Island Encounters: Timor-Leste from the outside in

Abstract

This book tells a story of how I have come to know island Timor and, ultimately, why I think these understandings matter. It’s a story I tell in snapshots from a six-month journey in 2018 with my family as we travelled from one end of the island to the other (see Map 1). It is a story of personal encounters with people who call Timor their home and of encounters with the landscape itself. And, given that this is an island divided, that story of division is one I must also tell. Like the cloth or tais I bought on my first visit to the country, this is a story told by the threading together of the warp and weft. The lengthwise ‘warp’ dwells in the experiences of the two decades of my involvement with Timor-Leste and, more particularly, the months I spent travelling with my family from west to east across the island. The crosswise ‘weft’ is made up of the stories and ideas that shuttle back and forth across the island to create the shared fabric of Timorese people’s lives. These often deeply cultural stories and ideas weave and continually reweave together the past, present and future. They connect not only the people but also the languages, lands, waters, animals and plants that comprise this rich and varied landscape. These are reoccurring stories across time and space that are suffused with ideas about the profound life-organising significance of insiders and outsiders, the mountains and the sea, the trunks and the tips, the darkness and the light, family and marriages, traditions and modernity. The threads of these diverse preoccupations cultivate and nurture relationships, revealing layered interconnections between people and the land and an astonishing depth of historical attentiveness. While these stories and their spread across the island are the core concerns of the book, in this introduction I first sketch some of the history of my involvement with Timor-Leste. I then address a topic that so often encases, masks, foils or even brings these deeper cultural stories to the fore: the paradoxes of development.