10 Questions for Khairani Barokka
- By Edward Clifford
a friend and i talk rainforest infernos,
how she’d had hope
for that failed carbon scheme
that i’d always known to be
core of ash, not white hope
—from "prayer for baby breath," Volume 62, Issue 4 (Winter 2021)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In the ‘90s (perhaps you, too, are transported by that phrase back through the years, to a specific writing memory!), I wrote an anti-war poem for a children’s poetry competition, held in Indonesia as part of the cultural component of the Asian Pacific Economic Conference. Hilariously, I remember affixing a note that read ‘Dear Bill Clinton, please read my poem’—if only there were such poetic pipelines from children to state leaders. I remember it won second place to a poem that was, though I didn’t have the words for it at the time, sexist, inviting Bill Clinton to come to Bogor, where our handmaidens would welcome him. Decidedly creepy in hindsight! An interesting, early lesson in how politics privilege certain aesthetics.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
An honest answer to this is, somehow, everything I’ve ever read. Writers and artists I admire and whose lives light the path: Toeti Heraty, Dolorosa Sinaga, Arahmaiani, Debra Yatim, Melani Budianta, Rita Indiana, Ruth L. Ozeki, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Frida Kahlo, Petra Kuppers, and so many of my contemporaries. How my beloveds write their lives through living influences me, in writing and in general.
What other professions have you worked in?
Interdisciplinary artist, translator, editor, researcher, prize/residency judge, illustrator, teacher, aid worker, journalist, administrator, custodial services, random side jobs that didn’t last long as a youth.
What inspired you to write this piece?
There is a decidedly white, Western-centric, neoliberal bent towards how environmental issues are treated in the media, worlds away from how poor, rural, and indigenous peoples experience them on the ground. The encroachment of a faulty carbon market, that privileges wealthy corporations’ ability to pollute and pillage whilst literally buying rainforest, stems from this deeply inadequate and biased framing of ‘nature’ as separate from ‘humans’. Everything in this poem really happened.
In addition, after writing it, I met a journalist who admitted that they had covered the 2015 Indonesian rainforest fires—which caused the deaths of nearly 100,000 Indonesians in the country alone, let alone those killed or sickened by the smog in neighboring countries—from the orangutan extinction angle, without looking at ‘the social justice’ side of things. I felt real pain at this admission, that a massacre of human beings, indigenous peoples who have been acknowledged as the best defenders of the rainforest and its fauna, could occur, and not even be mentioned in coverage of the fires. Indigenous and peasant peoples’ sovereignty and ability to care for the earth, without so-called ‘market solutions’, is the answer to climate crisis.
Ecofascist viewpoints abound, including denial of how much past and current colonial capitalism is the bedrock of climate and environmental crises, and how undoing it is the key to survival. In my latest book Ultimatum Orangutan, I was able to foreground indigenous viewpoints, and cite indigenous scholars and communities who believe ‘Anthropocene’ is overwhelmingly used incorrectly—that it should be counted as an era beginning with European colonialism, which sought to create false distinctions between ‘nature’, ’mind’ and ‘body’, as indigenous scholar Zoe Todd and Heather Davis write.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
Jakarta. The way the lights hit humidity, the rains that raised me. The cities, towns, and villages my loved ones come from, in many senses of the word, permeate my imagination, especially Tanah Datar, West Sumatra and Jogjakarta. Travels around Indonesia, and Asia more broadly. My home in London. The elusive safe haven of mindfulness. My closest people as homes.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
There’s a word processing app on my laptop that comes with its own options for meditative writing music and sounds, which I find very helpful. In general, music without words, or in a language I don’t understand, is good ‘background emotion’. I’m always eager to discover new playlists. At the moment, am enjoying parts of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s enormous oeuvre as accompaniment to writing, along with Studio Ghibli soundtracks, and the soundtrack to the series Vida.
Do you have any rituals or traditions that you do in order to write?
Position my body for Maximum Comfort, which overwhelmingly means lying down, with a pillow behind my head. I haven’t written properly while sitting up for a decade or so; am able to take care of disability needs this horizontal way, instead. Cue music. Make sure there’s a nearby hydration source. When I remember to, I say basmallah; old Muslim school habits die hard.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
I’m very shy about showing my work in its early stages, so more often than not, apart from myself, it’ll be editors of publications—unless it’s a collective/workshop situation where I’m with colleagues, and we’re all looking at each other’s work. Occasionally, I’ll share with my partner first (who’s already biased, and therefore an untrustworthy opinion).
What are you working on currently?
Commissions for poetry, short film and live performance, and a couple of larger creative nonfiction/art projects. Also: trying to rest often and well, to take care of myself in other ways, and to be there for the people I love.
What are you reading right now?
Meydo Deydo, Harlan Boer’s upcoming Indonesian short story collection. Negar Djavadi’s Disoriental, translated by Tina Kover. And am in the middle of other books I’m reading more slowly, often while starting and finishing others; different books invite different paces.
KHAIRANI BAROKKA is a Minang-Javanese writer and artist from Jakarta whose work has been presented internationally. Her work centers disability justice as anti-colonial praxis. She is currently Research Fellow at University of the Arts London, Associate Artist at the National Centre for Writing (UK), and UK Associate Artist at Delfina Foundation. Among her honors, she has been Modern Poetry in Translation’s Inaugural Poet-in-Residence, a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, an Artforum Must-See, and an NYU Tisch Departmental Fellow. Okka’s books are Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis) and Rope (Nine Arches.) She has just published a poetry collection, Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches.)
