/stay silent (nonook de'it). Faced with a monkey who can bring either good or ill fortune: be quiet. After a dream or vision: sit silently. Told about your new destiny: sit quietly.

When you are still and quiet, you may evade the attention of powerful and dangerous forces in the world--that's what's going on when Mauko's dad tells him to be quiet. But also, when you're quiet, you can notice things, think about things. You're not jumping to conclusions or actions too quickly. You're letting your own thoughts--and the situation--develop.

It's refreshing to see this held up as a virtue--or maybe just as good common sense.

And then I was really struck by how listening, attention, and reflection are key to Mauko's vocation as a healer. I was imagining the aunt, who has been suffering for so many years. I was imagining her having Mauko listen to her attentively. And then he goes and prays for an answer: this is a continued focus on her, a respectful, humble focus. I was thinking about how healing just that very attention could be! It reminded me of my feeling about traditional healing as described in the movie Holding Tightly, which I talked about here.

It's something that's so entirely lost from medicine as practiced in the United States. I know there are doctors, nurses, and aids who do try to truly listen, to be attentive--but they are trying to be so in a horrible system, a crushing machine that punishes that behavior and rewards treating people as widgets that you move through your assembly line. Medical investigation is about isolating active ingredients, extracting them, and dosing people with them. But in many cases, that's just not how healing works. Don't get me wrong: I am happy to have antibiotics to vanish away illnesses that can be vanished away in that manner, and I'm happy for vaccines and X-rays and all the rest. But this other aspect is so very important and so very missing. As a healer, Mauko brings the gift of quietness and attention, and as an advocate, he gets the government to heal root problems: let everyone attend school; value all people.

I've finally finished translating the next story that my friend Nando (Fernando da Costa Pires) sent me back in July last year. From its title, this one might sound like the last one, only this time our protagonist is meeting a monkey instead of an eel. But it's actually very different: for one thing, the hero, Mauko, is disabled, and the story has a lot to say about how disabled people have been regarded in Timor-Leste. It has some magical elements like the last story, but every detail strikes me more deeply this time than last time--though I loved last time's story too. I have more things to say about it, but I'll save them for when I post the story. I've also asked Nando to write an author's statement, so he can share some of his own thoughts on the topic of disability and why he wrote the story.

These questions are a mix of Tetun and English. Where they're in Tetun (probably riddled with errors), I've supplied English, but I haven't attempted to translate my English-language questions into Tetun. Similarly, where Nando answered in Tetun, I've translated the answers into English, but where he answered in English, I haven't ventured a translation. Ha'u husu deskulpa tanba la bele tradús hotu ba Tetun 😓

Nando da Costa Pires


Nando da Costa Pires is the author of "Mr. Mau Leki Meets an Eel," which you can read here.

(Nando da Costa Pires mak hakerek na'in "Sr. Mau Leki Hetán Majiku Husu Tuna," ne'ebe mak bele lee iha ne'e (okos).)

I asked him some questions ...

Can you tell us about reading when you were growing up in Ainaro?

Tuir ha’u nia hanoin kona ba reading iha Ainaro ladun le’e livru barak tanba livre ba le’e la to.

(According to my view, many in Ainaro didn’t read books because books were not available for all, but some people did find a way to read books.)

When I was a child, I didn’t read any books because I didn’t have any. Sometimes I asked other people to show me some to help me do my homework, and sometimes I borrowed my friends’ books to read.

When you were a child, what things did you do each day?

When I came back from school each day, I spent my time helping my family a lot on the farm.

Follow-up Question:
Bainhira Alin Nando sei ki’ik oinsa mak ajuda ita-nia familia iha to’os?

(When you were little, how did you help your family on the farm?)

Wainhira hau sei kiik, hau ajuda hau nia familia mak hanesan hamoos duut ou kuru bee lori ba hau nia inan aman hemu no hili ai hodi tein ba meiudia sira han.

(When I was little, I helped my family by doing things like weeding, or fetching water for my parents to drink and gathering wood to cook everyone’s midday meal.)

In school, what subjects did you like? Were there any subjects that you did not like?

In my school, I liked math and science. The subject I didn’t like was talking about politics.

You told me that your grandmother told you the story of Mr. Mau Leki and the eel. Did she tell you many other stories?

Nia konta istória só iha tempu espesiál ka beibeik ka?

(Did she tell stories only on special occasions or all the time?)

When I was a child, my grandmother told me many stories. She would tell me stories two times a month, or sometimes three times a month.

Who else in your family told stories?

My parent and my uncle (my father’s brother).

You told me “istória nee realidade akontese duni” (“this story really happened”).
Ha’u fiar ita, tanba mundu ne’e misteriozu no buat hotu (ema, animal, ai-hun, rai, lalehan, klamar) mak ligadu malu

(I believe you because this world is mysterious, and everything (people, animals, trees, earth, heaven, spirits) is connected to each other.)

