‘Here for Now’: Temporalities of Ageing and Forced Displacement Through Pension Narratives

ABSTRACT

Based on long-term ethnographic research with East Timorese multi-generational families displaced from Timor-Leste to Indonesia in 1999, this paper examines the temporalities of displacement. It focuses on the lived experiences of refugees turned residents to challenge the linear assumptions often associated with their lives. Drawing on people’s narratives of state pensions, provided by the Indonesian state to former civil servants of East Timorese origins, as reason for staying, the article demonstrates how ongoing displacement conditions and legacies of violence compel them to focus on the here and now. These narratives provide insights into how people (re)configure political belonging, familial care, and aspirations over time, space and generations. The article reveals how displacement creates multiple and conflicting temporalities that can generate ruptures in younger people’s life trajectories while stretching older people’s temporal horizons and responsibilities to provide. In facing marginalised living conditions and various forms of exclusions, older East Timorese maintain life in the present via their ageing bodies through biometric bureaucracies associated with claiming pensions or through extending their working life. These insights importantly challenge imaginaries that depict later life as a stage of dependency and economic unviability in exile.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporalities
• displacement
• ageing bodies
• biometric bureaucracies
• aspirations
• East Timorese
• Indonesia

Introduction

At a ‘youth for peace’ workshop held in February 2020 in Kupang, West Timor, the workshop participants from Indonesia and Timor-Leste (also known as East Timor)¹ absorbed themselves in an activity called the ‘river of life’. In this exercise, the empathetic instructor invited them to imagine their lives as a river that runs through multiple memorable life events. They drew these on large sheets of paper and presented them to the group.² One participant called Marley was 25 years old at the time and originally from Timor-Leste. Like the other participants’ drawings, Marley’s river flowed across a timeline shaped by the history of Indonesia’s occupation of Timor-Leste between 1975 and 1999. He drew his river as originating in a mountainous eastern region before shifting course dramatically into West Timor, an area belonging to Indonesia’s Nusa Tenggara Timur (NTT) province – except for Timor-Leste’s Oecussi enclave. Mass violence, instigated by disgruntled Indonesian security forces and their local militias, had broken out and displaced around 250,000 East Timorese who were forced to move across the border when the occupied territory voted for independence in a referendum facilitated by the United Nations (UN) on 30 August 1999.

What differentiated Marley’s life story from those of the other participants was that his river did not flow back into Timor-Leste. Whereas his peers in the room spoke of a return and of their future aspirations, Marley told a story of growing up in a state of displacement and experiencing an inherent sense of uncertainty. For the past 20 years, he had moved from one camp and resettlement site to another, depending on where opportunities became available and relatives were located. When asked why they stayed there instead of returning, Marley’s response would always come back to his family and the Indonesian state pensions that sustained them:

My mother receives her pension payments here from the time she worked as a civil servant in Timor-Leste [for the Indonesian government]. This is why we stay [in Indonesia]. Our river flows here for now. What the future holds for me, I do not know.

The empirical narratives presented in this article lie within the broader context of the East Timorese displacement and later resettlement in West Timor. Like Marley’s statement above, these narratives often emphasise the significance of state pensions, and unfold amid ongoing legacies of violence. While around 90 per cent of the refugees have returned following the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)’s decision to revoke their refugee status in December 2002, many decided to stay to retain their Indonesian civil service status and pension rights. Some stayed because they had supported integration with Indonesia rather than voting for independence during the referendum. Others, including former militias of East Timorese origins, stayed because they were involved in the post-ballot violence and would face prosecution in Timor-Leste should they return (International Crisis Group (ICG) 2011). Those who chose to remain took up Indonesian citizenship, and they were locally referred to as ‘new residents’.

At first glance, the East Timorese displacement story – from the point of their exodus to becoming refugees and eventually being resettled as residents – seems to paint a linear trajectory. Assumptions of liminality underpin this linearity, and scholarly and policy approaches to displacement often make such assumptions when describing the experiences of refugees; they refer to a phenomenon of being ‘betwixt and between’ legal categories (Ramsay 2017: 516). However, Marley’s words hint at a sense of living with and through time that is neither linear nor fixed in place. This article builds on scholarship arguing for the importance of understanding the temporal dimensions of displacement and does so in ways that move beyond its analytical conflation with politico-legal categories (see Sakti and Amrith 2022). Ramsay (2017: 517) has argued that linear assumptions of refugee experiences imply that ‘resettlement, by virtue of providing refugees with a recognised national identity, then resolves the “problem” of their displacement’. To challenge these assumptions, I focus on the lived experiences of East Timorese refugees who became residents in Indonesia.

As an entry point, I examine people’s narratives related to state pensions as both the reason for staying and the means through which East Timorese multi-generational households sustain everyday life in exile. The participants of this study prominently enlisted pension narratives when dealing with the temporal aspects of displacement. As a state form of care for older people, a focus on pensions offers a unique analytical lens to understanding the temporalities of political belonging (Thelen and Coe 2019).

Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with East Timorese multi-generational families, this article first situates this community’s displacement within longer histories of violence, the Indonesian state’s continued neglect over their wellbeing, and the various forms of exclusion they experience in the present. It highlights how the conditions of displacement persist for this community despite their attaining legal identity after resettlement. Displacement as an ongoing condition (Feldman 2018) forces them into prolonged poverty, discrimination, and a state of ‘stuckedness’ (Hage 2009), which compels them to focus on the here and now. The article then delineates the significance of state pensions for this community and the notion of long-term reciprocities that underlies the meanings attributed to the pensions, before revealing how these pensions are often intertwined in legacies of mistrust and betrayal.

The following section draws on existing scholarship linking concepts of temporality, displacement, and the ageing body to think about questions of belonging, aspirations, and the timing of a good return. The analysis zooms in on several ethnographic cases that speak to the broader social, cultural, historical, and political context and the experiences of the East Timorese interlocutors whom I have interviewed over the years since 2010. It reveals how older people enact citizenship and rights via their ageing bodies through biometric bureaucracies associated with claiming pensions or through physical work to provide vital resources for their family. The analysis thus challenges imaginaries that depict later life as a stage of dependency and economic unviability in exile. On the contrary, this article shows how enduring states of precarity and uncertainty can generate ruptures in younger people’s life trajectories while stretching older people’s temporal horizons and responsibilities to provide in exile. The article argues that when individuals engage with narratives of pensions as a reason for staying, they are attempting to deal with the disadvantageous circumstances of their life in the present moment, which the past continues to shape, as a way of continually negotiating and experimenting with the boundaries of the future.

The East Timorese in West Timor

The relationship between the Indonesian state and the East Timorese community in West Timor goes beyond the 1999 post-ballot violence and can be traced back to 1974. This was the year the Indonesian armed forces began their covert intelligence operations along the East Timorese borders. They recruited ordinary people as informants and thereby contributed to the political instability that was brewing in what was then still Portuguese Timor. While the territory was preparing for a decolonisation process, the newly established political parties were heavily involved in their campaigns. A devastating internal political conflict ensued, which killed at least 3,000 people and created lasting political divisions among the East Timorese. The Indonesian government narrated the conflict as a ‘civil war’, and used it to justify their plans to invade the territory in December 1975 (CAVR Executive Summary 2005).

Over the following 24 years, the Indonesian armed forces penetrated everyday life. They mobilised civilians as informants and created civil defence patrols and, eventually, armed militias to suppress political resistance. The resistance network continued their independence struggle throughout the occupation. Official truth-finding documents reveal that this dark period resulted in a death toll of 102,800–183,000 civilians (CAVR Executive Summary 2005). While transitional justice institutions, which were set up in Timor-Leste after its independence, acknowledged that the Indonesian intelligence operations sowed fear and suspicion among East Timorese people, the limitations of their mandates prevented them from investigating and prosecuting most of these acts. The war occurred in what Drexler (2013: 76) described as ‘gray zones of collaboration and betrayal’, wherein neighbours denounced neighbours as belonging to the resistance to either protect themselves or their families during the occupation. Many people also played as part of both sides, infiltrating the armed forces and the resistance to gain intelligence. Drexler argued that these institutions’ failure to address the poisonous consequences of this period, ‘coupled with the total impunity enjoyed by high-level planners and perpetrators, made resolution unusually difficult’ (Drexler 2013: 76).

The end of Timor-Leste’s occupation came after the fall of Indonesia’s authoritarian president, Suharto, in 1998. His successor, B.J. Habibie, unexpectedly announced a referendum for the East Timorese people. The two options offered were: (1) greater autonomy within Indonesia, or (2) self-determination (independence from Indonesia). The period surrounding the referendum was marked by voter intimidation from Indonesian-backed East Timorese militias (Robinson 2010). When the result was announced on 4 September 1999 in favour of independence (78.5 per cent), they retaliated with widespread violence, destroying 90 per cent of the territory’s infrastructure and forcibly displacing people into West Timor by forcing them over the border on trucks and boats (ICG 2011).

After the UNHCR ended their refugee status and all accompanying humanitarian aid at the end of 2002 (see Dolan et al. 2004), the Indonesian government continued to provide assistance to the remaining East Timorese refugees (pengungsi, I.) until 2005 when they ended this status permanently and formally ‘closed’ refugee camps. Thereafter, the welfare of those who chose to remain was a concern shifted to the provincial administrations. This shifting has had the greatest repercussions in NTT, which hosts the largest population of former refugees and is one of Indonesia’s provinces with the lowest average income and a high unemployment rate. Nowadays, government officials often respond to questions about assistance to the East Timorese former refugees by saying that ‘they [refugees] no longer exist’ (ICG 2011: 7).

