Translation, Rage, and What Is-Was-Willbe: A Conversation with Khairani Barokka

I had the pleasure of speaking with Khairani Barokka (Okka) over Zoom about her third poetry collection amuk, published by Nine Arches Press. The book mobilizes the mistranslation of the Indonesian word “amuk” to craft a sprawling exploration and indictment of the environmental, cultural, and linguistic violences of colonialism.

The formally experimental poems that form this collection bring together different registers and voices, anger and hope, ancestral presences and long histories of the present. Okka graciously shared how she came to focus on this word, the work of poetry and what she calls “linguistic cosmologies,” and what she hopes readers will reflect on after her reading her work.  

Stream or download our conversation here.

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Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Jagravi Dave: To start, is there a poem you would like to share with us?

Khairani Barokka: I think I’ll read an excerpt from “amuk”. The book is divided into two parts. The first is “amuk,” a longer poem that is the text of a performance lecture that was commissioned for the Edinburgh Futures Institute’s Climate Futures Initiative. Here it goes:

One. Amuk, or what must be felt, or text from a performance lecture to commemorate the official universe-wide recognition of amuk, amok and amuck as separate voices and a past-present-future, or the tail end of a 500-year-old scream and not-one temporal tense.

bok mungkin perlu kita jelasin dulu ya. To enter the Indonesian language is a science fictional enterprise. It is a universe of speculative words, gestures, perception. This work is a move to remind ourselves of this, of these chronotypes. Indonesian—not bahasa, which simply means language, but bahasa Indonesia—has no tenses. Thus, all translations into English, where past or present or future must be pinned down, as definite, are both potentially right and always wrong. A reductive tense cannot encapsulate the speculative nature of our language, the science fictional possibilities, destabilizations. And this is, of course, not to mention the other different linguistic cosmologies in the archipelago, over 700 other languages and ways in which neurons enhance possibilities beyond modernity’s fixity, persnickety predilection for pinning down.

Linguistic cosmology—how stars move and imprint upon the body.

Translations from Bahasa Indonesia as illustration (reminder): kami makan [we eat, we ate, we will eat]; kami kelaparan [we starve, we starved, we will starve]; kami mati [we die, we died, we will die].

The refusal of Indonesian and various Indigenous languages to conform [to have conformed] to temporal orthodoxy is-was-willbe the greatest of wisdoms on the tips of our tongues and limbs kept-keeping-will keep self-protecting in the leaves. The following is the story of how continually ruling factions interact with worlds in which they are [certainly were, most likely will not be] not fully aware of how time passes-passed-willpass in what contexts. Unaware of or resistant to truths regarding what they have contributed-contribute-areheadlongtowards futurecontributing to these timeframes. Centuries that impact bodyminds—human, animal, otherwise—through mitochondrial recall, and retention of affects ancestral that have been-are-willbe brought to bear.

Ancestrally, we think (thought) of time within different geometries. A non-linearity, cycles, continuance. Motion passing-passed-willpass steadily past Gregorian decades through Indigenous calendars. This is and was-willbe the story of one such emotion: amuk. And the ways it has been framed, claimed by twisted offspring of variant malevolences.

And I’ll stop there, but hopefully that was a teaser into what this book is (was, will be).

JD: “Amuk” forms the focal point of your book. How did you come to this particular word as the thing that you want to center your text around?

KB: “Amuk” means rage, or to rage, a violent action of some kind. It’s part of my language; growing up, it was like, “Oki amuk”: “I’m throwing a tantrum.” And then, you come to realize, it is the root word for “amok,” which turned into “running amok.” “Amok” itself was defined in English dictionaries as sort of a violent rage, like a murderous rage. When adopted into colonial dictionaries, suddenly it referred to the Natives homicidally attacking people, psychopathologizing Indigenous resistance to slavery.

As a translator, an editor of translations, and a mentor of translators, I found it so disturbing when I moved to the U.K. from Indonesia that there’s this practice here and in many Western countries of “bridge translation,” where someone who doesn’t know the language (a Western poet) will work together with someone who does know the language (a Native speaker) and together they will translate the poem. What the Western poet brings is actually editing.

Yet in the U.K., it is extremely prevalent for someone to say, “You don’t need to know the language; you can translate.” It is unbelievable to me the power differential there. I myself, as a bilingual person, have had to pay money to be tested on my English proficiency when I’ve been bilingual since the age of three. No other language than English can say, “This is what this word means in this language I don’t understand.” I’ve had a lot of people say to me it’s not a colonial practice, and it’s infuriating.

I wanted to take just one word to show how unequal this relationship has been for hundreds of years and how it continues—to the point where in Indonesian dictionaries that false definition [of amuk] is included.

People don’t know this history. I’m a poet and I’m a performer and I’m an artist, and I wanted to convey this in a way that people could understand this violence.

