INTERVIEW with Khairani Barokka
FWR: “To enter the indonesian language is a science fictional enterprise,” you write in the first section of amuk. Reading forward, you show readers how Indonesian tenses permit a simultaneity of temporal possibilities not included within the narrower scope of English; traveling through time or existing beyond the limits of time altogether. What does it mean to you to move into and through languages, recognizing how structures and concepts so often cannot map directly? How do you feel through and comprehend the idea of translation, knowing it as something different from and more than the word-to-word equation of which one (at least in the Anglo-American context) is often trained to think it?
KB: Firstly, thank you for having me in this space, and for the time you’ve given to the work. I see the whole of the book amuk as my translation of the word. A strong interest of mine over the past years has been to query what the west thinks of as objective ‘truth’ and expose it to be fiction, and also giving encouraging people to provide the grace of truthfulness to what is called ‘fiction’. amuk highlights what is ultimately speculative non-fiction, and the infinite possibilities that affords, in terms of so many languages (including Indonesian) not having time tenses. And isn’t it strange that innumerable translations from languages without time tenses, like Indonesian and Malay, pin down just one time tense for verbs? So, as the titular poem says, each translation from these languages is both right and always wrong.
The book is a way of elucidating how moving through languages is equivalent through moving between differing cosmologies, psychogeographies. Any translator who really understands two or more languages will know that translation is not at all a word for word equation, especially considering differing grammar rules—and again, it’s about moving away from that deeply colonial understanding, that there is only one kind of English rather than different Englishes, that there is an ‘objectively right’ translation at all. Translation is an art form, and is a form of creative writing, no two translators will translate the same poetry collection the same way.
FWR: The body and body parts arise frequently over the course of amuk. What, to you, does it mean to understand the body as implicated in language—beyond simply the mechanics of its production? On the other end, thinking of lines like “language cosmologies […] hunted at the throat,” what does it mean to you to configure language itself as a mode of embodiment, with all of its potentials and vulnerabilities?
KB: Thank you for pointing this out, I suppose the bodily is a preoccupation. I think that each bodymind being so unique means each interpretation of language is uniquely ours, and the beauty of language is communication being potentially misunderstood in so many ways, as well as the hope of being potentially understood in so many ways as well. It is the hope for community, in a sense. Just as, in the book, rage is a prayer, is a manifestation of hope.
FWR: On the note of embodiment: among the multiplicitous ways in which amuk exists, it declares itself very early on as being a performance. We are even told what voice-voices we are switching into at various points, from that of amuk to one that is human. Have you performed this work before? If you have, what was that experience like? If you haven’t, how do you imagine it being performed—especially when it comes to facets, like the brackets, that cannot be communicated using the voice, or parts like the wall of texts pronouncing “I love your rage”? What does it mean to you for this work to exist as or be understood as a piece lived bodily, viewed bodily, and not encountered only in the context of the page?
KB: Yes, the long poem ‘amuk’, that forms half of the book, was originally a performance lecture on climate justice commissioned by Edinburgh University. I’ve been fortunate enough to perform excerpts from it, as well as the entirety of the poem, since the book was published, as well. Each performance is different, as a big fan of improvisation, and I make use of the voices by using different accents. I recently performed that wall of ‘I love your rage’ by asking the audience to yell it with me—and they did! The beauty of poetry always existing in different sensorial states—audio, visual performance, text—is part of an ethic of disability justice, to me, and access as translation. I love how seemingly singular texts reveal different aspects of themselves in different mediums, and I certainly have a different relationship to the text each time I translate it, so to speak, through my body. And therefore a different relationship each time to the audience I’m trying to connect with. That’s a really astute observation that the bodily connection is foregrounded intentionally, because I hope this understanding of ‘amuk’ is felt bodily by others, as I feel it within myself. I think the work as text is just as bodily received as the work as audible performance—how you read visually is always very much your bodymind involved in the art.
FWR: Much of the book discusses the “mistranslations” (if one can call them that) wrought by colonial/hegemonic ignorance and arrogance, from “run amuck” to the poetic genre of the pantoum. What was your intention behind giving voice to human and nonhuman alike in this work—and particularly giving voice to an act of language itself? How did you first land on the term amuk to be the word at the heart of your collection?
