Excerpt from “amuk [infinity symbol]. waters”

Khairani Barokka

Amuk means ‘rage/to rage’ in Indonesian and Malay. European colonists translated anger—of peoples, of biomes, in response to slavery, environmental destruction, and land theft—as frenzied, indiscriminate homicide, the origin of the concept in English of ‘running amok.’

 

the story of amuk‘s now-etymology:

‘i do not know that there has been a boot over your chest for five
hundred years. I do not recognise that this boot is mine, the foot
is mine, and that I’ve rested comfortably on your lower belly as a
stool for entire generations over.

and it is your forests i have obliterated to concrete. and it is your
nation-state’s debt i have held over the peatlands as incentive to
choke your own selves with industrial smog in order to emulate
us, the genesis of amuk.

i do not recognise the presence of other tenses in every tense.’

 

                                                                        * 

 

the gall of pathologising amuk
is the journey through languages it’s been molded to
through macheted etymology

until a meaning implying ‘mass unrest
like a civil war’ [as natives will bicker]
joins the indonesian ministry of education’s
dictionary itself
as the first entry

the second entry in our official dictionary
also denotes murder as outcome
‘in the context of certain cultural activities.’

 

 

 

in the official indonesian dictionary

amuk as emotion
the baby-rage, self-consuming fire,
ur-meaning
is not listed

in its stead, the third meaning in our dictionary for amuk:

a psychological term referring to ‘an uncontrollable condition;
a riot with violence’

 

                                                                        *

 

the story of amuk
is that of tongues being swallowed whole
and ever-quietening forests

 

 

 

suddenly, their heads awake
when the smoke has finally reached their nostrils
after hundreds of years

when the waterline threatens
their bedframes sourced from now-corporate lands

 

                                                                        *

 

and they cry ‘humanity!’ ad nauseam
‘this crisis is humanity’s fault’
‘something wrong with humanity’

but they would be saying that,
wouldn’t they

we were never supposed to be human

 

 

 

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!’

 

 

 

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An Indonesian woman with long, black hair and pink, half-moon earrings, wearing a blue, button-down shirt with a round collar, looking to the camera.

Khairani Barokka is a writer and artist from Jakarta, based in London, and working across various borders. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and centers disability justice as anticolonial praxis, access as translation and environmental justice. She has been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, a Delfina Foundation Associate Artist, Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing, Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, an Artforum Must-See, and a shortlistee for the 2023 Asian Women of Achievement Awards. She has a PhD by practice in visual cultures from Goldsmiths, focused on disability, visuality, and ableist colonial legacies through the lens of Gauguin’s painting Annah la Javanaise.

Okka’s most recent exhibition was ACE-funded Kerokan Pol, part of the duo exhibition Languages of Intimacy at Birmingham School of Art’s Gallery in 2025, curated by Grand Union. It is a collection of four short films shot in Jakarta, on sick-disabled intimacies drawing from Indigeneities, against a backdrop of hypercapitalism. Her latest books are 2021’s Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches, shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize), 2024’s amuk (Nine Arches, longlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize), and her 2025 speculative nonfiction debut, Annah, Infinite (Tilted Axis), an Expert Pick in The Bookseller.

Cover of amuk

PUBLISHER

amuk
Nine Arches Press

Birmingham, West Midlands
England

  • Featured book

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.

"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, author of Happy Stories, Mostly

"A poetic act of resurrection. A defiant and hope-giving epic of a collection, reversing colonisation's murders to restore its victims to life. In these poems, buds sprout from what was severed, forests spring from land made waste. The end transforms into a beginning, a prayer stretching its tender leaves towards the sun."
—Tiffany Tsao

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