Fetishist Disavowal: On Felix Nesi’s “People from Oetimu”

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It can be hard to read without projecting a use function onto a piece of writing—perhaps inevitable, since most literature is subject to market forces. Even the self-declared aesthete wants something: an encounter with the sublime, or an escape from utilitarianism. I’m drawn to Bruno Latour’s notion of the aesthetic, which recalls the word’s original etymology—a great work jolts us from our stupor to make us sensitive to something. What we want from reading depends on our circumstances, and for many readers, those circumstances involve witnessing incredible amounts of atrocity. Felix Nesi, who grew up in West Timor, has described reaching a point where he couldn’t write about anything unrelated to the violence he witnessed in his hometown. The result is a form of literature that, like Latour’s sensitizing jolt, asks the reader to think harder about what we’re looking for in those pages.

Readers may skirt around an answer to the question but still attempt to cope with atrocity by engaging in fetishist disavowal, a mechanism for dealing with one’s experience of horror (at a lack of power, for instance). This concept, formulated in 1967 by psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni based on Freud’s concept of the fetish, describes how we cope with traumatic events or something as incomprehensibly troubling as the climate crisis. Unlike denial or repression, disavowal operates with full knowledge of the event (“I know very well”) but uses that knowledge as the fetish object that allows us to carry on as usual (“I know very well, but all the same”). To the fetishist, reading becomes appealing when it offers objectifiable knowledge in easily digestible amounts.

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Around ten years ago in Iowa City, I sat in a creaky room with too many chairs in an old building known as the Shambaugh House to listen to Susan Harris, editor-in-chief of the international literary journal Words Without Borders, give a talk about publishing world literature. “How many of you like American literature?” she began—a cheeky move, since she was directly across the street from the building that houses the notoriously homogenizing Iowa Writers Workshop. In response to the clusters of hands that went up, she declared, “Well, I’m sorry, but it’s just not as interesting as international literature.” 

Several years later, Nesi would move through the same house as a resident of the International Writing Program (IWP), a three month-long residency for writers from around the world housed at the University of Iowa. During his residency, he gave a talk on writing fiction amid political conflict, revealing his preoccupations with whether, and how, to write about the incredible violence that occurred in Timor in the 1990s as East Timor started to gain independence from Indonesia. “Writing helps me know myself better, meet all the wounds and pleasures, dreams and imperfections of me as a human being,” he said. “There’s always a child crying deep in me asking for the existence of these fears and traumas in my sentences.” One can understand why, when you live through beheadings of supposed spies, or the public burning of union employees, or children run over by military tanks, it might feel impossible to write about anything else. 

In Nesi’s talk, as in his writing, there’s a latent ambivalence—perhaps a reaction to his newfound anglophone readership, an awareness of his trauma becoming cultural capital in an industry that stands to profit from his “unique” perspective. Later in the same talk, this ambivalence sharpens when he contrasts his position with writers from more privileged Indonesian regions: “I can brag in front of my favorite writers from Java that I have so many stories with real drama to write.” Nesi’s work was buzzworthy in Indonesia largely for its depiction of peripheral regions rarely represented in literature. For many anglophone readers, there’s an inevitable flattening of such potent geographical details; Nesi’s work anticipates this with blunt historical exposition: “As time passed, conflicts broke out between the Portuguese and the Dutch. Both of the nations wanted sandalwood, and lots of it, so they took to the island with soldiers and guns”; “But he didn’t know about the atrocities that the girl had experienced: the way the Indonesian army slaughtered people in Timor of the Rising.”

Translated by Lara Norgaard, People from Oetimu is the first book by an Indonesian writer to be published by indie press Archipelago Books. It’s also the second translation by Norgaard, whose debut, the sci-fi thriller 24 Hours with Gaspar by Sabda Armandio, came out with Seagull Books in 2023. The novel takes place in a fictional town between West and East Timor during three historical eras: the fall of Suharto’s regime in 1998, the independence movements against the Portuguese in the 1970s, and the Japanese occupation in the 1940s. Each timeline tells stories filled with lust, rape, and murder, told in a tone that’s off-puttingly matter-of-fact: there’s no dimension to these acts, no facet to consider as a view into the psyche, no texture in the prose to bristle against. 