So, I want to ask: What important things do stories like this one teach us?

(Istória hanesan ne’e hanorin ba ita buat importante saida?)

Istória nia importante mak hanorin mai ita atu kuidadu ita nia natureza sira, no karik ita hetan milagre husi natureza nia forsa, ita bele uza forsa ne’e bele tulun fali ita nia maluk sira ne'ebé presiza ita nia ajuda.

(This story’s importance is that it teaches us to take care of our natural world, and that if we obtain miracles from the forces of nature, we can use that power to help our families and friends when they need our help.)

Liu husi istória ne’e ema bele hadomi liu tan sira nia ambiente.

(Through this story, people can come to love their environment more.)

Hanorin ami atu oinsá atu ajuda ema seluk, karik sira presiza ita nia tulun.

(It teaches us how to help other people, if they need our help.)

Follow-up question:
Alin Nando dehan, “karik ita hetan milagre husi natureza nia forsa, ita bele uza forsa ne’e bele tulun fali ita nia maluk sira ne'ebé presiza ita nia ajuda.” Alin Nando rasik iha esperiensia ne’e?

(You said, “if we obtain miracles from nature’s power, we can use that power to help our families and friends when they need our help.” Have you yourself had that experience?)

Iha, tanba hau nia avo hetan duni milagre balun husi natureza tanba nia kura duni ema balun ne’ebé hetan moras no nia tana hodi siik ema nia moras no nia fo aimoruk tradisional ba ema moras nee.

I have, because my grandfather has indeed experienced various miracles from nature, because he has truly cured a number of people who were sick, and he performs divinations in order to understand people’s illnesses, and he gives traditional medicine to these sick people.

Is this the first time you have ever written a story?

Yes. It is the first time for me to write a story.

Do you read many stories? If yes, what types of story do you like?

Yes, I do read stories, but not many. I read some stories in Tetun from Revista Lafaek.

In your opinion, what is the difference between reading a story and listening to someone tell a story?

In my opinion, reading stories improves our comprehension about the things the story is talking about. We learn something from the story, and we come to know about interesting places. And also, we can read the story to our family.

In my opinion, when we listen to someone tell a story, we must listen carefully to the person so that we can understand the meaning of the story.


You studied math at university and now help students learn math. What methods do you use?

Yes. My experience is this: first I must prepare worksheets for the students, and then give them some examples and explain it to them. I must give exercises for student do in the class, and then I must check if they understand how to do it. And I must give them homework to reinforce what I taught, and later I must check their homework.

Follow-up question:
Kona-ba estudante ita-nian: sira-nia idade saida?

(About your students: what are their ages?)

Kona-ba estudante sira nia idade husi idade 8 to 17.

(About the students: they range in age from 8 to 17.)

Obrigada barak ba intervista ne’e no ba istória furak ne’ebe mak ita hakerek.
Ha’u hein katak ita hakerek istória barak tan!

(Thank you very much for this interview and for the wonderful story that you wrote.
I hope that you write lots more stories!)

You may remember that I encouraged anyone I knew from my visit to Timor-Leste in 2013 to send in a story to Strange Horizons for their Southeast Asian writers issue. They were specifically looking for submissions from Timor-Leste.

My call on Facebook didn't get much traction--probably because I'm not very active on the site, so it deprioritizes my posts in people's feeds--but one acquaintance reached out to me, a guy called Nando. I remembered his smile super-well. He's just one year older than the healing angel, my youngest kid.

He's not fluent enough in English to write in English, though, so he wrote his story in Tetun, and I translated it--and wrote about what a thrill that was. We submitted it ... but it was rejected.

Of course there are a million possible reasons why a thing is rejected, but I would guess it's because Nando's story is a folktale rather than an invention of his own. It's a story his grandmother told him about his own family. It's a true story, he says, though it's filled with magic. I don't doubt him: the world is filled with magic. But I suspect for these reasons, and for the manner of its telling--and who knows, maybe the manner of my translating--it didn't ping as speculative fiction in the editor's mind.

I thought of trying to submit it elsewhere, but I also thought of the heartbreak that involves (or can involve). And that's not what Nando signed up for: he was submitting to this one magazine's one special issue, which I'd called to his attention. (I did tell him that rejection was a possibility.)

So I thought, why not publish it here on my blog? If **I** publish it, I can include the photos he sent me of the places mentioned in the story. AND, I can include the Tetun version of the story, so people from Timor-Leste can read it too. If I publish both the Tetun and the English, then it can also conceivably be a resource for people, all sorts of people, who are interested in the culture of Timor-Leste and stories from Ainaro. And if I publish it, I can do an interview with him.

