‘Here for Now’: Temporalities of Ageing and Forced Displacement Through Pension Narratives

Abstract

Based on long-term ethnographic research with East Timorese multi-generational families displaced from Timor-Leste to Indonesia in 1999, this paper examines the temporalities of displacement. It focuses on the lived experiences of refugees turned residents to challenge the linear assumptions often associated with their lives. Drawing on people’s narratives of state pensions, provided by the Indonesian state to former civil servants of East Timorese origins, as reason for staying, the article demonstrates how ongoing displacement conditions and legacies of violence compel them to focus on the here and now. These narratives provide insights into how people (re)configure political belonging, familial care, and aspirations over time, space and generations. The article reveals how displacement creates multiple and conflicting temporalities that can generate ruptures in younger people’s life trajectories while stretching older people’s temporal horizons and responsibilities to provide. In facing marginalised living conditions and various forms of exclusions, older East Timorese maintain life in the present via their ageing bodies through biometric bureaucracies associated with claiming pensions or through extending their working life. These insights importantly challenge imaginaries that depict later life as a stage of dependency and economic unviability in exile.

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