Literary Masks and Metaphysical Truths: Intimations from Timor

By eliciting the ways in which five motifs combine and recombine in the oral narratives of the Tetum, a population residing on the island of Timor in Indonesia, this article presents the argument that oral literature in a nonliterate society may provide a mode for transmitting ideas of a metaphysical nature. The principal metaphysical idea defined by the interplay of these motifs in Tetum literature is that spirit and matter are transformations of each other, and a comparative survey suggests the likelihood that these motifs may be used in similar fashion in the literatures of people elsewhere in Indonesia as well as in mainland Southeast Asia and New Guinea. One of these motifs identifies the female sex as the transformer bringing about metaphysical and social transformations, confirming a previous finding that in Tetum gender symbolism this sex is associated with the conjunctive aspects of the cosmos.