Reviewed by Diane R. Wiener
Content Warnings: Colonialism, racism, misogyny, ableism, oppression, environmental destruction, abjection, harm, violence, murder
When I read and reviewed Khairani Barokka’s second full-length poetry collection, Ultimatum Orangutan, I was struck not only by how long the poems stayed with me but by the nuanced ways in which the work took up residence in my consciousness. For different and overlapping reasons, amuk will also remain resonant for me as a reader who has long admired and felt impacted by Barokka’s work.
Present throughout amuk is Barokka’s steadfast dedication to critiquing and seeking to undermine colonialism, racism, misogyny, and ableism, while and through resurrecting the stories of those individuals and communities, human and nonhuman, who have been abjected, harmed, and murdered by these intersecting systems of oppression. The capacious care, tenderness, and energy with which the poet seeks actively to bring back to life what had/has been undone through violence are matched by a relentless, necessarily activist praxis made whole by the poems’ work.
In the titular poem, approximately fifty pages in length (including visual content) and arranged into indivisible, numerous sections, a scathing commentary of brutalities enumerates the “issues” that subtend and connect the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in relation to wide-ranging images of teslas (no capitals), blood, fire, environmental toxins, assault, enslavement, genocide, and other horrors. Barokka has an unparalleled facility for lyricism while being unwaveringly direct, as in: “all sweatshop heartache / and mine poisoning / and factory suffocation / and oil rig flares / are this project // are these people / were them, will be” (40).
In “a cartographic hunger,” a poem that again reminds the reader that there can be no turning away, Barokka asks: “how do we pay no attention to this country / hone breath to build for another land / [in the same coordinates of space] / how do we forget this landscape of traps / filling reservoirs with disbelieved wounds / all hyperspeed-harvested, cultured / to feed a mythic line’s open mouth” (88). Barokka insists on and demands an ethical framework, as it follows a necessarily imperfect imperative: “we are building other countries, / astonishing names permeating / the cracked shores we wake to / the countries we seek have been self-constructing – / adhesive to each other in quiet clearings / when nightfall is breath at a time” (88-89).
This poem’s (and this entire book’s) current yet atemporal while specific “breath at a time” is not “a breath” but, rather, breath itself. In “prayer for baby breath,” Barokka summons the reader to a big mirror, into which we are invited, without ocularcentrism, to gaze, and through which we can or must enter into conversation with the orangutans alongside human mothers and their choking, suffocating infants. The forests, the journalistic coverage, and the “scorch apocalypse” coalesce into a new linguistic formation. This new enlanguaging is the book’s work, repeatedly, among other necessary labors.
The “Notes” at the book’s conclusion also insist upon a different tongue. While “Amuk means rage / to rage in Indonesian and Malay” (103) and “doa” refers to “prayer / prayers” (103), the definition of the DSM is sandwiched between these two words. Crucially, with respect to “amuk,” “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 amuk’” (103).
Reading these poems, “amuk” feels like a new, while ongoing and returning, resistance that is alighted–its wings on fire.
Title: amuk
Author: Khairani Barokka
Publisher: Nine Arches Press
Year: 2024
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About the Reviewer
Diane R. Wiener (she/they) became Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering in January 2020. The author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022), Diane’s poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, eMerge, For The Birds Arts & Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, Pop the Culture Pill, and eMerge. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. She has published widely on Disability, education, accessibility, equity, and empowerment, among other subjects. A proud Neuroqueer, Mad, Crip, Genderqueer, Ashkenazi Jewish Hylozoist Nerd, Diane is honored to serve in the nonprofit sector. You can visit Diane online at: https://dianerwiener.com.