I can't afford to pay as much as Strange Horizons would have, but I can afford semipro rates, so I offered, and he accepted. (And doing foreign remittances was an interesting experience, but that's a blog post for another day. Suffice it to say, PayPal doesn't operate in Timor and there's no post office, so I sent money via Western Union.)

I have all the pieces, and over tomorrow and Wednesday, I'll prepare them and put them up. I hope you all enjoy the story, and please, when it comes out, share the link widely! I really want people to know about this story. There is SO LITTLE fiction/folklore from Timor-Leste available for the Anglophone public.

I finished watching Laloran Justisa yesterday--I'll miss it so much; I loved it. There were a few series-long story arcs to wrap up, the most moving being the story of the main character Rosa's missing older sister. In Episode 1 Rosa and her mother are sitting in a church, remembering Adelina, who was stolen away by the Indonesians during the occupation. This happened a *lot*. They are looking at a photo from Rosa's baptism.

( the rest of the story )

Super happy ending.

Laloran Justisa is up front about being didactic/educational: it covers issues like domestic abuse, alcoholism, presumption of innocence, nepotism, and so on. The most recent episode dealt in part with an upright young police officer with a secret in his past: his brothers were part of pro-Indonesia militias that formed after Timor-Leste declared in a 1999 referendum that it wanted to be independent of Indonesia.

( quickie historical review )

In an earlier episode, Vitór and the idealistic lawyer Rosa bump into each other at the Centro Nasional Chega, a museum that documents the abuses of the Indonesian occupation.



In another episode, Vitór is present at the commemoration of the anniversary of the 1991 Santa Cruz massacre, when the Indonesian military gunned down some 250 protestors, in Santa Cruz cemetery in Dili, including schoolchildren.

Santa Cruz cemetery


Students participating in the commemoration


Vitór, in uniform this time, watching


His brothers' participation in pro-Indonesia militias is revealed, and he loses his job, but Rosa helps him recover it. It helps that he himself did not participate. But by having him talk about the situation in his suco (village) at the time, the show is able to broach why people did participate.

Here he's saying what his brothers did, but earlier he says, "In my village, there was a lot of pressure for us to be part of Indonesia, and those who joined the militia were given money, nice clothes, and good food." Since deliberate starvation was an Indonesian policy tactic that killed more than 180,000 people,¹ "good food" was a compelling benefit.



I think about this a lot, about how you weave together a people that have been unraveled.

¹Sian Powell, "UN Verdict on East Timor," The Australian, January 19, 2006, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.

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.

During the summer I took the level-one Tetun course (Tetun: the lingua franca in Timor-Leste) offered through Timorlink. It's an Australia-based program, but the teachers all have deep connections with Timor-Leste.

Next week I'm starting the level-two course, and--because life is stranger than fiction--my teacher is going to be none other than the inestimable Kirsty Sword Gusmão.

Life keeps thrilling me--I feel so lucky to be alive!

This description came from someone's article in Australian Road Rider about a motorbike trip around East Timor:

I’ve never seen a road being handmade before. There were young men and boys placing river pebbles and stones in a neat arrangement, others tended fires on which 44-gallon drums of tar rested. A few men had ladles on long poles which they dipped into the drums of molten tar then carried to the stone sections and poured.

Source: "East Timor: Land of Children"

Here's a photo of roadbuilding in Timor-Leste from 2010, courtesy of Wikipedia:

Doing some research, I came across this moving song, "Timor Oan Mos Bele," ("We Timorese Can Do It"), sung in Tetun, Portuguese, and English. It's addressed to everyone in Timor-Leste and urges them not to lose faith in the possibility of a good future for the country.

hatudu ba ema katak Timor oan mos bele,
labele lakon esperansa tuba rai metin
no lao ba oin nafatin

We have to show people that we Timorese can do it
We can't lose hope; we must stand firm
And continue to walk forward

The little signs say things like "Fight Corruption," "Education Starts in the Household," "Stop Using Violence," and "Create Peace and Love."

There are lots of tensions in Timor-Leste; violence and corruption¹ are problems, and I bet it's easy to get discouraged. But lots of people are doing such great work--I'm not talking about million-dollar initiatives; I'm thinking just of the ordinary people I met, who are running computer classes or transportation services, or investing in a washing machine and then offering laundry services, etc. And those are just the people I was aware of from my brief stay. But meanwhile there's a law in the works that may restrict journalistic freedom, and there've been some pretty dramatic police actions . . . so, I appreciate the spirit of this song, and I hope people hang on to this spirit.

Timor Oan Mos Bele Halo--Viva Timor!

(And I do love learning language through listening to songs. Phrases I learned today include fiar-an, "believe in yourself," and ida-idak, "everybody.")

¹Like this worrying story about petty police corruption that came down the line this morning from the East Timor Action Network :-(