Around 88,000 East Timorese currently live in West Timor (Damaledo 2018: 16). This figure includes an estimated 14,000 members of the Indonesian civil service and around 6,000 members of the military and police forces, along with their respective core and extended family members. Those who were recruited to the formal sector in the early years of the occupation (in the late 1970s) often began their career trajectory as military operational support, informants, and as members of civil defence patrols. They were eligible for Indonesian state pensions, as was the generation recruited after them. In addition to those who were working or had worked in the formal sector, many East Timorese are subsistence farmers who worked as sharecroppers on land owned by local West Timorese (Damaledo 2018: 14–16). They were not entitled to state pensions.

After the East Timorese were no longer formally recognised as refugees, the host population and local authorities would refer to them as ‘new residents’, ‘former refugees’ or as ‘ex-Timor–Timur residents’ (Damaledo 2014). These labels contribute to the ‘othering’ of the East Timorese, demarcating them from the remaining West Timor residents. The Indonesian government’s resettlement policy has further compounded their social exclusion by segregating resettlement sites and refugee camps from existing settlements (Soehadha 2019). Interlocutors of non-East-Timorese origins often described to me generalised perceptions about the East Timorese population in West Timor as ‘rough’ (kasar, I.) and not trustworthy. Relevant to these notions, is the fact that the former militias who terrorised the region in the early years of displacement continue to live among the displaced population. Moreover, ethnolinguistic and religious differences, and people’s frustrations over everyday discrimination, poor living conditions, and land issues often trigger conflicts at the local level between East Timorese youths and other groups (Maing and Jatmika 2021). During fieldwork in West Timor, I often encountered East Timorese people referring to themselves as pengungsi despite having had national identity for over a decade.

The Ambiguity of State Pensions, Exile, and Return

For those who worked in the formal sector, state pensions provided some degree of security for them and their family members when confronted with such marginalised living conditions. These pensions refer to a modest monthly income paid by the Indonesian government to civil servants who are no longer able to work; they aim to ensure that they do not live their later lives in a state of neglect. After Timor-Leste’s vote for independence in 1999, the Indonesian government terminated the civil service status and pension rights of East Timorese civil servants who had chosen to reject Indonesian citizenship. Those who decided to stay and who wished to continue their service in Indonesia were entitled to retain all their rights and benefits attached to the civil service status. The question of return was thus complicated by practical concerns and considerations related to future care for older people. Pensions are for life; they include health insurance and are fully administered by state-owned enterprises. In the event of the pensioner’s death, the pensions can be passed on to the widow(er) and child survivors.³ These payments symbolise the state’s recompense for the person’s years of work in government services.

However, it is precisely the notion of long-term service and the relationship between the individual and the state that creates ambiguity in relation to how the East Timorese perceive these pensions. These pensions speak symbolically to the past – to how the former occupying regime deepened political divisions by mobilising and militarising civilians as part of its wartime strategy. Before Indonesia’s democratisation in 1998, the civil service was not only heavily centralised but it made appointments that supported regime stability. Civil servants and their family members were also often expected to vote for the ruling regime’s political party (McLeod 2008), and in the East Timorese context for continued Indonesian occupation.

Thelen and Coe (2019) have argued that a focus on care for older people – through state pensions in this case – reveals how long-range temporalities and complex mutualities construct and reconstruct forms of political belonging. These processes of negotiating mutual obligations entail a notion of reciprocity whereby those who care for their country have the right to care from the state. Similarly, the research participants I spoke with emphasised the culturally-resonating notion of reciprocity in how they perceived the pensions (see Traube 2007 for a discussion on the East Timorese concept of reciprocity).

The East Timorese exile in West Timor, moreover, must be situated in broader context. Anthropological studies with East Timorese communities in Australia found that narratives of collective struggle for freedom (Wise 2006; Askland 2014) and imaginaries of return (Askland 2014) prominently shaped their exile identities. After independence, the East Timorese people had to re-establish a national identity beyond the bipolar opposition of the Indonesian occupation. Amanda Wise argues that this process included ‘exclusionary practices of cultural boundary making as means to eject whichever otherness seemed the biggest threat to a sense of “East Timorese identity”’ (2006: 178–9).

For the East Timorese in West Timor, their decision to stay in Indonesia gave rise to suspicions over their political loyalty. As exile and memory go together (Said 2001), a person’s past collaborations with the Indonesian state in the occupation period and, particularly, the violent crimes they committed against their communities and ancestral lands – or the suspicion thereof – shape relationships and experiences of inclusion and exclusion in the present. Practices of boundary making also draws on customary practices of conflict resolution. When disputes are deemed irreconcilable, conflicted parties often opt for geographical separation as the last resort (McWilliam 2007). Many of the East Timorese people with whom I spoke in West Timor link the idea of lengths of time spent away, or being excluded, from the place of origin with the perceived vengeance that others hold against them or their family members. The question of return thus involves issues of timing and familial relations over the life course.

Research Methods

This article draws from a multi-sited ethnographic study of the long-term legacies of the Indonesian occupation in Timor-Leste and, in turn, how East Timorese communities remember and experience them. Over a period spanning a decade, since 2010, I have carried out 22 months of fieldwork in both West Timor and Timor-Leste. I conducted participant observations, biographical, oral history, and expert interviews with East Timorese groups in the regencies of Kupang, Atambua, Belu and Kefamenanu in West Timor and the district of Oecussi, Timor-Leste.

