Why I Write About Papua

Why I Write About West Papua

Because I cannot Write About Anything Else

Some topics are chosen by a writer. Others choose the writer. Papua did not become my subject; Papua is my condition. I am a wound caused by the civilisational psycho-cosmocide project that seeks to heal through writing.

Some writers choose their own topics. Others choose the writer. Papua did not become my subject; Papua is my condition. I am a wound caused by the civilisation-wide project of psycho-cosmocide that seeks to heal through writing.

I did not wake up one morning and decided to study, analyse and craft careful arguments about it for distant institutions. Papua came to me like a wound — not chosen or invited, but simply there. Carried in the blood. Encoded in the body before language existed to name it. It lives in the part of myself that existed before the colonial world arrived with its definitions, categories, maps, mirrors, courts, churches and precise instructions for who I was supposed to become. Ultimately, I became someone, but now I am a betrayed, wounded, disrespected, rejected, neglected, tortured and tormented Papuan being, as the world continues to try to bury me in the dungeon of global psycho-cosmocide networks.

Being Papuan today is not just a biographical detail or an ethnicity on a form. It is a cosmological condition — a way of being rooted in a particular land, ancestral lineage and dreamtime reality that perceives itself as ancient and knows its own depths. This way of being represents a meaning of what it means to be human that existed before humanity ever built a wall. Before Sumer, Eridu, Egypt, Nineveh, Jerusalem, Troy, Athens, Rome and London emerged and declared themselves civilisations. Before the concepts of God or Allah were created. Before kings and queens were crowned. Before writing was developed. Before the virus of Psycho-Cosmocide was designed, weaponised and released into the bloodstream of the world's oldest natural peoples. I refer to that age as ‘ natural’ because that was reality before civilisational psycho-cosmocide. It wasn’t perfect, but the idea of perfection is a myth, invented to justify crimes against life on this planet, just like other ideas such as democracy, civilisation, and so on...

My memory, which is now largely poisoned, erased, buried and occupied, is older than time as measured by the modern world. It is older than the concepts of heaven and hell. Older than civilisation itself. It is older than the word 'Papua', a name given by outsiders to something that existed in fullness and wholeness long before any outsider arrived to name it.

That is what I carry. I do not write about Papua; Papua writes me. Papua is not my subject; I am Papua’s subject.

But this reality is occupied - not only militarily and politically, but also internally, in the minds of my people, in the language our children are learning, whose grammar carries a foreign cosmology and hierarchy of what is real and what is not, and who is fully human and who is not. It is in the stories they are told from birth about who they are, where they come from, and what they are worth.

The coloniser's myths have crossed the final frontier — the border of consciousness itself — and have become entrenched as if they had always been there. As if they belong. As if the reality they replaced was never real to begin with.

The Psycho-Cosmocide is active. And its process is total. It rewires and decodes. It recodes and downloads. It uploads foreign architectures of reality into minds designed to contain something entirely different. It resets, disfigures, refigures, deforms and reforms the original natural mind. It quietly and systematically deletes ancestral memory, cosmological knowledge, Dream-time language, sacred geography, and the living relationship between a people and the land that has shaped them generation after generation.

****-Psycho-Cosmocide erases them until nothing is left to erase. After the virus finishes, it calls the result 'progress', developed, successful, Christian, Muslim, professor, governor, president, minister, general, king, queen, and so on, and sorts everything until the ecology of the natural living system is completely torn apart—reduced to emptiness, nothingness, meaninglessness, valuelessness, uselessness, and powerlessness. Then, this rewired human being emerging from the process is called 'modern'. Educated. Developed. Saved.

I write because I know what was there before the deletion began, before the pandemic started, infection began, diseases began, psycho cosmocide began.  

I write because not all of Papua’s original and natural is gone. There are still survivors, memory keepers, ancient warriors, guardians of the forest, and protectors of knowledge, wisdom, fire, water, land, winds, food, and seeds.

I write because what remains-even as embers, even as fragments, even as the faintest signal beneath decades of colonial noise — is worth more than everything the modern world has offered in exchange for it.

I write because the world has decided that Papua does not exist.

There is a kind of violence that carries no weapon. It does not announce itself. It leaves no visible marks. It operates through decisions made quietly and repeatedly over decades in corporate boardrooms, foreign ministries, international newsrooms, and the conference rooms of institutions that claim to speak for humanity. This decision is that certain people, stories and sufferings simply do not rise to the threshold of the world's attention. West Papua has endured this violence for more than sixty years.

