A Story of East Timor
Luis Cardoso's beautifully lyrical memoir of growing up in East Timor portrays a people and a culture struggling to form their own identity under successive waves of colonialism. Its central image is "travessia", a crossing: between child and adult, Portuguese and Timorese, tolerance and repression, colonialism and independence.
Through this personal story of modern Timor is woven a subtle but sharp public history of the political identities forming in the face of the coming storm: a dreamy goalkeeper-poet becomes a guerrilla leader; a fiesty journalist becomes an international presence who will one day win the Nobel Peace Prize.