Since 2018, this study has evolved to investigate ageing experiences in exile. I conducted multiple informal and in-depth interviews with an additional 40 East Timorese older adults living in West Timor, collected over numerous stays between 2019 and 2020. These interviews took place in their homes and often with other family members present, which allowed me to speak with them and observe intergenerational dynamics. The research used purposive sampling to reach a group of participants that are diverse in their ethnolinguistic and economic backgrounds, age, and gender. More than half of those interviewed were recipients of individual pensions or survivors’ pensions. The pension recipients were chiefly men, and the survivor-pension recipients were overwhelmingly women. While the sum of the pensions was modest, they provided a regular and – as this article will show – much-needed income for East Timorese households in West Timor.

I also interviewed East Timorese older women, widows and those who did not receive pensions. By ‘older interlocutors’, I refer to those who were around the age of 60 years or older when they were displaced or at the time of interview. This chronological age follows typical understandings of retirement age adopted by both Indonesia and Timor-Leste. However, in everyday usage, people understand older age as a social, cultural and relational category.

Time and the Ageing Body in Displacement

Recent scholarship has recognised the crucial role that time plays in migrants’ trajectories and experiences (Cwerner 2001; Griffiths 2014; Robertson 2019). Increasingly, temporality features in the literature on displacement. Scholars have discussed displacement as a period of being ‘out of time’ (Griffiths 2014; Norum, Mostafanezhad and Sebro 2016); as oscillating between crisis and waiting, abjection and hope (Brun 2015; Jefferson, Turner and Jensen 2019); and as a form of existential immobility or ‘stuckedness’ (Hage 2009). They have argued that thinking about time requires an analysis of space (Munn 1992), state borders (Sur 2020), and how immigration systems and states use time as a powerful technique of control (Bear 2016). Displacement creates multiple and conflicting temporalities at the same time. The ruptures and rifts between them can result in discordant temporalities (Cwerner 2001) and a sense of ‘temporal difference’ between displaced persons and others who physically share the same space (Griffiths 2014: 1992).

The ruptures and exclusions that displacement causes often linger and reverberate across generations, long after displaced persons receive national identity. Ramsay writes of displacement, thus, not as a liminal state resolved through attaining a legal status, but as an ‘existential experience of contested temporal being in which a person cannot reconcile the contemporary circumstances of their life with the aspirations for, and sense of, the future’ (Ramsay 2020: 4). As Feldman (2018: 15–16) evidenced in the Palestinian case, ‘the longevity of displacement’ also indicates the chronic need that displaced persons may have long after the point of exodus and the (im)possibility of fulfilling them. These needs may be less acute but no less fundamental, and propel people to a seemingly unending present. For the East Timorese, a temporal and spatial approach can further help to reveal the moments when ‘the refugee past punctures the resident present’ (Nguyen 2019: 109).

Kin relations are significant in helping displaced persons deal with the sense of stuckness and confinement. A person’s hope for a different future is often projected to the future of their kin. Jefferson et al. (2019) argue that ‘while individuals may see no way out of the present “circuit of confinement” … they continue to struggle “for the sake of” their offspring’ (Jefferson et al. 2019: 5). While these efforts are largely future-oriented, they are firmly rooted in the present and achieved amid the material scarcity of day-to-day life in displacement. Age and positions in the life course play a central role in kin relations and person’s perceptions of time. For migrants living through perpetual states of ‘temporariness’, for example, Amrith (2021: 130) found that ruptures along a migrant’s journey may disrupt ‘normative constructions of young people as highly mobile and older populations as immobile’. These constructions, she adds, may ‘overlook how youth mobility trajectories get “stuck” or how people’s lives may become more mobile at later moments in life’ (Amrith 2021:130). I find this perspective useful for the ethnographic cases discussed here, particularly in demonstrating how older East Timorese people’s access to pensions, or the necessity of extending their working life, challenge normative constructions of ageing bodies in exile as dependent and passive (Bolzman 2014).

A focus on the body, particularly on how the (ageing) body has been conceptualised as a crucial site for claiming citizenship and rights, can also be useful. Netz et al. (2019: 638) argue that ‘there is no innate quality to the body as a site for citizenship claims. Bodies are enacted. They only become distinct and significant when they are put in relation to historically and geographically differing norms and standards’. I use their approach to examine how ageing, gendered, marginalised, and racialised bodies are called upon or become relevant (or excluded) in the realm of citizenship through their claims to pensions and rights. These pensions entail biometric bureaucracies, as well as the temporal regulations constituting citizenship and ‘legality’. The following section demonstrates how pensions elevate the social value of ageing bodies in everyday family life while, at the same time, fixing them in time and space.

