By Crispin Rodrigues

Interrogation Records
Jeddie Sophronius
Gaudy Boy (2024) / 120 pages / SGD 17  

Stunning and powerful, Jeddie Sophronius interweaves the 1965 mass killings of the Communist Party of Indonesia with the act of writing about such a traumatic event, creating a poetry collection that asks how one can do justice to the recollection of such a bloody event. Interrogation Records stands as a testament and testimony to voices who have been lost but who can be reclaimed through the power of art.

The collection is filled with a pastiche of records about the mass killings from perpetrators and victims, as well as reportage from mass media outlets, which demands us to contend ourselves as readers/spectators/gazers and our agency in watching from the distance. What struck me the most was the capacity of simple language to carry such devastating weight. The perceived simplicity of a stanza such as that in the poem 'Killing System':

them. Ordered manner.
        Those were the orders:
to kiss or be kissed.

So much turns on the word "kiss" – perceived intimacy, desire, betrayal, death. The simple act of kissing carries such political weight in the systematic killing of civilians, while the epigraph is steeped in the explicit violence – "Victims' throats were usually cut with knives, sickles or machetes" is reduced to a betraying kiss. So many poems within the collection are short and deceptively simple in language, yet the signified meanings of these words are embroiled within how the language of media and political jargon can intertwine to erase the brutality of genocide. I did feel at times that the poems that clearly address the massacre felt a bit repetitive in the way that they all convey horror in a similar way, but this is the way it is with such trauma – it lingers in the same shape and form, and is as systemic as the event itself.

This is the most apparent in the symbol of chickens that runs throughout the collection. The chicken, a euphemism for a communist, is butchered and gutted with such frankness that it is hard to stomach its normalcy, as seen in 'To Kill a Chicken'. Here, I wandered back and forth between the victim and the fowl, substituting the chicken for communist, asking myself if this was the propaganda machine trying to devalue a human life into simple livestock. It was a hard poem to read, not in a bad way, but in a way that was haunting. The symbol of the chicken creates a universal symbol of suffering, not just in Indonesia in 1965, but what is happening now to the Palestinians, and shows that conflict dehumanises and devalues lives, and that this is a never-ending premise of conflict.

Sophronius ends each section within the collection with a poem that functions as metacommentary on the act of writing about the mass killings, and this for me is where the collection really shines, capturing both the difficulties of turning an event of such horror into art and yet also the faithfulness of art in representing such an event. It is in these poems that they find the resoluteness to seek answers that have been suppressed. In 'Research Process" in the first section of the collection, the poet ends it with a poignant dose of pragmatism:

Oh we don't have a cassette player, bring
your own. Where can I possibly find one?

Here, the state apparatus, while appearing open in allowing the poet to have access to previously confidential material, knows that there will still be obstacles to finding out the truth, and leaves the poet in a bind with the lack of a cassette player. This creates difficulties in fully uncovering the truth, drawing attention that the archives themselves can be used as obstacles of the state to prevent access. Likewise, in 'Research Process' in the second section, the poet is rejected loaning copies of Pramoedya's written work by a librarian working in a small library where it is compared to an 'acceptable' canon of work – Lenin, books on Japanese and Dutch occupation, Javanese poems – suggesting organisational impediment to access. These poems on the research for secondary material are followed by poems on annotations, which question the role of the poet as a 'witness' to these events and whether they had the right to speak for the victims of these mass killings. I found these poems to be the most poignant of the entire collection, mostly because of the interplay between the poetic speech act and the desire to reach out for these missing voices, which creates a sense of intimacy:

What past would remain buried under my skin? In the end, you too have left this shell I call body, found another to call your own. We made the right choice. Together, we had to fight the world. Alone, I only have to fight our past happiness. ('Annotations', pp. 50)

Sophronius wilfully challenges naysayers who question his authority to speak for these individuals, that the personal recovery of the political self is a form of self-care that carries tremendous national weight as well.

I did feel at times that, while wandering through the poems, I desired more complexity in the interweaving of the poems that address the massacres alongside the personal poems, which can sometimes function too much as a reflection of the segment rather than perhaps deepening the complexity of art and politics in a way that challenges the very notion of a separation between the two. The clear demarcation of the two types of poems felt a little reductive to the process when it could do so much more as intertwined (counter-)narratives. Despite that, what I greatly loved was the book's capacity to carry so much in simple language that brings the trauma and tragedy to the forefront, while keeping true to a balance of art as record and as expression.

I read the poetry collection, initially afraid that the historical paradigm of the work would drown out the poetics of the work, but Sophronius holds art as a mirror to the heftiness of such trauma and reflects the delicacy that poetry must play in the national conversation.

_____