Rimbaud in Java: The Lost Voyage

"This is such a great book. It’s a work of speculative history. Basically, in 1876, Arthur Rimbaud joined the Dutch army and spent six months in Java before his more famous peregrinations in Africa. He deserted pretty soon into his posting and we know almost nothing about his time there. That’s the lacuna from which Jamie James, a singular writer, jumps off. He writes very early in the book that what we want—to see Java through the eyes of the poet—we shall never have, so he starts right out of the gate admitting that it’s all conjecture. But the book is so transportive and delightful. It’s a portal into the connections between Europe and Indonesia at this time. I’m a sucker for connections between far-flung places and about what I think of as ‘long globalization’. In the course of the book, he takes this kind of pilgrimage to Jakarta, Semarang and Salatiga, which are the three cities that we know Rimbaud went to. He discusses Rimbaud’s poems and speculates whether one of the words in them, in the poem “Devotion,” from Illuminations , maybe includes a Malay word, ‘bau,’ which means smell (it’s an unexplained interjection in the poem, otherwise). Then he also brings you into the cultural climate of 19th century Java. He talks about the institutionalized pederasty in some of the Javanese towns outside Salatiga and the sexual life under colonial rule. He writes about what it must’ve been like to live in this tropical island, in these jarring settlements on the edge of primeval forests. “Every kind of climate change issue—from deforestation to climate refugees to mass extinctions—everything is happening there. It’s like a hothouse laboratory” James has a yearning for this impossible-to-recover Indonesian past that I share. It can be frustrating, sometimes, to love Indonesia and look at just how thin the historical record is. This is for many reasons: written history is not such a major cultural mode there, paper degrades in tropical climates—so they don’t have things like papyrus scrolls. So you’re left to grasp at these threads. The intellectual movements of this book are so familiar to me, because that’s how I see my (amateur) relationship to history there too. Even people who work on medieval Indonesia tend to have to rely on the vanishingly few number of travelogues by people like Marco Polo , who went to Sumatra, and Ibn Battuta . Despite this scant historical record, James accomplishes something amazing with a novel and oblique approach that frankly filled me with so much hope that I might, some day, attempt something like that too. He’s a great writer. This book is crammed with compelling errata—like how there was opera and Mozart being staged in Batavia, the old name for Jakarta, and in the other colonial Javanese towns. He branches off from there to some other very interesting connections, like how Victor Hugo brought this Malay poetry form called ‘the pantoum’ back to France where it became a very popular verse form in the 19th century. That, to me, is astounding. He also talks about this wonderful Javanese painter, Raden Saleh, who around the time Rimbaud was coming to Java, went to Paris, where he was reviewed by Théophile Gautier and visited by Baudelaire. So it’s not just about Rimbaud. Rimbaud in Java is so beautiful and it expands the boundaries of what research can be. I love a lot of Jamie’s books for the same reason. They work in this liminal space between art criticism and history and travel writing and he’s very interested in Indonesia’s place in the wider world. This book is a totally charming tour de force. It wasn’t as personally affecting to me as the books I’ve chosen, but it was very important historically to Indonesia. It’s cool that a novel changed history."