Caring Through Pensions: Biometric Bodies

Jacinta,⁴ a 62-year-old pensioner originally from Lospalos, Timor-Leste, lived with her two adult children in a neighbourhood comprised largely of resettled East Timorese families in Atambua. Her youngest son had recently graduated from university but had not yet found work. Her daughter was heavily pregnant at the time of interview and lived with her for familial support. The daughter’s husband had been long unemployed. Sitting next to me at her open terrace on a stifling August afternoon in 2019, Jacinta spoke about her daughter’s circumstances, ‘My daughter just passed the civil service test, thank God. She can start work after giving birth so I told her and her husband to just stay here’. She glanced around before lowering her voice, ‘That way, I can keep a close eye on them. There had been domestic violence between them in the past. The community leader thought it would be better if they stayed with me’.

Jacinta has another daughter who had returned to Timor-Leste and built a family of her own. Despite the long-distance and contemporary histories of violence surrounding the Indonesia–Timor-Leste border, Jacinta retained close transnational familial ties and communication. She visited family and her husband’s grave in their place of origin as often as she could, describing the joy these cross-border visits brought her. ‘I would live there if I could’, she said with bright eyes. Yet Jacinta regularly returned to Atambua to collect her pension payments. These payments were based on her being a legal resident living in the country. ‘I have to be there in person’, she said, referring to the bureaucracies regulating pension collection in Indonesia.

Like other pensioners in West Timor, whether they are originally from Timor-Leste or not, Jacinta had to personally visit the local bank on the date when the pension payments became available. On these monthly occasions, pensioners or pension recipients had to queue from early morning to authenticate their identities by showing their national identity card (kartu tanda penduduk or KTP, I.) and pension membership number. The bank would then transfer the pension payment to the authenticated person’s bank account so they could withdraw the cash. Everyday life in the semi-urban town of Atambua is heavily reliant on cash-based economies, which compelled pension recipients to make large cash withdrawals during these visits. In 2019, PT TASPEN, the state enterprise administering pension payments for former civil servants, began introducing a more ‘efficient’ and digitalised method of identity authentication, which used a biometric procedure via a smartphone application. Jacinta said of the new system:

Last month, they took pictures of me when I went to the bank to collect my pension salary. This is how it will be done from now on, they told me. I had to face the camera like this, open and close my eyes slowly like this. I had to turn my head, slowly, right and left, and then I had to open my mouth wide. Did they want to see my false teeth? They said that only by matching us with these pictures can they transfer our payments. Otherwise, they will block our account.

Pensioners must authenticate their identities on a regular basis to verify that they are the rightful recipients of the monthly pensions. Depending on whether they receive the veteran allowance, or individual or survivor pensions, they must verify their identity every one to three months. Jacinta told me, ‘There have been cases of fraud where the rightful recipients have long passed away, but someone else continues to claim the pensions. Perhaps that’s why the bank wants to see us in the flesh’.

The new biometric authentication system has been designed so that pensioners do not have to personally go to the banks (or post office). They can therefore avoid long waiting hours and are less likely to become targets of crimes due to their carrying large sums of money. However, in places where digital literacy and access to broadband internet are significantly limited, as in most areas across West Timor, and in situations where pensioners do not own a smartphone with a forward-facing camera, the procedure is instead done manually, as Jacinta described. However the pension recipients authenticate their identity, the procedure speaks to how governments rely on identification technologies, such as documents, photographs, and biometric surveillance, to make decisions about who belongs and who does not. To reiterate Jacinta’s words, such technologies establish ‘rightful’ recipients. At the same time, they define the direct link between bodies and objects of surveillance – specifically, ageing bodies and claims to the state.

Rao (2018: 69) has argued that new surveillance regimes are more fluid than rigid in practice. People craft what she calls ‘biometric bodies’ or ‘bodies in the making that are assembled by linking people and objects in ways considered advantageous for specific identity regimes’. In the case of electronic fingerprinting in India’s health care sector, she gives the example of how people adopt new bodily rules and habits, such as rigorous hand washing or rubbing their thumb on a hard surface, or mobilising family members to sign on their behalf when seeking a solution for when devices fail to read a person’s identity (Rao 2018). When Jacinta spoke about the new procedure for retrieving her pension, she described how it affected her travel between families and her desire to fulfil translocal care expectations. She was determined to live her later life with more mobility across borders, and so Jacinta found ways to circumnavigate the rigid mobility restrictions of pension bureaucracies and border regimes that had typically been created to fix people in place. She would stay in Timor-Leste for as long as a visiting visa would allow her (two months) without her pension account becoming blocked. Upon her return, she would promptly show up at the bank, so that they could authenticate her identity and unfreeze the account.

