Coming to Jakarta: Poetry, Information, and Disaster

Abstract

Academics have very little leisure time. The only games we play are Clifford Geertz calls deep games, in problematic essay on Bali cited so frequently in this poem. In order then to make time for things like genocide and New World Order in his busy life, and in ours, Berkeley medievalist Peter Dale Scott has invented a poetic board game called Coming to Although it comes without instructions, most people get hang of it pretty quickly: five-page bibliography in back of book and marginal glosses and citations throughout are heavy clues, at least to academic readers and knowledge buffs, that game is in fact about following clues - it's a research game, an intelligence-gathering game. Our kind of game. Two of three writer-academics who wrote on poem for 1990 issue of Agni Review (31/32), as well as man who interviewed Scott for that issue, took same tack, discussing results of research they found themselves conducting into American involvement in Indonesian affairs as they read poem. Robert Hass's review ends in fact with an update of government's account of Indonesian massacres - this just in from San Francisco Examiner. I'd like to account here, at least in part, for exhilarated awe with which these readers and others like them participate in intelligence game of Scott's poetry. Ross Labrie, reviewer for Canadian Literature (no. 122/23, 1989), writes from off in left field that what one with fondness from Scott's poem are boyhood scenes in Westmount and Memphremagog area... (146). That attitude towards poetry, or kind of reading it attests to - aesthetic pursuit of private nostalgia - is not in play here: as Scott proposes in canto 2, Let us examine carefully // good reasons / you and I / don't enjoy reading this. Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror is an epic, and one that explicitly claims its place in a continuum poet both acknowledges and accuses: Virgil is invoked by name in first tercet (the stanza form poem shares with The Divine Comedy), and whole narrative is framed as a descent into Hell, begun as a near-drowning in a childhood lake, Avernus Canadian Literature's reviewer fondly remembers as the Memphremagog area. It is divided into five cantos, each further divided into several two- or three-page sections, and it oscillates by something like free association between hard-factual narrative of covert American involvement in post-colonial political unrest, particularly in Indonesia in 1960s, and an autobiographical account of author's own involvement, one way or another, in that defining American crime. (Before he threw his lot in with poets and professors Scott had been a Canadian diplomat, a Ph.D. in political science educated at places like Oxford and Paris, a family friend of people like the Dulles clan who also summered in Lake Memphremagog area.) After first short canto margins are littered, like those of Coleridge's Rime of Ancient Mariner, with reference notes - much of poem's language is a tissue of fragmented quotation and paraphrase. A bibliography of 108 items gives full data on these sources in back. This list is not latest event in trend set by Eliot's Waste Land - these are not additional remarks from a poet bent on teaching us how to read his poem, but a set of sources from which we can learn more about concrete historical circumstances which occasioned poem. The emphasis is not on Scott's meanings, but on meanings of Jakarta. As a result, poem is in a way subsumed by its bibliography, becoming itself another source of information on American involvement in 1965 massacres that attended overthrow of Sukarno. In an essay about poem's occasion, Scott writes, the poem arose initially out of impossibility of reaching any U.S. audience on this unspeakable subject in prose. …