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Indigenous Species

Khairani Barokka (Goodreads Author)

4.15 · Rating details · 27 ratings · 3 reviews

A young girl is abducted and smuggled aboard a boat bound upstream on an Indonesian river, through a landscape scarred by ecological destruction and historical greed. As her captors take her ever deeper into the jungle, her uncertain fate is compounded by the sense of her environment as a place of violence, destruction and jeopardy. But it is also a place from which she ...more

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Hardcover, 52 pages

Published December 1st 2016 by Tilted Axis Press

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Tilted Axis Press

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Oct 06, 2017 Paul rated it it was amazing

Shelves: women-of-colour-2017

“I am of the same blood as the sanctioned mess of invasion
That was Javanese transmigration,
And I shampoo my hair with oil crafted
From dead-end social experiments
And gargantuan-scale domestication of hectares,
Cemeteries of growth”
Not at all easy to describe or categorize; this is a wonderful production from Tilted Axis Press (if you don’t know them, look them up). It is poetic, but so much more a cry of resistance against destructive forces be they imperialist capitalist or environmental. This “I am of the same blood as the sanctioned mess of invasion
That was Javanese transmigration,
And I shampoo my hair with oil crafted
From dead-end social experiments
And gargantuan-scale domestication of hectares,
Cemeteries of growth”
Not at all easy to describe or categorize; this is a wonderful production from Tilted Axis Press (if you don’t know them, look them up). It is poetic, but so much more a cry of resistance against destructive forces be they imperialist capitalist or environmental. This work acts on a number of levels and the artwork in the book is striking and very powerful. There is also a braille version where the artwork is embossed and tactile. The poem started as a performance and Barokka explains what she wanted to achieve;
“I liked the idea of a book that was also an art object. Also, considering then-unavailable healthcare, I wanted to step away from performance a bit, find a way to recreate the experience without always having me physically enacting it. And I wanted Indigenous to be a provocation, highlighting sighted privilege and how unequal the publishing landscape is – that’s why there’s a marker of Braille’s absence on every other page of the sighted version, and that’s why it’s explicitly called a sighted version. The poem is always still a performance – it was performed at the book launch”
This is also a reaction to and against the destruction of the environment in Barokka’s native Indonesia. It is about a girl abducted in her own homeland and taken upriver (I have heard this described as a feminist and anti-imperialist version of Heart of Darkness). The artwork and the depth of the language almost makes the language itself a physical thing. The abduction mirrors the theft of resources;
“I bet you, from the raucous
Machinery I’m hearing
And the smell of rashness,
That this is where the grease deals
Are siphoned into miners’ food.
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,”
I would strongly recommend this work, Barokka is co-editing an anthology of D/deaf and disabled poetry and has a collection of poems of her own due out as well. I will look out for both. ...more

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Apr 25, 2017 Larissa Schortinghuis rated it really liked it

This is just very powerful and will be reread many a time in the future.

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Nov 22, 2016

Bảo Ân rated it it was amazing
Jan 22, 2020

Apr 12, 2017 Laurin rated it really liked it

I've never seen anything like Barokka's work before. It's captivating, experimental, creative, and thrust through with passion. It is a literary, visual, and intellectual experience. The only reason why I haven't given it 5 stars is because only some of the poetry was as riveting to me as the ideas and images.

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