Jacinta’s case demonstrates quite literally the importance of the body in enacting her claim to her pension rights. She followed the rules by regulating the length of each stay abroad. Her years of service in the Indonesian public sector and her ageing body entitled her to state care for older people. This form of state care, in turn, provided her with a crucial resource for familial survival and created possible futures for younger generations of East Timorese in West Timor. The ageing body, or the physical presence of care, was also constructed as valuable in keeping certain other bodies – especially that of her pregnant daughter – out of harm’s way. Older parents in exile support their children not only in financial terms, but also in dealing with everyday social problems, such as domestic abuse and long-term unemployment, that are rooted in the legacies of past and present violence. In the next section, I elaborate on how temporalities of violence, pensions, and aspirations coalesce, and how ‘timing’ at the border plays an important role in older persons’ imaginaries of return.

Timing a Good Return

For the East Timorese in West Timor, people’s focus on the ‘here and now’ in exile could also be traced to their notions of what constitutes a good life. The parameters guiding such ideas may refer to where and when in a person’s life such livelihoods, security, and conviviality are deemed possible. These may change over time alongside the shifting aspirations of family members across different generations. Bastian’s case here demonstrates these shifts and the usefulness of a temporal perspective in understanding exile and people’s decision to experiment with re-inhabiting the world after conflict.

Bastian, a 67-year-old civil service pensioner in the Tuapukan camp, Kupang, spoke of his thoughts on life in exile and the idea of a return to Timor-Leste. Like most East Timorese who joined some combination of the Indonesian military, police force, or public administration in the early occupation period, his work trajectory began as a day-to-day assistant for the Indonesian security forces. During the invasion, his neighbours fled to the mountains and endured years of suffering in the mountains without enough food and clean water, and bore witness to countless deaths; however, Bastian did not. Instead, he helped Indonesian soldiers locate their hiding places so his neighbours could be eventually captured and brought back to town to ‘stabilise’ the region. His early days of collaborating with the Indonesian military led to him being rewarded with a position in the public administration within the occupying regime, but this constructed him as betraying his people.

After the exodus in 1999, Bastian stayed in West Timor to ‘be consistent’ with his political choice. But he also spoke of a fear of his former neighbours punishing him. He said, ‘I did not know what they would do with me had I chosen to return. Maybe they would kill me or make everyday life miserable for me’. When Bastian became displaced, he and his wife did not have the time to focus on anything else besides rebuilding life from scratch; they went from living under a tarpaulin tent to having a roof over their heads. He chose to retain his Indonesian civil service status as a teacher and was immediately transferred to work in a school in NTT’s capital, Kupang. They invested all their attention, money, and time on their children’s education in Indonesia so that, ‘one day, they become “good people”’, he said when I interviewed him in his modest living room. Framed photographs of his wife decorated one side of the room.

Their three children all grew up in Timor-Leste until their later school years. They went to local colleges in Kupang and, upon graduating, chose to return to Timor-Leste. ‘They wanted to go back and build their lives there. In their hearts, they are East Timorese’, Bastian said, leaning back on the chair. His face brightened up, ‘They have been there for many years now. While they are there, they try to reconnect with former neighbours so that, one day, it could be possible for me to permanently return’, he said with a smile.

He returned for the first time two years before the interview. He went to perform his wife’s funerary rituals after living for nearly 20 years in exile.

Her wish was to be buried in her hometown, in Lospalos. When my wife died and we transported her body across the border, that was my first time going back. I remember my body shaking so hard with fear at the border. I thought old neighbours would attack me or kill me in my sleep. For sure, they were cold with me at first. They pretended not to see me when we passed each other on the street or at the market. But after a week, they said, “We are all old now, what harm could we do to one another?” One old neighbour said, “Good you waited this long to return. If you had come back any earlier, we would have beaten you up!” I just laughed. Since then, I visit my children in Dili every year and we go to Lospalos together.

Bastian’s narrative invokes what Sur (2020: 548) writes about borders consisting of both spatial and temporal phenomena. The borders between Indonesia and Timor-Leste define the territorial limits of nation states. Here, they also symbolise Bastian’s ruminations on years of potential bodily harm or even death, which he linked to the acts of crossing the border and returning. These concerns kept him in a state of existential immobility. Borders, in this sense, embody the enduring legacies of deeply rooted conflicts that separate people into distinct geographies of moral belongings. Yet these lines are far from fixed. The forces of time and kinship can shift stringent borders and enable entry for those exiled. I have observed among many East Timorese interlocutors how landmark events in the life cycle, such as death, create a frenzied time in which familial and cultural obligations can eclipse personal concerns for one’s safety or potential rejection. Other life events, such as marriage and the transition to adulthood, can also enable the re-entry of younger generations of East Timorese people who aspire to return to their country of origin. Sur’s concept of ‘time consciousness at borders’ is crucial in this process (Sur 2020: 550). Timing one’s return, as Bastian shows us, involves volitional affective work on ruptured relationships, either done personally or by proxy, across time, space and generations (Sakti 2017).

Timing a good or final return also relates to how one constructs the ageing body. Bastian’s narrative revealed that although his temporal horizon had begun to open with the experience of a better-than-expected reception back home, he did not want to forgo his pension rights in Indonesia. ‘I will only return for good when my body has become too frail and can no longer do anything besides wait to be lowered into the ground’, he said with determination.

