Abstract
Khairani Barokka (‘Okka’) is among a handful of new-generation talents who work on poetry from the global South that is not just a locational preference but an epistemological one. The themes of her poetry span across various contemporary concerns. There is ecocide and the ravages left by the trail of global capital, manifested in the plunder of nature beyond recognition. The forests of old exist only in memory. Feminism is another constant, emboldened in its particularities but not without a common language of experience. A third theme is language itself, especially an English that is fractured and fragmented. This, in turn, leads to a reality beyond the easy modes of translation.
Born in Indonesia, and currently based in London, Okka’s work defies common poetic categorisation, since her themes are not discrete but overlapping. It is hard to tell where one theme begins and another ends. Her object is not just to write good poetry (whatever the term means, with its various allusions and connotations) but also to engage with poetry as a force for good. The articulation of poetic voice is for a definite purpose, which is one of reclamation. Perhaps, there are a plurality or cacophony of voices she wants to restore or bring to light, from within the deeper forests of Kalimantan to the more cosmopolitan climes of the global North. These registers too elude easy meaning.
She writes in her book, Indigenous Species (2016):
And I don’t want to grow old As you paddle downriver With the mercury Beating down your synapses, Eating at your unborn childlings, While I close my eyes And look away And pretend girls my age Don’t live here and won’t.
And elsewhere in the book, she writes:
And where they are packing down Eons of intricacies and strength From the forest to molecular form On a woman’s lipstick bottle in Iowa.
The effects are there for all to see, as various idealisations about the correctness of English get questioned. Her poetry touches the realm of the indigenous and reaches across the ideological containers of the global North and South. Indigenous voices are deservedly receiving their due attention in the world poetry of today. This is not just about articulation and recovery of a lost episteme but also a question about transmission and the modes of such transmission. However, questions nevertheless remain.
How much of such poetry is adequately expressed and understood, beyond the immediate context? Why should context matter so much in a world that is supposedly shrinking with the internet? How is indigeneity to be distinguished from an exclusivist nativism? Is there an autochthony that is inherent to the indigenous? Where do the boundaries lie—should some boundaries remain after all—even in a digital universe where transmission is easy, and containers spill over?
As such, Okka tries to reorient the very notion of what it is to write in English, just as she reclaims her heritage and asks questions about where this enterprise is headed. The dominant mode in Okka’s poetry is one of questioning. This mode defies the easy pleasures of the lyric, while confronting the notion of the universal itself.