KB: I’ve been thinking about the mistranslation of ‘amuk’ for years… To me, it encapsulates the history of colonialism, to mistranslate ‘rage’ into psychopathy or a ‘culture-bound’ homicidal syndrome or a ‘running amuck’ of chaos. It’s the theft of rage, by Dutch, Danish, Portuguese, English, and these languages deliberately mistranslated the word in the late 17th century, during violent colonisation. Criminalising and pathologising the rage of colonised peoples has been going on for centuries, as a very specific tool of oppressors. The history of this one word ‘amuk’ stretches all the way into what’s happening in the present, with the multiple genocides ongoing in Palestine, Papua, Sudan, Congo, and elsewhere. And with regards to the nonhuman, all of these continued colonial genocides are also environmental genocides, as I’m glad the book makes clear
To answer your first questions, I suppose voices are important to me because I felt the original and persistent soul of the word ‘amuk’ contains hundreds of millions of lives. In each word’s etymology in mis/translation is the history of so many voices.
FWR: One of the many innovative aspects of this collection is the way it uses punctuation, and specifically brackets. Brackets even open the book—framing the incantation of “bahasaku” and then filling, in various sizes and formats, the otherwise empty space of “In Praise Of.” In a book so much about both the idea of alternate possibilities of seeing or understanding and about what it means for such possibilities to be hidden or devalued, among other subjects, what led your decision of how you use brackets? Do the meanings and motives behind this punctuation change for you as we see them across different poems in the collection?
KB: Yes, it relates to the use of voices, I think—the truth that lies behind each word, and how it’s used in the English language. Saying the quiet part exists, the quiet part is out loud for a lot of people, and having to make it ‘quiet’ does something to you. And also drawing a boundary of respect for language. There is something protective about brackets for me, that the true meanings will always be there, no matter how much people try to obscure them. Protecting from disrespect what needs to be held in secret spaces, to avoid the surveillance of disrespectors. The great thing about brackets is that meanings and motives are also open to interpretation, throughout the book.
FWR: amuk is astounding both for what it communicates and how it communicates it; the stories it tells and the innovative ways in which it tells them. There are many instances of playing with or complicating form, and the book even includes and references work from other art areas like photography and film, as with the photos of hands and in the poem “preceding a prayer for the dead asian men who inspired a nightmare on elm street.” As you were writing this work, who were you looking towards as your models and inspirations (can be writers, musicians, painters, relatives—whomever!)? How would you say your experience in performance and working with artists in other mediums has influenced your work?
KB: Thank you so much. As you say, I come from a performance/interdisciplinary art background as well as a literary one. My PhD was in Visual Cultures. For me, these interests have always been tied to poetry, and to translation, and to a wide range of influences, and to collaboration with other artists. So ‘amuk’ starting out as a performed text—with the words on a screen as I performed it—was just an outpouring of all the different artistic influences I’d accumulated, probably many I’m not even conscious of. Certainly my family, and Minang and Javanese traditions of poetry as communal, as voiced. Certainly artists who use performance, such as Arahmaiani, and the late, great Cok Sawitri, and many musicians I admire. Certainly other disabled and ill artists in the literary and performance world.
FWR: Though a collection of original writing, your background as a translator certainly shines through in amuk, especially in its interest in language and the politics between languages. What do you feel that being a translator as well as a poet gives you access to? How do each of your practices inform the other? What do you feel like is/are the responsibility/ies of translators?
KB: Many thanks, I’m glad the translation background comes through. One understanding being a translator gives me access to is that the notion a translated poem is only good if ‘it reads as though it was first written in English’ is a false colonial paradigm, and again, one that presumes there’s only one kind of English in the world. And using multiple tenses in one verb is definitely something that comes from my understanding of language as a translator—it is actually quite weird that all verbs from non-tense-containing languages are translated in just one tense in English. I started playing with multiple tenses in one in my previous book, Ultimatum Orangutan, and decided to really go in on it for this one. Translators’ responsibilities are manifold, but I feel that ultimately, it is about humility and respect for languages as entire universes and philosophies of thought. I’m so glad you enjoyed the book, thanks again for having me.
