Unpaid Wages: Local Narratives and the Imagination of the Nation

This paper explores how official nationalist discourse is appropriated and reworked in local constructions. It draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the district of Aileu, East Timor, conducted before the Indonesian invasion and after the 1999 referendum. Bridging these two periods is a Mambai narrative tradition about a Christ-like figure named Tat Felis, who comes to Aileu with the first missionaries and is persecuted by local chiefs. In different ways, the paper argues, Mambai have entwined the story of the suffering inflicted on him by their ancestral chiefs with the suffering endured by the people in the nationalist struggle. Such narrativised ordeals evoke a cultural code of reciprocity in which whoever suffers to bring something forth must be repaid. In referencing their own enduring obligations to Tat Felis, people implicitly or explicitly remind nationalist leaders that the nation was purchased with their blood.