Lives perished, yetnothing happened. Earth’s rotationdid not stop. It happened elsewhere,somewhere distant: not here. It wascontained as in, the earthquake wascontained: struck a place much fartherthan the distance the average manwould care. The dead was not our dead.The dead were at fault. The dead wereour enemies, The dead chose wrong.They weren’t alive to begin with. Nothinghappened. No one cared.
Death List
Jeddie Sophronius
As many as 5,000 names were furnished over a period of months to the army there, and the Americans later checked off the names of those who had been killed or captured, according to the former U.S. officials… “No one cared, so long as they were communists, that they were being butchered,” said Howard Federspiel, who in 1965 was the Indonesia expert at the State Department’s bureau of intelligence and research. “No one was getting very worked up about it.”
—Kathy Kadane, “U.S. Officials’ Lists Aided Indonesian Bloodbath in ’60s”, The Washington Post, May 21, 1990
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“Diorama of Ghosts” from INTERROGATION RECORDS: by Jeddie Sophronius.
Published by Gaudy Boy in April 2024.
Copyright © 2024 by Jeddie Sophronius.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Jeddie Sophronius is the author of the poetry collections Happy Poems & Other Lies (Codhill Press, 2024), Interrogation Records (Gaudy Boy, 2024), Love & Sambal (The Word Works, 2024), and the chapbook Blood·Letting (Quarterly West, 2023). A Chinese-Indonesian writer from Jakarta, they received their MFA from the University of Virginia. The recipient of the 2023 Gaudy Boy Poetry Book Prize and the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for Bisexual Poetry, their poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, The Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Read more of their work at nakedcentaur.com.
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.
“As far as I am aware, Interrogation Records is the only Anglophone poetry collection I have encountered that seeks to make the [Indonesian] massacres its thematic centrepiece. It is a foray into a genre where the massacres have not often featured prominently, least of all in the English-speaking world. Sophronius adopts an archivist’s eye: his personae move in and out of the archives, variously inhabiting the positions of historical figures suffering under systematic violence and a present-day reader of government records of the period."
—Jonathan Chan, The Rumpus
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