Ultimatum Orangutan

By Khairani Barokka

Khairani Barokka's second poetry collection is an intricate exploration of colonialism and environmental injustice: her acute, interlaced language draws clear connections between colonial exploitation of fellow humans, landscapes, animals, and ecosystems. Amidst the horrifying damage that has resulted for peoples as interlinked with places, there is firm resistance. Resonant and deeply attentive, the lyricism of these poems is juxtaposed with the traumatic circumstances from which they emerge. Through these defiant, potent verses, the body—particularly the disabled body—is centred as an ecosystem in its own right. Barokka's poems are every bit as alarming, urgent and luminous as is necessary in the age of climate catastrophe as outgrowth of colonial violence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nine Arches Press
• Release date: Mar 25, 2021
• ISBN: 9781913437107

Khairani Barokka

Khairani Barokka is a translator, editor, writer and artist from Jakarta. In 2023, Okka was shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis, and access as translation. Among her honours, she has been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, and Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing. Okka’s books include Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), Rope (Nine Arches), and Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (as co-editor; Nine Arches). Her latest books are Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize, and 2024's amuk (Nine Arches).

Book preview

Hello, Sequelae

Because another storm is humming,

you squat by a creek, chin out.

Tease the fringes of river intoxicant,

thumb and forefinger dunked in the wet,

breathing air that makes you a statistic.

Low to the ground, lung-filling spatter.

Pry yourself from rushing water,

face what the minnow knows,

what stoic ducks understand,

what treebanks feel as a seeping-in.

A falling outwards of equilibrium

hunts a sore chest, senses insects

leaving the grounds where you make

fast cover, temporary, walls

already so pale, so fading, ivory

as the full teeth of ghosts.

Find heat-emanating bodies,

find axe and blanket.

No hurtling yourself under tables,

you have always been so open

to skin-piercing things, there is no

safe house. In your hands

is how to seed earth.

You have always known how

to tell time by sky.

i. natural history museum

for AS

edmontosaurus, coelacanth, animatronic

hypnotists stand vigil over lone paragraph,

cocoon-wrapped, on indigenous peoples’

uncredited boon to european science. dissected

human women then throng display halls.

our feathered reptiles, mineral keychains,

armadillo taxidermy, empress arachnids,

espresso cues to purchase donation,

latin lingua franca of ancient, skewed orders,

visitors to kensington allowed to fly home

upon quiet capture by gift shops and cctv.

the key to survival is [l].

the cause of extinction is [g].

ghost orchid is wisdom, her presence skeletal.

rules all chances of escape, in the living,

from spirit preservation in transparent jars.

ii. the event

when sky-stone fell into the earth,

the smoke blackened all of celestial dome.

tree bark grew thick with scales of ash,

the heat rose, water flew, boiling ether

choked the beasts. and they collapsed

into mass graves set in this lone, blue

marble, waited in the depths as calcium.

cainozoic era begun with the largest of endings,

botany and fauna slain, punto. zeus’ grenades

slung across the cretaceous/tertiary boundary, now-

ukraine, now-mexico, now-north sea, now-west

of mumbai. and the deccan traps’ sparking ruby

volcanoes, rattling maniacally, suffocating leaves.

i sit in wonky wheelchair, museum-provided,

my friend vertical behind me. tyrannosaurus rex

moves his silly, twin forelimbs about before us,

electric strands moving his painted neck, head

aloft like a chicken’s. we missed them by too

many millions of years, we rebuilt from hunch

and stringed paths connecting phyla. preferential

choice to resurrect those with eyes, a menace

in their paws, phylum chordata. my friend will

buy me a tear-shaped stone in the shop, tinged

just like sugus orange-flavoured candy. and we’ll

lie down, discuss vile scourge that’s human

populace, apologise quietly to theropod dinos,

descendants eaten with sweet potato fries.

in which i hypnotise a tiger

not made for blake quotes and tinder profiles.

not squandered for bullets slung as attempts

at gumption. not slit with knives on colonists’

orders, then strung up. not sold to a venture

capitalist who’ll place her pale feet in heels

and on you. not vanishing. not a chipmunk-

cheeked emoji. not bedtime threat to children

in cold climates. not CGI recreation with an

underappreciated actor voicing you. not a

bevy of ill-advised tattoos. not the hangover.

not sports team embodiment. not go get ‘em.

not taxidermy. not species forgotten. not a

name used for foreplay. not a fantastic form

of balm for soothing creaking muscle tissue.

not a totem for my calming alone. not tired

and misunderstood and hiding and rotting

and gone. scream without shame or fear of

banishment. this is no forest of wounding,

tribulation, dust of your bone. lick your paws.

                                                           open your eyes.

Fence and Repetition: A History of Climate Change

Prolific, private division of land was: mass of colonists’ decision

to ink signatures, stand-in for currency, in turn for earthworm

gristle