There have been military operations that have claimed tens of thousands of lives — these are documented but not widely known. Transmigration policies have rendered Papuans a minority on their own ancestral land — a fact that is seldom discussed. Journalists are forbidden from entering. Activists are imprisoned for raising a flag. Children are systematically and deliberately taught to be ashamed of their faces, languages, and cosmological beliefs. An unprecedented ecological and human tragedy is unfolding across not just West Papua but the entire island of New Guinea, involving international, regional, national, and village networks of highly organised criminal gangs that hide behind the curtains of religion, government, and various institutions established, controlled, and run by civilisational Psycho-Cosmocide.  These things are happening now. Today. Not in the past. Now. And the world looks elsewhere. That looking elsewhere is not ignorance. It is a choice. It has architects. It has beneficiaries. The silence surrounding West Papua is not empty — it is full. Full of oil, gold, copper, timber, and exotic animals, and full of strategic calculations about which relationships must be maintained and which people can be sacrificed to maintain them. When I write, I refuse that silence.

Every word is an assertion of our presence — a declaration that we exist, that what is happening is real, and that the world cannot remain comfortably unaware. Writing about Papua breaks through the silence that power has spent sixty years constructing. Through the power of testimony and record, we declare: you will not erase us from the story of this Earth.

I write because Psycho-Cosmocide is the crime no one has named.

I have spent years grappling with a question that would not let me go. Why do familiar frameworks such as genocide, ecocide, ethnocide, epistemicide, colonialism and human rights violations feel inadequate when describing what has happened and is still happening to the Papuan people? These frameworks are not wrong. But they are incomplete. They only scratch the surface of something that runs far deeper than any existing legal or political category.

What has been done to Papua is not just physical. It is metaphysical. The attack has been on the inner world — the cosmological architecture through which a Papuan understands existence, purpose, life and death, and how to pass this knowledge on to future generations. The ancestral memory, the spiritual geography, the dream-time reality in which land, ancestors, and ceremony hold a cosmic order together between all living beings, entities, and dimensions. When you destroy these things, you are not just taking a people's land. You take their reality. You make them strangers to themselves — people who look in the mirror and see the coloniser's assessment looking back. They are people who have been so thoroughly rewired that they can no longer access the original signal of their own being. This is psycho-cosmocide: the systematic, invisible and parasitic destruction of a people's inner world, executed through myths, symbols, languages, institutions, colours and stories. It involves the slow replacement of a living cosmological reality with a manufactured civilisation.

Growing up in my home village from ages four to nine, I listened to missionaries tell stories of heaven — Jerusalem, Samaria, Judea, Egypt, Rome, Europe — all filled with white gods, white angels, white magic, white messiahs, white saviours, white happiness, white eternity, white immortality. Always contrasted with black demons, black hell, black Lucifer, black devil, black death, black Papua, and black me. This was the beginning. The planting of the civilisational psycho-cosmocide virus. The opening of the crime scene.

I am a kind of neurosurgeon — working to diagnose the civilising mission that has made an entire species sick. I have identified the disease, the poison, the virus. And I have given it a name: Psycho-Cosmocide. Because crimes without names continue undisturbed. The world cannot prosecute what it cannot see. It cannot see what it has never been given the language to name.

The first act of resistance is naming it. It is the moment when the invisible becomes visible. An unacknowledged crime is brought into the light, where it can be examined, confronted and dismantled. I write because someone must name it. I have been given this task by my ancestry, my wounds, and my twenty-six years of living in exile, researching as if I had been sent to a faraway land in search of a promised land full of heavenly things, only to realise that the promised land and the heavenly things were back home: his birthplace and the ancestors he left behind.

I write because Papuan ancestors are asking me to.

This may seem strange to people who have been shaped entirely by the modern secular world — a world that believes the dead are gone, the past is over, and ancestry is merely biography, not a living presence. For a Papuan, however, the ancestors are not absent. They are present, speaking in the language of land, dreams and blood. The call to write is not a personal decision. It is an inherited duty.

I carry voices: The voices of people who lived and died on that land over the course of thousands of years until now. People who knew every season and every secret of the land. They knew the names of every river, not as geographical labels, but as living relationships. They built their entire cosmological reality — their understanding of time, death, birth, the sacred and the human — around that specific soil, those specific mountains and that specific ocean. People who were never asked. Never consulted. They were never recognised as the original custodians of something so ancient that its loss diminishes the entire human story.