In the second chapter, a Portuguese man named Júlio takes his family to Timor to oversee the decolonization process, when the UDT (the Timorese Democratic Union) launches a coup followed by an attack by the FRETILIN (the Revolutionary Front for an Independent East Timor). Júlio attempts to live as neutrally as possible in the thick of conflict, but finds himself caught between political factions and inadvertently becomes a hero of the FRETILIN (despite his initial apathy toward their cause) while being abandoned by the Portuguese government. When the Indonesian military invades, Júlio and his wife are taken and killed, and their daughter is held captive with other young girls on the eastern edge of Dili. What’s described next is hard to read: “Men were brutally tortured, then forced to grope her breasts. The other women received the same treatment as she did. . . . Sometimes a man would come into her cell to rape her, sometimes she was thrown in the back of a jeep and taken to the barracks, and the men would fuck her there.” I hesitate to quote this out of context, yet many such moments occur in the novel and read as if out of context—blunt objects in narrative form. 

In another chapter, a group of boys go to the town healer to ask him to examine one of their penises, which they think is deformed because it’s so big. The silly, bodily anxieties of pre-adolescence teeter on the edge of comic potential, though the translation’s preference for high register creates something more clinical: “The boys had just started sixth grade, but Ipi’s private parts were huge, maybe two times the size of their own”; “Ipi analyzed his friends’ private parts, first one, then the other, before looking down at his own. He only then realized how abnormal his looked.” The healer—who specializes in circumcision—takes Ipi inside to examine him and proceeds to sexually assault him. The moment occurs suddenly, described in explicit, uncomfortable detail, and ends just as abruptly. 

What are we to make of this jarring flatness? While I read People from Oetimu I was also in the middle of 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (in Natasha Wimmer’s sharp translation), a novel where anyone I mentioned it to who’d read it asked if I’d gotten to “that part” yet (“that part” referring to the entire third section, which spans about three hundred pages and consists mostly of a meticulously narrated catalogue of femicide). It’s unpleasant to read either novel (which doesn’t mean there’s no value in reading them), but I found myself more willingly tolerating Bolaño’s, perhaps for the captivating detail with which he describes the silence that lurks around these murders, the way a single image, like a hotel toilet missing a huge chunk of porcelain, can haunt you even in its static form, needle its way into your subconscious, transcend time to connect with all cycles of violence in ways we can scarcely fathom. 

Nesi’ project differs from Bolaño’s, and—to return to my suspicion of Nesi’s awareness of his new readership—there’s something to the flatness of Nesi’s storytelling that feels confrontational, that deliberately refuses any glint of beauty or humanity to cling to for momentary relief. He doesn’t let your gaze wander around the scene with curiosity: he insists you focus on one terrible act only. He seems to anticipate the dismissive sneer of US critics attached to propriety (I’m thinking here of the New York Times review of Eka Kurniawan’s Beauty is a Wound, translated by Annie Tucker, the first book by an Indonesian author nominated for the Man Booker International Prize: the review compares Kurniawan to Gabriel García Márquez and then complains, quite petulantly: “Also, I didn’t much care for all the rape scenes, but maybe that’s just me”). 

Nesi’s confrontational approach challenges the dismissive curiosity that has characterized the publishing industry’s fraught relationship to international writing. It’s a tendency that’s been well-documented: David Damrosch’s 2003 historical survey of “world literature” showed how the term became synonymous in the twentieth century with texts that provide “windows into foreign worlds.” Gloria Fisk presented an even more cynical view in her 2018 study Orhan Pamuk and the Good of World Literature, writing that global authors circulate within “this transnational literary establishment that convenes through the same technologies that globalize the economies that subtend it.” These discourses around world literature, Fisk argued, reveal more about readers’ expectations (or baggage) than anything else; a novel’s value becomes measured by how much “geopolitically specific” information readers can extract from it.  

