Poetry and Terror in Peter Dale Scott's "Coming to Jakarta"

Abstract

In Peter Dale Scott's forthcoming work, Minding the Darkness, he asks ...did he [David Horowitz] perhaps have a point / about the left's too willing // suspension of judgement? This is the kind of question, calling for an evaluation of one's political beliefs and strategies, that is typical of Scott's recent poetry. Scott's work is one example of a that counters the familiar complaints about contemporary poetry's political irrelevance. His is very much about politics in the late twentieth century. But I would suggest that the political meaning of Scott's work is not located just in his subject matter or the questions that he raises; rather, the politics of his are also determined by the way in which he involves his audience in his project of self-critique. His poems challenge those of us with the time and inclination to peruse Chicago Review or to pick up a New Directions volume of to think about our own role in shaping the institutions and practices of political power. In this essay I argue that Scott's invitation to his readers to recognize our complicity with the terrors effected by our political institutions is especially apparent in the first book of his trilogy, Coming to Jakarta. Coming to Jakarta has three principle subjects, and one of the goals of the poem is to determine a useful relationship between them. The poem opens: There are three desks in my office at one I read Virgil's descent into the underworld at one I try to sort out clippings of failed Swiss banks or of slow killings on meat-hooks in a well-guarded Chicago garage but the third desk this one is where the typewriter stares at me with only a sheet of white paper from which my blank mind is averted with an unmistakable almost diamagnetic force The subjects of this poem are politics, poetry, and Scott himself as he tries to find a way to write about them. The most shocking revelations of Jakarta occur when Scott reveals the U.S. government's involvement in the 1965 massacres in Indonesia, when as many as half a million people were killed over the course of a few months. Scott documents his accusations with marginal references and an extensive bibliography, though he does once take advantage of the fact that he is writing precisely poetry to hazard an informed but unsubstantiated guess about one man's connection to the massacres. But with the exception of his authorization to make this one guess, what recommends this subject matter to poetry? In interviews Scott notes that he first began this poem because he could not get his investigation of the massacre published in any other form. This censorship was a boon for poetry, however, for it spurred Scott to make a poem out of this material, and in so doing he also began to investigate his own - and our - involvement in the perpetuation of the conditions under which such a horrific event could have taken place. Because Scott takes on issues of political import through a lyric that encourages self-reflection, he leads both himself and us to consider the connection between ourselves and the work of states and corporations that we like to think of as removed from ourselves. Large sections of the poem are devoted to speculation on the causes of the massacre. In one section he questions the results of the intersection of U.S. economic and political interests in Indonesia, interests that included the United States' desire to keep the country from becoming a communist domino falling toward Australia or Indochina, and U.S. corporations' investments in extracting maximum profits from the land. After noting the Cold-War choices between nuclear Armageddon or Jonestown mass-suicide, Scott asks: And what if the choices in Java were just as simple - to become a technological graveyard or a Malthusian one rice production beginning to give way to high-yield low-nutrition cassava till petty landlords rid themselves of peasants who had taken over the fields to enforce the government's ineffectual land reform (125) The italicized section in this passage is a quote from Robert Shaplen's Time Out of Hand. …