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Book tinderbox9/15/2023 ![]() "More probing, engaged and profound than many a contemporary novel, Cynthia Dewi Oka’s A Tinderbox in Three Acts demonstrates how a gifted poet can explore the often painful complexities of history, personal and public, with true originality. Movingly alive in its lament, we are better for this tending." Bringing this imagination of poetry to bear on the imaginations of fascism and genocide, this stirring collection is not an argument of equivalence, but of the many forms of risk we undertake in being with each other. Khairani Barokka, author of Ultimatum OrangutanĮvocative and haunting, Cynthia Dewi Oka’s A Tinderbox in Three Acts is a choral undertaking, often in the clothing of familiar forms, state-sponsored and otherwise, that refuses the trickery of objectivity, and is instead frank in its imaginings, in its need for imagining. Brava, selamat, an ovation for these three acts.” Against ‘the ministry of bones’ that is the New Order dictatorship’s brutality and lasting impact, she writes, ‘If there is a branch you cannot / reach, throw a rope and struggle / together.’ For, as Cynthia reminds us: ‘what is a nation after all if not a series of revisions’. ![]() She fills (literal and metaphorical) holes with canny, sensitive, brilliant fictioning. Cynthia Dewi Oka writes in a lineage of defiant artists who were killed, exiled or otherwise hurt for taking on this subject, and this book is a freedom-scalpel-cut from the tangled, corporeal forest of intergenerational trauma, from Western complicity in the ’65-’66 genocide and the decades of violence after. I read this artwork with my heart in my throat-witnessing a voice that says virtuosically what Indonesians as a population have kept and kept in our bodies for generations. Structurally imaginative, it is an epic and profound acknowledgment of suppressed nightmares on a gargantuan scale, with a cutting honesty on how they are reflected back to us under Empire’s gaze. This, this, this is a book so many have been waiting for. “Reading A Tinderbox in Three Acts is akin to ‘discovering our wet heart like a banner among the leaves’. Aracelis Girmay, author of The Black Maria It is a tremendous honor to walk behind Cynthia and this truly essential work.” With imagination and the sharpest tools, she cuts opening after opening into the page. But Oka and her fellow organizers, researchers, artists, carriers of this history are also facts. At its center churn insurmountable, incomprehensible brutalities. “I cannot say enough how critical this work is for its history, specificity, and devotion. "Full of shocking glimpses of colonial violence, Oka’s powerful collection asks readers to engage with a historical reckoning." ![]() Where memory fails, here is poetry to honor the dishonored, the betrayed, the lost and still-awaited. Here, history as an artifact of the powerful is trumped by the halting memory of the people whom power s ought to destroy. Here, the boundary between singular and collective consciousness is blurred. In service of recovering what must not be remembered, A Tinderbox in Three Acts repurposes the sanitized lexicon of official discourse, imagines an emotional syntax for the unthinkable, and employs synesthetic modes of perception to convey that which exceeds language. Drawing on US state documents that were only declassified in recent years, Oka gives form and voice to the ghosts that continue to haunt subsequent generations despite decades of state-produced amnesia and disinformation. Under the New Order dictatorship that ruled by terror for over three decades in the aftermath, perpetrators of the killings were celebrated as national heroes while survivors were systemically silenced. In her fourth poetry collection, Cynthia Dewi Oka performs a lyric accounting of the anti-Communist genocide of 1965, which, led by the Indonesian military and with American assistance, erased and devastated millions of lives in Indonesia. Selected by Aracelis Girmay, A Tinderbox in Three Acts is at once elegy and exegesis, fact and invention. ![]()
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