This sentiment manifests in the dubious platitude of “promoting cross-cultural understanding,” a phrase that euphemizes translation’s didactic function, especially for works from countries with a checkered history of US involvement (though this involvement is rarely acknowledged). The language of this geopolitically charged platitude shares lineage with the xenophobic rhetoric once used to justify technocratic rule. In 1920, Bell Telephone Labs (now AT&T), for example, promoted their Telephone System infrastructure as a vehicle of cultural homogenization: “A confusion of tongues makes for a confusion of ideas and principles.” During the Cold War, conflict would similarly be fashioned as misunderstanding to justify research programs that included machine translation, anthropology, and eugenics, all under the guise of “communication science.” These programs, funded by robber barons, effectively explored ways to optimize social control through state propaganda. In each instance, multilingualism has been presented as a problem requiring translation’s solution: an industrially managed universality. In Slavoj Zǐzěk’s words, the conditions of economic exploitation are naturalized and neutralized into “cultural” differences, “into different ‘ways of life’ which are something given, something that cannot be overcome.” But in the world of letters, translation emerges as the very work that can overcome these differences. 

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It’s within this context that we should consider Nesi’s appearance in the United States as a literary representative of Indonesia through the IWP. One of the great institutions of this universality, the IWP was canceled by the US State Department in March with the announcement that the program “no longer effectuate[s] agency priorities” and its offerings don’t align with national interest. Of course, it’s terrible to hear of the evaporation of another already scant publicly funded arts program, another sign of conservatism’s gross disinterest in any form of culture that isn’t moral pacification. But it also makes stark the long history of world literature’s ties to US foreign policy—a liberal internationalist view on culture’s value to soft power. 

Before starting the IWP, Paul Engle had been courting sponsorship to make the Iowa Writers Workshop more international, receiving grants from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, then the State Department, to travel abroad and scout foreign writing talent—an explicit move of soft diplomacy. He went to Pakistan, India, Thailand, Hong Kong, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Japan. His letters from that time have, in scholar Eric Bennett’s words, a thrill that “is palpable and touched with unself-conscious orientalism.” But he also persuaded the State Department of his mission, and they agreed to cover his and his chosen foreign writers’ travel costs if he could raise funds for room and board in Iowa City. “We should do what we can to convince the young writers of the world, now so heavily favorable to left-wing attitudes, that we honor the mind in its freedom,” he wrote, adding that the program could be useful “by having around the world some very articulate people who have much good will for us and our ways.” As the Workshop’s success took off, Engle also secured financial support from a former student, then Secretary of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (the CIA front). Bennett has speculated that after being ousted from his role as director in 1966, Engle, a proud Cold Warrior, took his donors with him (including the CCF) and started the IWP as an offshoot of the Workshop as a face-saving move. Engle’s internationalist vision was thus funneled into the IWP’s project of diplomacy, while the Workshop without Engle diverged into a school of writing favoring more domestic concerns. 

Susan Harris’s comment on the inherent appeal of an author’s foreignness signals a liberal evolution of the ethos cultivated by the Cold War mentality underlying the IWP’s foundations. Though this mentality slowly floundered—the new director Christopher Merrill, who took over the program in 2000, credited its near breakdown in the 1990s to the Clinton administration’s decision to dissolve the State Department’s cultural diplomacy apparatus—it found revival in the wake of 9/11 under Merrill’s directorship. After the attack on the World Trade Center, the IWP was invited into conversations to examine (perhaps theatrically more than anything else) the government’s failures of public diplomacy. Merrill—echoing Engle forty years prior—did his own world tour to gather information for a report on the (new) possibilities of cultural diplomacy through literature. The program’s fate has faltered periodically at the hands of various political shifts, but it has stayed the course thanks not necessarily to its contribution to literary production (this aspect was peripheral in the aforementioned interview) but to its role in facilitating geopolitically advantageous relationships. (Full disclosure: the semester I saw Harris talk, I worked for the IWP as a driver, which consisted of driving residents in a Chevy Suburban to various events which many seemed reluctant to attend, such as, most notably, the Iowa Rodeo.) 

This may seem like an overly deep history to wade into, but it is, for better or worse, the context that brought Nesi to the US as a literary representative of Indonesia (after his book came out and before it was translated into English), and the context in which we read his debut novel, which grapples with very restrictive notions of national identity. 

