The after-lives of no arrival: How Papuans make their lives matter

Abstract

The essay considers heterogeneous Black temporalities in West Papua, Indonesia's largest urban region. Here, "Papuan time" is an extension beyond the dilemmas of being human or not. This is the possibility of being a human that has not experienced irremediable loss or a future foreclosed. But rather an entity that endures an after-life beyond what anyone might know it; a life situated in the middle of freedom and abjection. Such a life takes place in a city, Jayapura, that appears perpetually unsettled, something always “new.” But in the repetition of such newness, it is a city that does not seem to go anywhere specific, that does not promise any sense of redemption. A city that never arrives.