Travelling and multiscaler memory: Remembering East Timor’s Santa Cruz massacre from the transnational to the intimate

Abstract

This article tracks the memory of East Timor’s Santa Cruz massacre across time and space, attending to the multiple scales at which it is imbued with meaning. While footage of the massacre initially had a strong impact in the west, helping to mobilise new audiences and spark a new wave of international solidarity for East Timor’s independence, the memory of Santa Cruz has now come ‘home’, increasingly solidifying as a foundational narrative of the Timor-Leste state. Ethnographic attention to the intimate scale, including the home and the neighbourhood, reveals, however, that Santa Cruz exceeds its ‘national’ meanings. In these spaces the families and friends of the dead communicate with, and care for, them, and the spirits of those whose bodies have not been recovered activate a questioning of continuous losses and absences. The case study demonstrates that an analysis of ‘travelling’ memory through a multiscaler lens can provide a fuller picture of its social and political import. It also shows how ethnographic methods can generate rich insights into the intersections between the transnational, national and intimate and shed light on the affective power of lived, embodied memory.