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Knowledge of an event becomes the fetish-thing that helps us disavow it, which allows us to continue our enjoyment unscathed—in other words, to avoid the pathetic feeling of not doing anything with the knowledge we have. Zǐzěk uses the example of recycling and buying organic to explain fetishist disavowal of environmental harm: we engage in frantic pseudo-activity that we know will not solve the problem but allows us to feel as if we have acted on what we know. As theorist Alenka Zupančič put it, when we are caught in the crossfire of crisis we tend to “readily wake up—so as to be able to go on dreaming.” Reading with fetishist disavowal is a sort of inverse of the wish-fulfillment function of escapist reading that Sarah Brouillette describes, which “alleviates the temptation to ruminate on the unpleasant facts of one’s social circumstances.” There is a humiliation to witnessing horrendous acts rationalized through structures of time and power. World literature is positioned as a means of resolving that problem, yet under this mode of readership it helps us circumvent the problem instead. We see this in the aforementioned urge for didactics or claims to cross-cultural understanding—translation, publishing, and reading become forms of a frantic pseudo-activity. 

My initial distaste reading these blunt passages in People from Oetimu confronted me with my own impulse toward fetishist disavowal. I was preoccupied looking for references to US involvement in the mass murder of over a million Indonesians—thirty thousand pages of files declassified in 2017 revealed damning evidence, including how the CIA drew up a provisional list of people to kill—and the complicity of corporations that orchestrated human rights abuses and now bankroll the very novels that address these conditions of suffering. Mobil Oil Indonesia (later merged with Exxon), which built one of the world’s most profitable natural gas facilities in the Aceh province in 1971, recently settled a twenty-year case over human rights violations committed to “protect” their oil fields. Exxon Mobil allegedly hired and helped train soldiers, increasing Aceh’s militarization and inspiring the formation of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) in 1976. Mobil Oil later provided a grant for the translation of And the War is Over by Ismail Marahimin, published in 1977 in Indonesian and in 1986 in English by one of the most influential Indonesian translators, John McGlynn. McGlynn cites this grant as a major turning point in his career, leading him to start the (also corporate-sponsored) Lontar Foundation to publish more Indonesian literature: that grant from Mobil Oil showed him, he said, that “institutional support … would be the key to publishing a steady stream of Indonesian literary translations.” Yet in Nesi’s world, US public-private involvement in Indonesian history is absent; instead what I encountered was my own glaring lack of understanding of a much more sprawling history, which Nesi refuses to remedy. In this respect, the omission functions as an implicit rejection of the fetishistic demands of world literature. 

People from Oetimu most deliberately resists the industry’s compulsory universality in its attention to multilingualism. Many people in Timor speak Uab Metô, and their Indonesian is full of Timorese slang and dialect. As Norgaard explains in her afterword: “The histories underlying these languages—and the ways in which they meet, mix, and clash—is both a thematic preoccupation and a formal feature of the novel.” This poses a considerable challenge to Norgaard, who reads the language as a vehicle of alienation for the characters both under and after colonial domination, and the political tenor of many subtle punchlines relies on this linguistic history. Her work in this regard is admirable, nimbly leaving traces of the various languages and negotiating shifts between oratory, literary exposition, and colloquial dialogue; the inclusion of a glossary works well as a supplement. That anglophone readers grasp these tensions is crucial to a core project of Nesi’s novel, which is to encourage skepticism of the very concept of the nation. Yet—and here’s where market pressures inevitably intrude—the project is also defined, in the afterword, as relevant because of the perspective it provides on “a nation’s collective memory,” and its “indispensable contribution” to world literature, particularly given Indonesia’s 2024 presidential election of Prabowo Subianto, a former military general accused of human rights violations in East Timor. 

We could, in the end, read People from Oetimu as a significant challenge to the IWP’s original mission of neatly packaging narratives of national conflict for anglophone audiences. By resisting translation and decentering the US, the novel gestures towards a literature beyond industrially managed universality. As Zǐzěk explained, we shouldn’t aspire to tolerance of cultural difference (it is capitalism that is universal, not culture) but to an intolerance of struggle: “To chastise violence outright, to condemn it as ‘bad,’ is an ideological operation par excellence, a mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence.” Reading with fetishist disavowal is a mechanism of mystification, and Nesi resists the extraction of knowledge necessary for this mechanism to function. 

With the State Department’s renewed, forceful termination of its cultural diplomacy mission, perhaps what’s left in its wake could offer new possibilities for writing, translating, and reading with a fresh sense of what makes literature interesting—or what could jolt us into a new perspective. Nesi’s novel, in its exacting portrayal of violence and refusal to comfort Western readers, offers one model for such literature. In the meantime, though, in a hollowed-out industry that relies increasingly on private institutional support, there may be even less room for literature and its readers to negotiate our opposition to the violent systems of global capital.