As long as I am still fit, I will stay here to collect my pensions, even though I live in a camp. My children do not ask me to send them money. Instead, they tell me to enjoy the fruits of my long-time labour.

Precarious Futures and Debt

Bastian’s last point touches on the sense of deservingness, which I will discuss in the next section. For now, however, I would like to return to Marley. His peers from Timor-Leste were all roughly between 19 and 25 years old, which meant that they had largely grown up during the time when their country had gained full independence. Whenever Marley spoke with them about the living conditions in the camps and at the resettlement sites, he would mention his mother’s pensions as a reason for staying. His answer focused on the material aspect of what made their everyday life in exile possible. Thus, his narrative allowed people (and the narrator) to reorient themselves; to shift typical constructions of the East Timorese exile from ones that are fixated on the past – of betrayal and conflict – to narratives that instead spotlight welfare issues and structural violence in the present.

Marley presented a list of these welfare issues and ongoing structural violence to the workshop participants, which included: chronic poverty, no land ownership for a population made up mostly of agricultural farmers, parents unable to afford providing for their children’s educational and nutritional needs, young adults being forced to migrate and work in exploitative labour conditions, discrimination due to their displaced or refugee status, and difficulties in finding work due to suspicions that the local population harbour against East Timorese people. He identified the root cause of these issues to be the Indonesian state’s deliberate neglect of the rights of residents from the former East Timor province (warga eks-TimTim, I.). At the end of his presentation, he asked a room full of tearful participants: ‘Don’t we deserve to have a future too?’

Pension recipients have the opportunity to take up larger loans from banks that offer ‘pension credit’ with the condition that they deposit their official civil service pension document. These loans come with low interest rates, and they are paid in instalments over a long period of time. Only pensioners can apply for such loans and, in turn, they finance the younger generation’s future aspirations or planned projects. Pensioners’ loans are used, for example, to pay for younger family members’ university tuition fees, migration to other regions in Indonesia or abroad for work, as well as to create livelihoods by opening a small shop and purchasing a motorcycle to drive as a taxi-bike (ojek, I.).

The task of paying the instalments, however, did not fall only on the pensioners themselves. All family members were typically expected to help, even if this help could only materialise in the far future. Thus, when mentioning pensions, people would also speak of the monthly deductions needed to pay for instalments. Debt compels people to stay in place and focus on the familial and economic pressures of the here and now (see Perez-Rivera, this issue). Getting out of debt, however, did not automatically occur with the completion of schooling, training, or migration projects. Prejudice against the East Timorese population presented difficulties for younger East Timorese to find secure employment. Listening to Marley’s presentation, Lina, another East Timorese youth who also grew up in West Timor, told me after the workshop that her many attempts at finding work often failed at the interview stage. She said:

One time in Atambua, I applied for a job right after finishing secretary school. During the interview, the person asked me where I was from ‘originally’ and I answered Timor-Leste. She asked, ‘Are you a pengungsi (refugee, I.)?’

‘Yes’, I said, startled.

She asked again, ‘Do you do any extracurricular activities with other pengungsi?’

What she was indirectly asking was whether I took part in martial arts groups. People here associate East Timorese youth from refugee camps with violent martial groups and believe that they cannot be trusted.

Lina’s narrative demonstrates how their younger and racialised bodies (‘They looked at my darker skin tone’) were temporally fixed to the imaginaries of ‘rough, violent, and untrustworthy’ East Timorese. Lina aspired to gain a civil service position, but her multiple experiences of rejection left her dispirited to even try. Both Marley and Lina grew up largely in Indonesia, and so their conception of home and their emotional attachment to place may differ from those of their parent’s generation or those who spent the formative years of their lives in Timor-Leste. Their experience may not be one of ‘temporary exile’ (cf. Wise 2006), but rather one that is focused on improving the conditions of the displaced East Timorese population (understood as rightful residents in general) and opening up temporal horizons for this population, which seemed closed (see Heidbrink this issue).

The Politics of Deservingness

A notion of deservingness is inherent in the narratives above. People merit care, protection, and recognition from the state based on the rights and responsibilities that come with citizenship. The East Timorese interlocutors who served in the Indonesian public sector described pensions as a form of recognition. Bastian described them as the ‘fruits of labour’. Pensions give people a reason to stay amid ongoing structural violence in exile and the uncertainty they attach with returning to their places of origin. They also provide care in times of illness and a way of reimagining time in exile. But what happens when such a valuable resource is absent from everyday family life?

