Interrogation Records

INTERROGATION RECORDS
by Jeddie Sophronius
ISBN: 978-1-958652-07-7
$16.00 / Paperback / 5.5” x 8.5" / 120 pages
Gaudy Boy, April 2024
N. America: Amazon / Bookshop
Singapore: Word Image
Distributed by Ingram

The winner of the 2023 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize, selected by Divya Victor.

Breaking the silence and collective amnesia around the Indonesian mass killings of 1965.

About

To this day, there exists in Indonesia a black hole of silence in acknowledging the 1965 mass killings as what they were—tragedy. Jeddie Sophronius’s Interrogation Records is a rare docupoetry collection that explores and calls into question the “official” narratives revolving around the massacre during this period of the Cold War.

Also known as “The Communist Purge,” the massacre resulted in the slaughter by the Indonesian army of members of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and anyone accused of being affiliated to it—many of whom were Chinese and civilians. Throughout the collection, the voice of Sophronius’s speaker-researcher is quiet but always alert, contending with the aftermath of state violence and silencing, in a masterful blend of personal and collective history. Sophronius presents both authoritarian and artistic language on the same page, urging us to consider how documents, archives, and testimony may hold affective power and excavate a different truth. 

Striking at a climate of silence and erasure, Interrogation Records is a remedy of collective amnesia. 

Author

Jeddie Sophronius is the author of the poetry collections Happy Poems & Other Lies (Codhill Press, 2024), Love & Sambal (The Word Works, 2024), and the chapbook Blood·Letting (Quarterly West, 2023), a runner-up for Quarterly West’s 2022 Chapbook Contest.

A Chinese-Indonesian writer, educator, and translator originally from Jakarta, he received his BA in English: Creative Writing from Western Michigan University and his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he served as the editor of Meridian. Their poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere, while their prose is forthcoming in The Third Coast and The Arkansas International.

They currently live and teach in Charlottesville, VA. They divide their time between Indonesia and the United States. Read more of their work at nakedcentaur.com

Praise

“Interrogation Records by Jeddie Sophronius builds a bridge between the personal and political at a scale that lets us observe the changes taking place in the reader as they traverse that bridge. As a poet and researcher, I have wanted more US-based presses to publish documentary works that address underexpressed and understudied historical events that have taken place outside the United States. I have wanted us to expand our conversation about genocide, politicide, ethno-racial beliefs and prejudice, and the charge against communism out in open fora, especially through poetry. And I see in Jeddie’s book precisely such an occasion for us to have an expanded conversation. Interrogation Records responds to the systematic killings in Indonesia that took place between 1965 and 1966. Under Suharto’s regime, the Indonesian army was responsible for civil unrest and the slaughter of civilians who were alleged members of the Communist Party—civilians who were sympathetic to the feminist, anti-imperialist,  pro-labor Gerwani women’s organization, trade unionists, and ethnic and religious minorities, including Javanese Abangan Muslims, ethnic Chinese, and atheists. Some estimates suggest that 3 million were killed that year.

Jeddie’s book is a keen, sparse, documentary approach to archival records. Yet it is not bloodless or without passion. The most significant documentary poetry tethers us to the historic event with the poetic line as if it were our very sinews. It implicates us at the arteries, it calls us into an enfleshed attachment. It enlivens the dead texts of archives, reanimates them so that we recall and revere the human lives that they document. It intentionally shapes verse and prose so that that our own relationship with the historical event is not dominated by habitual and superficial empathy, but is built slowly through the greater facilities that reading can engender: curiosity, critical judgment, generous discernment born of difficulty, and a luminous attention to bureaucratic language which structures yet obscures so much of our social existence. I see in Jeddie’s book a significant aspiration towards these important achievements, so often evident in the work of Muriel Rukeyser and Charles Reznikoff. Yet his book is also a preserving of an activist vernacular that we admire in the Black Arts movement, embodied in the perspicuous countenance of the speakers in the poetry of Sonia Sanchez, Etheridge Knight, and June Jordan. At its most exciting moments, Jeddie’s Interrogation Records is inflected by the work of poets of Southeast Asian descent in US-anglophone contexts like Diana Khoi Nguyen and Mai Der Vang. He is writing into the growing library of Asian writers in the United States whose literary work attends to genocide, war, and political incarceration, advancing both a journalistic and a research-oriented poetics within this diasporic formation.

In his poem “The Sinner’s Mantra” Jeddie quotes the adage from Karl Marx’s “Critique of the Gotha Program”: “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need.” And if I may, I would say: Jeddie’s great and significant ability, in his book, matches our great and significant need to learn more about the Indonesian killings of 65-66. So, I receive his book as a gift and a redress of silence. And every time we learn history through poetry that intentionally unsilences the archives, we are unwriting a master-narrative, we are writing and reading as a prevention of erasure, we are writing and reading as a cure for amnesia.”
—Divya Victor, winner of the 2022 PEN America Open Book Award

“Interrogation Records is a stunning work by a keen poetic intellect. Writing at the intersection of history and remembrance, Sophronius contends with the multigenerational aftermath of state violence and the powerful forces of historical erasure. The ongoing inheritance Sophronius excavates in these lyrics is part-memory, part-burden, part-presence, part-silence. Each poem feels hard-won from the mysterious cultural machinery we call “archive,” lifted into astonishing, often heartbreaking, utterance. In its possession of the visual field of the page, in its formal rigor, and in its virtuosic expression, Interrogation Records invites us on a remarkable journey.”
—Kiki Petrosino, author, White Blood: A Lyric of Virginia

“Interrogation Records lays bare a powerful affective archive of the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia and their aftermath. The poetry collection does not seek to depict the atrocity as an isolated historical event; Jeddie Sophronius instead takes on the more compelling, indeed the more pressing task of trying to understand and express how society remembers and forgets crimes of the state generations after that violence took place. How to make history carry collective meaning, how to make the past felt, how to make documents and archives and testimony hold affective power—these are the questions Interrogation Records explores, and indeed the political concerns that most urgently require poetic language. Sophronius constructs a series of dialogues across the multi-layered discourse about 1965, offering insightful critiques of public perception, state ideologies, and propaganda while engaging numerous voices--scholarly, testimonial, ghostly, intimate. From reflections on identity and belonging to biting satire of euphemisms employed by the state to obscure fear, pain, and the striking elimination of human life, Interrogation Records is a search for the fragmented traces of memory that scatter present-day Indonesia.”
—Lara Norgaard, translator