Social Freedom What Concept of Freedom reflected in Xanana Gusmao’s Poems is

49 these two colonial cultures. During Portuguese colonialization, Timorese were forced to leave their way of life because the colonizer thought that Timorese culture was backward and inferior to Portuguese. Meanwhile, during Indonesian occupation, cultural imperialism was known as Indonesianisation; everything related to the Timorese culture was banned. Both Portuguese and Indonesia use “Common cultural values” as political rhetoric in order to justify colonialism. Common cultural values are also as fabric of public education where mainstream students are taught to celebrate the new form of tradition, a tradition that colonizers claim is unique and represents both colonized and colonizers; in fact, common cultural values are just the form of control by colonizers to keep their influence over the colonized. Cultural imperialism is the practice of promoting and imposing a culture which is politically powerful for colonizers to occupy colonized or „less potent societies‟. The form of cultural identity imposed by Portuguese to the Timorese is the term maubere or known as “Other” to marginalize Timorese. Xanana as leader and a poet use maubere as a new identity. He argues that identity is freedom. It is in the name of identity of maubere that he rises against oppression and also it is in the name of identity that he fights against degradation. Moreover, in the name of identity, he also affirms the dignity of the Timorese. Maubere People, clench your fists, The hour is yours, Maubere And your defiance will bring down the walls of your own enslavement 50 Maubere People, confront and face yourself in the long march of liberation. Liberate yourself Be strong Be Maubere Xanana, 1975-1999, stanza 2, lines 1-5, stanza 3, lines 1-5 Two stanzas above reveal that the Timorese found shared common identity in the word maubere „maubere people‟. The term was used by Portuguese to marginalize the Timorese as uneducated or inferior to colonizers, and also known among Indonesian officers to refer them as backward and lazy. The term Maubere is a newly found identity established that is need by Xanana to struggle against colonialist ideology of the colonized inferiority and bring freedom to Timorese. As shown in lines “Maubere peopleconfront and face yourself in the long march of liberationLiberate yourselfBe strong Be Maubere ”, this is in line with Fanon‟s in Barry, Peter. 1995:193 idea that colonized people have to regain what has been devalued by colonizers in the past in order to be free and to reclaim their identity. In order to set them free, the colonized people need to reclaim and reconstruct their own history of the negative or non-existence of what is produced by the colonizers. Meanwhile, Said in Bressler, 1999: 267 stated that colonized people must question their existence in order to understand one‟s identity. Maubere as a new identity brings new existence and road to freedom of the Timorese. The concept of freedom that Xanana portrays through “maubere” is that one‟s freedom is determined by hisher existence as „existential freedom‟; this refers to the freedom of individual in the universe. „Be maubere‟ or the Timorese is to be 51 their own self to determine their own existence. Through his first work, Fanon observed that, “The body of history does not determine a single one of my actions. I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical instrument hypothesis that I will initiate the cycle of my freedom” qtd in, Black WorldNegro Digest 1973: 32. When the Timorese use the term maubere as their identity, they have built their own foundation. If interpreted in existentialist term, maubere comes very close to Sartres 1946 idea that one is creating his own essence. Through this poem, Xanana also portrays social freedom. Social freedom gives Timorese an opportunity to achieve the goal of social development and improvement, since being under colonizer is only oppression and force labour. Social freedom implies the creations and preservation of condition in which each nation can develop their economy and culture according to their own value without colonizers intervention. This is the freedom of the state and its society, where each society has their right to be free from any oppression or colonialism from other societies, particularly from the West. Its defining characteristics are: consciousness of freedom, self- expression and obedience to one‟s self. Maubere is the concept that does not only represent the Timorese identity and as a frontier but also as a concept of freedom; this is quite similar to the concept of the Negritude, the common shared identity that sets Timorese and African free from colonialism. Maubere and Negritude are the concepts of freedom for the Timorese and African. The concepts of maubere and Negritude have brought new identity that