Violence, Resistance, and Reconciliation: A Mimetic Analysis of East Timorese Storytelling

I will explore some aspects of violence and group reconciliation by analyzing events in a border town called Suai, between East and West Timor, in 1999, with the help of the insights of René Girard. To shed light on the nature of state-sanctioned violence and the process of reconciliation and remembrance, I will draw on existing sources that have documented the events in Suai in 1999, particularly focusing on one witness's recollections of what occurred after the massacre that took place there. This essay will argue that the massacre in Suai shows the systematic nature of the violence perpetrated by the state during the Indonesian occupation of East Timor, and that the group reconciliation after the massacre shows how the Timorese came to terms with the systematic violence perpetrated against them. In particular, it will posit that the awareness of the victim was important for group reconciliation and truth-telling within the context of the Christian faith of the East Timorese. The essay cannot give an exhaustive analysis of all aspects of 1999 but will give a Girardian perspective that may help us to understand some elements of how storytelling based on recognition of the victim informs reconciliation and disrupts the violent imagination of the state.

Mimetic Theory and "A Different Story"

As is well known, through literary and anthropological analysis, Girard has proposed that humans are uniquely structured by their imitated or mimetic desire, that is, that humans desire according to the desire of another. ¹ Humans are brought into relationship by shared desires that form human identity. However, when common objects of desire are fought over, mimetic desire is distorted into rivalry and conflict. The accumulation of these conflicts results in cultural breakdown. According to Girard, these rivalries are resolved in the unification of desire that occurs in scapegoating a victim; for example, Oedipus is identified as a scapegoat for the plague occurring in Thebes. This scapegoating produces a newfound cultural unity and order built on the lie of unanimous violence that the victim is guilty. To perpetuate this cultural order, Girard says that sacrificial rituals emerge to imitate the original scapegoating violence, and myths develop to render the violence as legitimate. In his analysis of ancient and modern literature and culture, Girard found that the scapegoating that lay at the heart of human culture was discussed in a different way by the Bible than as seen in comparable myths. Girard argues that the victim's role in culture and myth is steadily exposed by the Hebrews and is definitively revealed in Christ, who is killed as victim and is claimed to reveal God as his forgiveness exposes the distorted cycle of desire and violence.

James Alison has this to say about the implications of Girard's analysis:

Girard's thought is, above all, shown in the reading of texts. Anyone who has read any of his books, whether on myths or the Bible, Shakespeare, Proust or Dostoyevsky, Freud, Levi-Strauss or Nietzsche, cannot but see that what Girard does is read texts. Most of those who attempt to learn from his thought do likewise. Again, it is not just that there is an idea, and that the idea needs texts in order to show itself. I think that there is a more profound point here about the nature of truth-seeking: the idea can only be made present as the undoing of the various forms of sacrificial cover-up to which our texts and stories are prone. The idea just is the gradual, and contingent, undoing of lies. There is no "idea" without the contemporary putting of it into practice as a detection of sacrificial structure and the learning to tell a different story. ²

Girard is concerned with the uncovering of the victim and the consequences of mimetic desire in human culture. This uncovering can only occur as it is put into practice in people's lives in order to tell "a different story." Therefore, the unmasking of the victim and distorted desire is not solely an academic exercise in which the object is...