4 - Untranslatable Subalternity and Historicizing Empire's Enjoyment in Luís Cardoso's Requiem para o Navegador Solitário

Summary

Following Portuguese decolonization and during the decades of Indonesian occupation, a new generation of East Timorese writers emerged seeking to formulate and grapple with cultural meanings revolving around the nation's postcolonial political and economic strife. While the twenty-first century saw the end of Indonesian occupation, which had initially been supported by the United States and Australia, the nation's political and economic autonomy continues to be undermined by the historically fomented relationships of dependency upon Western powers, particularly Australia.

In conveying meaning in literary form vis-à-vis the forces of contemporary global power inflicted upon life in East Timor, writers have, in different measures, looked to a revised politics of untranslatability in the construction of protagonists, narrators, and broader articulations of global reality. Like Fernando Sylvan, many have used the trope of trans-spatial movement in order to elaborate a scene of writing that is itself in strategic flux, barring the subject from becoming a fixable object in the web of Empire's field of meaning and knowledge. For instance, novelist Ponte Pedrinha's (pen name of Henrique Borges) most impactful novel, Andanças de um Timorense [‘Wanderings of a Timorese'] (1998), embodies precisely this. One can argue, however, that no writer tied to the literature of East Timor, at least that written in Portuguese, has taken such a trope and the project of untranslatability to further levels of creativity than contemporary novelist Luís Cardoso.

Born in 1958 in the East Timorese village of Calaico, Cardoso was raised speaking Tetun-Prasa (also known as Tetun Dili), a creolized form of the Austronesian language Tetum, spoken primarily in the Belu Regency of West Timor and over the border into East Timor. Tetun-Prasa's creolization is, of course, a result of Portuguese colonial presence and it is one of the nation's two official languages alongside Portuguese. Cardoso learned the latter through colonial primary and secondary education. Following Portuguese decolonization, he emigrated to Lisbon, where he earned a university degree in agronomy while also exploring his interest in writing. Since the publication of his first novel, Crónica de Uma Travessia – A Época do Ai-Dik-Funam [The Crossing] in 1997, he has become the most celebrated contemporary East Timorese writer.