This collection from Jeddie Sophronius, a Chinese-Indonesian poet born in Jakarta, Indonesia, and now living in the US, lifts the reader into the bloody history of their people, the beauty of their family love, and the dilemmas of the immigrant poet who must leave a troubled and unsafe homeland behind. In poems both technically skilled and immediately accessible, Sophronius shares both the life of a unique individual and a history universal to their people with equal courage and compassion.
Love, akin to sambal, leaves an aftertaste that pains the tongue yet beckons for more. Set against the backdrop of Indonesia’s socio-political climate, Love & Sambal explores the romantic history of a Chinese-Indonesian speaker entangled in the complexities of differing religious and cultural beliefs. The speaker turns inward, descending into personal and collective memory to map the way forward.
Love & Sambal
Praise for
Love & Sambal
Love & Sambal offers poignant testimony to ancestral and familial sacrifice. A coming-of-age story set in a hostile homeland, it’s a harrowing narrative about “how I got lost/and mistook someone else’s/country for my own.” It’s also a damning document of the anti-Chinese legacy of Dutch colonialism and Indonesian nationalism, and the ways racist violence has shaped public and private histories. Blending lyrics of filial devotion, narratives of romance and alienation, and documentary poems of historical and contemporary Indonesia, Love & Sambal is a book like no other, and Sophronius a gifted poet whose syllables lift conscience into song.
—Brian Teare, author of Poem Bitten by a Man
Seamus Heaney—like Jeddie Sophronius, a poet obsessed with writing a divided, stricken, and violently haunted motherland into existence, into sense—says that he writes “to see myself, to set the darkness echoing.” The narrator of Love & Sambal sojourns with mythic and deeply personal intention through the dark wood or night of the soul that is Indonesia’s almost Biblically plagued history of usurpation, prejudice, flood, drought, and erasure. Touch this book anywhere and you will touch everywhere its echoing darknesses, in stories of dislocation, exile, trauma, lost names and cultures, and of friends and lovers split by unreconcilable languages and beliefs. There is no darkness, however, without the idea, the hope, of light, and like the complex Indonesian chutney—sambal—of the book’s title, Sophronius’ is not a hopeless vision. This collection contains multitudes—the sweet, the sour, the pleasing, the bitter, offering a full palate of experience that the poet savors bravely out of abiding love for his “kind” and his country: “crimson grind, soft skin / of a dried pepper, sprinkled with a taste / of lime—watery. Yes, I ask for all this.”
—Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Paradise Close: A Novel
