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Poetry and Terror - Politics and Poetics in Coming to Jakarta (Paperback)
Loot Price: R992
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Poetry and Terror - Politics and Poetics in Coming to Jakarta (Paperback)
Series: AsiaWorld
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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A study at many levels of Scott’s long poem Coming to Jakarta, a
book-length response to a midlife crisis triggered in part by the
author’s initial inability to share his knowledge and horror
about American involvement in the great Indonesian massacre of
1965. Interviews with Ng supply fuller information about the
poem’s discussions of: a) how this psychological trauma led to an
explorations of violence in American society and then, after a key
recognition, in the poet himself; b) the poem's look at east-west
relations through the lens of the yin-yang, spiritual-secular
doubleness of the human condition; c) how the process of writing
the poem led to the recovery of memories too threatening at first
to be retained by his normal presentational self, and d) the
mystery of right action, guided by the Bhagavad Gita and the maxim
in the Gospel of Thomas that "If you bring forth what is within
you, what you bring forth will save you.” Led by the interviews
to greater self-awareness, Scott then analyses his poem as also an
elegy, not just for the dead in Indonesia, but “for the passing
of the Sixties era, when so many of us imagined that a Movement
might achieve major changes for a better America.” Subsequent
chapters develop how human doubleness can lead to an inner tension
between the needs of politics and the needs of poetry, and how some
poetry can serve as a non-violent higher politics, contributing to
the evolution of human culture and thus our “second nature.”
The book also reproduces a Scott prose essay, inspired by the poem,
on the U.S. involvement in and support for the 1965 massacre. It
then discusses how this essay was translated into Indonesian and
officially banned by the Indonesian dictatorship, and how
ultimately it and the poem helped inspire the ground-breaking films
of Josh Oppenheimer that have led to the first official discussions
in Indonesia of what happened in 1965.
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