They never had the opportunity to speak in a language that the world's power structures would understand. But now I do. When I write, I am not merely expressing myself. I am an instrument, a channel through which something older and greater than my own voice enters the world. The ancestors are not passively waiting to be remembered. They are actively seeking living voices willing to carry their testimony forward. I write because they ask me to. And, after twenty-six years in exile, I still haven't found a compelling enough reason to refuse.

I write because Papua is the ultimate test of humanity's moral integrity.

Throughout history, every civilisation has made claims about justice, dignity, and morality and so on… They have claimed the right of peoples to exist on their own terms, in their own reality and on their own land. These claims have been enshrined in constitutions, voiced in major international forums and instilled in children as the fundamental values of the world they are inheriting. West Papua is the test of whether any of those words mean anything at all.

If a people can be occupied for over sixty years, have their sovereignty stolen through a fraudulent vote involving only one thousand hand-picked individuals, have their land stripped of gold, copper and oil, have their activists imprisoned for raising their own flag, have their journalists excluded, have their culture systematically dismantled through education, religion and demographic engineering, and the world continues to look away because it is geopolitically inconvenient, then every word ever spoken about justice and human dignity is revealed to be mere rhetoric. Cover story, myths, fantasy, make-believe constructed over a crime scene.

I write about West Papua because I refuse to accept this façade. The measure of humanity's moral seriousness is not how it treats the powerful, but how it treats the most invisible.

For a writer, watching means bearing witness through language — naming what is, so that what ‘should be, and should not be, cannot be forgotten’.

I write because the children must inherit more than the wound.

Ultimately, everything I write is for future generations. Not as an abstraction. Nor as a rhetorical gesture. I write for specific, living, breathing Papuan children growing up right now — some on the land of their ancestors, some in the diaspora, and some in communities where living traditions are still practised, while in others they have nearly vanished.

If we do not write, remember, preserve and resurrect, they will inherit a colonial version of themselves. A version that does not know its own depth. They will be taught to find their own faces strange, their own languages primitive and long-dead -gone, and their own cosmological realities superstitious or irrelevant. They will inherit a diminished, displaced and ashamed version of something that was once whole, rooted, ancient and magnificent. This would be the final victory of psycho-cosmocide. I will not allow it while I have breath and language.

My writing is not commentary. It is creation. Every essay, every quote, every philosophical framework and every act of naming what has been destroyed and mapping what can be rebuilt is a beam in the sacred architecture of a new reality. It is a gift placed in the hands of children not yet old enough to receive it. But one day, they will arrive at the question that every human being eventually asks: Who am I? Where do I come from? What is real? What happened — and why?

Wherever the winds of dispossession have carried them — whether in Papua, Australia, or the diaspora — when a Papuan child asks that question, there must be an answer waiting. Not the coloniser's answer. Not the missionary's answer. Not an answer manufactured by systems that have spent sixty years trying to make Papua disappear. But a genuine answer, an answer that is deeply rooted in the ancient, living, irreplaceable reality of what it means to be Papuan on this earth. The answer that must be drawn from the first and last memories of Papua.

My writing is about creating, preserving and teaching that memory, born from a love with no other name. I desire this memory more than I desire heaven, and I fear losing Papua's memory more than I fear hell.

Last words…Why I write.

Silence is not neutral. In West Papua, it is the final weapon of psycho-cosmocide — the atmosphere in which everything else survives. Military operations require silence in order to proceed unquestioned. Resource extraction requires silence to continue unchallenged. The destruction of the inner world requires silence to remain unresisted. Every word I write breaks that silence.

Whether you are civilised or uncivilised, white or black, coloniser or colonised, believer or atheist, preacher or villain, king or mafia member, I will challenge everything you've told me about this world. I've reached a point of no return regarding your fictional civilisational stories and the reality you've built in their name. I'm not totally rejecting, but I am totally challenging… this is my battle line.

I do not believe that writing alone will free Papua. However, I do believe that it is one of the necessary conditions of freedom. People made invisible by silence can become visible again through language. The act of naming — acknowledging what has happened, what is happening, what it costs and what it means, and demanding change — is a form of sovereignty in itself. It is a reclamation of a poisoned reality. It is a refusal to accept the world that power has built in place of the true world.

