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the colonizer plays an important role in the anti-colonial struggle for liberation and their identity. Post-colonial theory allows the third world writers to look at their own
history and put across their own perspective on how to reclaim their past and to erode the colonialist ideology by which the past had been devalued. Post-colonial theory
also expresses the Eurocentric universalism in taking for granted both the superiority of what the European or the Western is and the inferiority of what is not. In the case
of Timorese independence, the postcolonial theory is to reveal what elements in Xanana‟s poems that reflect Timorese in search of freedom.
a. Search for Identity
Frantz Fanon in Barry, 1961: 193 argues that colonized people have to regain what has been devalued by colonizer to them in the past and to erode
colonialist ideology in order to be free and reclaim their identity. Fanon 1967 says that colonized peoples were made to feel inferior and
alienated from their culture because the history, culture, customs and belief of the colonizers were promoted universal, normative and superior. In order to achieve their
independence, colonized people need to reclaim and reconstruct their own history of the negative or non-existent versions of it as produced by the colonizers. Hence,
Edward Said in Bressler, 1999: 267 states that he or she or „colonized people‟ must question their existence in order to understand one‟s identity:
An author must ask himself or herself three questions: who am I? How did I develop into the person that I am? To what country or countries or to what
cultures am I forever linked? In asking the first question, a colonized author is connecting himself or herself to historical roots. By asking the second
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question, the author is admitting a tension between these historical roots and the new culture or hegemony imposed on the writer by conquerors. And by
asking the third question, the writer confronts the fact that he or she both individual and social is created and shaped by the dominant culture Said in
Blessler 1999: 267. The question of identity becomes important for people in the third world
countries to find common identity as a way forward to liberate their country. Timor Leste, a country under Portuguese rule and Indonesian military occupation, needs to
find common identity. The way to identify common identity is through the word maubere.
The word maubere was used by the Portuguese to marginalize Timorese. Maubere
means uneducated or inferior in the eye of the colonizer; however for the Timorese, maubere became their new identity. Frontier has a dual function, as an
imagined community and as national consciousness. The imagined community has certain boundaries geographically. As national consciousness, maubere creates
imaginative boundaries between people of Timor Leste who feel oppressed, poor, backward, uneducated and destitute nation oppressed by the Portuguese and
Suharto‟s military regime. During Suharto‟s military occupation, Xanana Gusmao used maubere, not only as a symbol of struggle but also as a political tool to gain
international recognition of Timor Leste. maubere is similar to the concept of “Negritude.”
The Negritude is Africans‟ common identity and common purposes in order
to move forward in building a better-civilized society. Negritude represents not only Africans but also the other nations under Western hegemony in fighting for
