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Khairani Barokka’s uncompromising third collection of poetry amuk sheds light on the devastating and ongoing effects of a single word's mistranslation, and emphasises what exists in opposition to such hostile histories and presents: hope, resistance, and joy.
Groundbreaking in its use of form and poetics, amuk deconstructs the brutal workings of oppressive systems to examine how, “through macheted etymology,” violence and suffering is replicated through (mis)translation. From linguistic corruption and domination, the poems make connections to the mutilation and ruin caused by an extractive colonialism that destroys whole peoples, cultures, languages, and environments.
Through Khairani Barokka’s own recognition of "linguistic cosmology – how stars move and imprint upon the body,” radical poems of fury and prayer look towards the sacred and ancestral, towards survival and continuance, and the vital, living resistance of persisting languages, and resilient peoples.
Khairani Barokka is a translator, editor, writer and artist from Jakarta, with over two decades of professional translation experience. In 2023, Okka was shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis, and access as translation. Among her honours, she has been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, a Delfina Foundation Associate Artist, an Artforum Must-See, and Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing. Okka’s books include Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), Rope (Nine Arches), and Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (as co-editor; Nine Arches). Her latest books are Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize, and 2024's amuk (Nine Arches).
“amuk is Khairani Barokka's best book so far, exploring incisively the (linguistic) possibilities of resistance. 'amuk', the longest poem in the book, ingeniously enriches the discussion about Global South rage towards colonial powers. This book 'is/was/will-be' a gift.”
-Norman Erikson Pasaribu