West Papua is not just a political problem waiting for a political solution. It is a living prophecy about the consequences of sacrificing ancient peoples on the altar of convenience, and about the possibilities that emerge when these peoples, generation after generation, century after century, refuse to disappear.

If the written word was civilisation's first virus, we must now use it to name, redefine, diagnose, challenge and reimagine. We must build the sacred architecture of a new reality from within the language of the wound.

A wound within a wound: I write in my coloniser's language

Beneath all the other griefs I carry as a Papuan writer, there is a grief that lies beneath. Everything I have written — every word of resistance, every act of naming and every philosophical framework I have built to diagnose and dismantle the forces that occupy my people's inner world — has been written in a language that is not my own. English. The tongue of one coloniser. It is the instrument of an empire that has shaped the very system of thought, value and reality I am writing against more than almost any other force in human history. I write my resistance in the language of the occupation. I name the wound in the vocabulary of those who helped inflict it. I seek truth through a grammar designed to describe a world in which my people do not truly exist. This is not a small thing. It is the wound within the wound.

I confess this not as a sign of defeat, but as the most honest acknowledgement of the Psycho-Cosmocide's totality, intimacy and structural completeness. It has even reached into the act of writing itself and the instrument I must use to resist it. The coloniser's language is so embedded in the architecture of global communication, scholarship and record that, to be heard beyond the village, the island or the Pacific, I must speak in it. I must think in it. I must dream in it, at least partially, at least for now. This is the most heartbreaking and unfortunate reality of writing about Papua.

But I want to say something that goes beyond grief.

I hope, I dream, I wish that one day I will write in my own language. Not just the language of my ancestors from my village. Not a language of the past, preserved in amber. Rather, I want to write in the language of a sovereign state: the living, breathing, forward-moving language of an independent State of Papua. It is a language that has not yet fully been born because the nation that would speak it has not yet fully been born.

I believe with the same certainty with which I believe that Papua is a prophecy and not merely a political problem that these two births are inseparable.

A new nation cannot be born in another nation's vocabulary. It cannot think its own thoughts in another people's grammar. It cannot describe its own reality using definitions inherited from its occupiers. If Papua continues to express itself in Indonesian, English, Tok Pisin or Dutch, then it has not yet fully arrived. A state exists through aspiration, suffering, resistance, blood, ceremony and ancestral memory, but it has not yet been born into the full sovereignty of its own linguistic reality.

The moment it develops its own writing system — its own way of marking language on the page and visualising thought — that will be its birth.

The moment it builds its own numbering system — its own mathematics of reality, its own way of counting time, value, and relationships — that is a birth.

The moment it creates its own calendar — its own architecture of time, its own naming of seasons and cycles rooted in the land itself, rather than the liturgical or commercial needs of foreign civilisations — that will be a birth.

These are not romantic fantasies. They are the structural conditions of genuine statehood. Every nation that has ever existed independently has possessed these things: A writing system. A numbering system. A calendar. A vocabulary that belongs to them. A grammar through which its people can express thoughts that could not be expressed in any other language — thoughts that are native to that land, ancestry and cosmological reality. Without these things, a nation is merely a territory waiting to become itself.

With these, a nation is born — not on the day a flag is raised or a declaration is signed, but on the day its first child reads a sentence in the language of a free Papua and, in their body and blood, understands that layer of the self which exists beneath all colonial instruction: 'This is mine'. This is real. This is us.

So, I write in English now — because I must; because the world that holds Papua's fate hostage speaks English, and I must speak to it in a language it understands. But every essay I write in this borrowed tongue is also, secretly, a sketch. A blueprint. A provisional structure that represents something to come: a Papuan language of philosophy, cosmology, political thought and sacred knowledge. This language does not yet have a name because the state that would give it one has not yet been born.

I write in English like a man building a temporary shelter while constructing a permanent house. The shelter keeps the rain off. But it is not the house. The house is coming.

When Papua has its own writing, numbers, calendar and vocabulary for profound concepts, the work I have done in this borrowed language will have served its purpose: to keep the flame alive until the fire can be properly lit.

That is the final reason why I write.

It's not because English is inadequate. It is not. It's not because the coloniser's language can fully convey what I'm trying to say. It cannot. But it is because the alternative — silence — is one thing I will not choose. I write in the language I have because the language I need does not yet exist. I write in the hope that one day it will.