JD: There’s an ambivalence that we get about anger or rage through this book. On the one hand, it’s the psychopathologizing of anger that turns the Indonesian word “amuk” into “amok” or “amuck.” The English word “amok” signals an anger that has no cause, no justification, and no direction. But then, on the other hand, you talk about this directionlessness of anger as a “tactical triumph.” If there is no direction, if you can’t locate where the anger comes from and where it’s going, there’s a possibility of protection or evasion of capture. Could you talk more about this dual signification of anger?

KB: Colonizing dictionaries will never be right, and that is a blessing. But, as you can see from the inclusion of these definitions in Indonesian dictionaries, it’s also so dangerous. So there is, as you say, this duality. The incorrectness offers a space of evasion, a space of ambiguity and intangibility for the colonizing capture of places, people, language, etc. But I think also that it is important to combat the diversion of indigenous languages into something quite evil.

I think both need to happen, right? You need the evasion, and you need the front-facing refusal to be defined, to literally be defined incorrectly.

JD: amuk is also dealing with environmental genocide and environmental justice. I sense through this book some frustration about contemporary Western climate activism running through these poems, seen perhaps most clearly in that page that repeats, “I love your rage.”  What do you hope that readers will understand about advocating for the environment through this book?

KB: If it’s okay with you, I’ll read a little bit before that page for some context. This is another excerpt from amuk:

Time and again at work, I am complimented on my anger. My last gig before the first lockdown, I was told on a bright stage by a former world leader—having just pointed out that ‘plant trees’ does not include how palm oil trees in plantations built on rainforest ash are poison writ large—‘I love your rage.’ The echo of it throughout continued Indigenous genocide like a valley girl chasing after me: ‘I love your rage. I love your rage. I love your rage. I love your rage.’

That really did happen, and it was a real come-to-Jesus moment for me, a former prime minister saying they love my rage. What does that mean? It is so much about the usage of rage: the loving of rage as performative in Western climate circles, and the tokenizing of Indigenous Peoples, and Black and Brown and Asian peoples, and the flattening of ourselves as people. The, at times, manipulative usage of our rage. Meanwhile, my rage is authentic.

It is about the weaponization of rage for the Western gaze. Rage can be commodified and twisted if we’re not careful. Rage can be directionless in a way that is positive, benign, and natural. In English, “run amok” is directionless in a way that is animalic, bestial, lacking in intelligence, whereas even benign rage in the original meaning can be with purpose. Rage is a prayer. It’s asking for something. It’s discontent that your body expresses.

With environmental justice movements, rage is often misplaced. There is not rage about horrific environmental destruction that is part of colonial genocide and has been happening nearly everywhere. It is such a weird psychological disconnect. Not understanding Indigenous People as human includes not understanding our rage as valid.

What I want people to take from this book is an acceptance of rage in your life in the different forms that it presents itself, and to understand and to rage against the ways that it has been manipulated, disconnected from your body, from your people, from your history, by Western colonial forces, in linguistics, in politics and all these interconnected societal forms.

This is an environmental justice book, very clearly. It’s a book about linguistic violence. It’s a book about family. It’s a book about prayer and spirituality. It’s all of these things. And I think that in Western societies, we’re often asked to put ourselves and our emotions in little boxes that don’t contain the complexities and the beauty of our histories and lives.

JD: I’d love to hear you talk more about this term “linguistic cosmology” and the idea of Indonesian as a speculative language, and how those things might come together. What does our language allow for or restrict us from?

KB: I do think that the beauty of not having tenses is that when you say something, you need to understand your connection to what came before you, what will come after you. You will try to be a good ancestor. You have good ancestors. This land has history. This land is not just the present. This land is what had to be bulldozed to make way for what is there now. This land is evolutionary. Geology is everything, and it’s overwhelming, and it’s universe-level understandings of life, of matter, of the universe.

The Indonesian word “alam” is often translated as “nature.” And it does mean nature, but it also means “the universe,” everything. And in that way, it’s also not a separation. I write about this in the book, how nature isn’t this separate thing from humans. We are part of alam. We are all part of the so-called nature. There is an overdetermination of nature as separate from humans that persists in poetic circles and environmental circles.

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Featured Image: Cover of the Second Edition Webster’s New International Dictionary. Photo by Waldemar, 2018.

Podcast music: “Gloves” by Julian Lynch. Used with permission.

Khairani Barokka is a writer, artist, arts consultant, translator, and editor from Jakarta. Okka’s work centers disability justice as anticolonial praxis, environmental justice, and access as translation. She has a Ph.D. by Practice in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her books include Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches, as co-editor), Rope (Nine Arches), Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize, and 2024’s amuk (Nine Arches). Website. Twitter. Contact.

Jagravi Dave is a literary studies Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her research constellates postcolonial theories of historiography, ontologies of human and environment, and contemporary experimental literatures. Contact.