Desires Born as Imperatives. The Temptation of Gratuitous Luxuriance in Colonial Travel Memoirs on Timor

The article is an analysis of two Portuguese travel memoirs, Paulo Braga’s A ilha dos homens nus (1936) and Alberto Osório de Castro’s A ilha verde e vermelha de Timor (1943). These colonial texts on Timor are treated as a testimony of imagery, utopias, and fantasies associated with the reality of southern luxuriant islands, in which local communities, able to survive without practising intensive agriculture, would adopt an unrestrained, workless lifestyle. The colonial affective landscape includes various kinds of temptation, associated not only with desirable human bodies, but also with vegetable lushness and other essential delights such as fragrant air. The gratuitousness of those tempting elements contrasts with the colonial invention of labour, production, and commercialisation of costly luxuries, such as pearls collected on the island. The novel visibility of gratuitous tropicality is particularly striking when Braga’s and Osório de Castro’s texts are contextualised with the materialism of an earlier travelogue, written by Maria Isabel d’Oliveira Pinto da França Tamagnini. The colonial travellers internalise the perspective of labour exploitation to such a degree that they prove unable to perceive its negative impact. Trust in natural abundance, nurtured by the islanders, is inconceivable and morally unacceptable for them.