Asakiyume mita

So, you're growing up in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, and you're taking ballet lessons, and you're pretty dang good at it, good enough to think about being a professional dancer, but you find yourself thinking, "You know . . . it's a bit narrow. And I am not sure I can live up to my bladey surname as a ballerina." You've always loved Indonesia--you learned your first words of Indonesian at four--so you study the language in college, where you also come to hear about the plight of East Timor, at that time occupied by Indonesia. Genocidally occupied: an estimated quarter of the population of East Timor were killed in the early years of the occupation.

May I present to you Kirsty Sword Gusmão




So in her twenties, Kirsty ups and goes to Jakarta as a foreign aid worker . . . annnnd then somehow manages to become an, um, "clandestine activist" is what Wikipedia calls it, code name Ruby Blade, working for the Timorese resistance.



That's right. Tutoring Timorese students in English was her gateway drug; next thing you know, she's sneaking messages to and from the Timorese resistance hero Xanana Gusmão, who's serving a 20-year sentence in Cipinang Prison for his separatist work. In a 2002 interview she said,

Basically, the correspondence to and from the prison was thanks to the eminently corruptible nature of the guards that worked in this high-security prison. Salaries were extremely low. People were very open to doing extracurricular activities, if you like, including couriering letters in and out of the prison.

At one point, she and a colleague managed to sneak seven East Timorese men to safety in foreign embassies in Jakarta by posing as a businesswoman who worked in the building the embassies were in. She'd cased the building beforehand, so when stopped by a guard, she said she and the men were on their way to the Revlon Cosmetics office, which happened to be in the same building.

During all this, she and Xanana fell in love¹--this despite never having met in person. She did finally manage to sneak in to meet him by pretending she was visiting an uncle serving time there (not really her uncle; just a random Australian imprisoned there for fraud). In a 2005 interview, she said,

Quite by chance, there was an Australian who was in prison with Xanana on charges of fraud. Anyway, we decided to make John Edwards into Uncle John. Uncle John. Your Uncle John. Christmas time I turned up at the prison, looking just like Little Red Riding Hood with my basket of goodies for Uncle John and extremely innocent and managed to smuggle my way into the prison with a group of Indonesian well-wishers including some fellow human rights activists. And we managed to spend probably about three or four hours together during this Christmas ceremony which was quite remarkable.

Eventually Xanana was released, the two of them got married, and in 2002 he became the first president (and now he's the prime minister). In addition to having three kids, Kirsty founded the Alola Foundation, originally to raise awareness about sexual violence against women, but later moving on to more general women's issues, like maternal and child health, employment, women's status, etc.

And now there's a movie about her: Alias Ruby Blade.

Watch on Vimeo

Alias Ruby Blade: a Story of Love and Revolution from Alexander Meillier on Vimeo.

She recently was diagnosed with breast cancer, but she's taking it all in stride, and I feel pretty sure she's going to wrestle it into submission. Chin up, Kirsty!



Sources:
2002 Interview: "Dangerous Liaison"
2005 Interview: Enough Rope"


¹Xanana, who's 20 years older than Kirsty, did have a wife from his youth. This fact pained me. Throwaway wives: not good. However, two ameliorating factors. First, it seems as if the two had grown distant even before Kirsty entered the scene. The wife had fled to Australia and Xanana was in prison. And second, he's continued to be involved with his kids by his first wife. But who knows. That's their personal story, and there may be some badness and sadness in it, but who among us is without sin?