Damaledo (2018) argues that the East Timorese in West Timor do not dwell on their situation of disadvantage but rather find ways of adapting to difficulties. Those who were displaced as agricultural farmers entered sharecrop agreements with local land owners. Some cultivated crops on government-owned land, such as the hills by roadsides, and they risked getting in trouble with the authorities. Since the exodus in 1999, East Timorese men have maintained an active role in mobilising protests and political rallies ‘to challenge the way the Indonesian government delivers services to them’ (Damaledo 2018: 152). Diasporic associations, such as KOKPIT (National Committee of East Timor Political Victims), were established in part to continually remind the Indonesian state that they existed and continued to struggle. They enlisted narratives of ‘loyalty’ to the Indonesian flag and the ‘sacrifice’ of having to leave their homeland to advocate better living conditions, land ownership, and housing on behalf of the East Timorese population in West Timor. Recently, these diasporic associations demanded veteran status for East Timorese men who joined Indonesian-backed militia groups and instigated the violence in 1999 but were not eligible for pensions (Wilibardus 2020).

Behind the scenes of these political rallies are the families trying to make ends meet without pensions. People of all genders have taken on various forms of physical labour for subsistence reasons at well over what is considered as retirement age. As one interlocutor said to me, ‘As long as our bodies are still strong (kuat, I.), we have to work. We have to go to the field, or break stones, or whatever opportunity the day brings us. How else are we supposed to survive?’ Throughout my research, I observed how older East Timorese, particularly older women, were often the backbones of their families. They had the knowledge of how to work the land with their hands, while the younger generation often did not, and they provided familial and emotional care to their children and grandchildren. In times when younger family members’ future aspirations get ‘stuck’ in exile, the older members must persist in working to provide.

Concluding Remarks

My interest in East Timorese interlocutors’ narratives of pensions was sparked by the stories of those who spoke about their presence and absence in exile. I have analysed these narratives in terms of time and temporality, displacement, and the body. In so doing, I have shown that several issues are at stake: political belonging, a sense of futurity, and constructions of older age. This article has shown that understanding displacement as an existential condition, rather than as a liminal state resolved through resettlement, reveals experiences of discordant temporalities that continue to shape the lives of multi-generational families in exile. East Timorese families’ reliance on state pensions further reveals the ongoing structural violence they face in Indonesia, long after attaining a legal citizenship status. The cases of Marley and Lina reveal the sense of temporal difference they experience in a place they consider home as a result of ongoing discrimination against the East Timorese population. Younger people experience ruptures in their life trajectories, feeling frustrated time after time with their marginalised conditions and difficulties in realising their aspirations. This, in turn, extends the caring responsibilities of older people who either receive regular (albeit small) pensions or who must extend their working life, engaging in physical labour.

The ethnographic cases in Jacinta and Bastian’s stories show how older exiles are far removed from the imaginary of burdensome bodies that are non-viable actors in displacement. On the contrary, it is often older East Timorese in Indonesia who are the family backbones in exile. Biometric bureaucracies directly link pensioners’ bodies with rights and care for older people, but they also fix them in time and space. For the interlocutors of this study, focusing on the here and now in exile did not necessarily mean that those receiving pensions intend to stay in exile forever. When we think of time, we must also think of the finality of death. Thus, Jacinta and Bastian spoke of their later-life aspirations of returning to their places of origin before that time comes. Their narratives hint at Marley’s words that opened this article, which were laden with uncertainty and hope, captured in his statement ‘our river flows here for now’. These narratives also point to how people construct ‘older age’ as an active period of time compared with the time of return, when they wait to die. These insights challenge the linear assumptions often associated with displaced persons’ lives. By attending to how people focus on and inhabit the here and now, discussed here through pensions, the analysis reveals personalised and collective ways of reimagining exile.

Special Issue title

‘Living in the Here and Now’: Extended Temporalities of Forced Migration.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to all the individuals and families who participated in this study in Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Special thanks to Megha Amrith, Thomas Stodulka, Andy Hodges and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the previous drafts of this paper. Finally, I thank Deastry Taek, who provided excellent assistance during my multiple research stays in West Timor, Indonesia.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Max Planck Society, Research Group “Ageing in a Time of Mobility”.

Notes on contributors

Victoria K. Sakti

Victoria K. Sakti is a social and cultural anthropologist and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany. She has carried out long-term research with East Timorese groups in Indonesia and Timor-Leste with a current focus on ageing, forced displacement, violence, memory and emotions. Her publications deal with older refugee experiences, transnational family care, pursuits of a good life and death, local idioms of distress, social repair, and thetemporal dimensions of displacement.

Notes

1 The Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste is the official name of the country. I use the term ‘East Timorese’ in its adjectival form in this article to refer to people originally from Timor-Leste. All names are pseudonyms and the Indonesian terms used indicated as (I.).

2 This workshop was part of a broader human rights curriculum organised by Asia Justice and Rights (AJAR) and CIS-Timor. It brought together the same groups of youths annually and in locations that alternated between places across the Indonesia and Timor-Leste border. When I was welcomed to observe one of the workshops, the trust and friendship that the participants had built with one another quickly became obvious to me. Thus, when doing presentations, they seemed at ease with one another in sharing intimate and difficult details about their lives.

3 For more on the topic of Indonesian state pensions and their regulations, see: https://ngada.org/uu11–1969.htm

4 I have introduced the case of Jacinta in a previous publication in which I discussed her attained mobility and position in family care arrangements (Sakti 2020).