Much has been said about Khairani Barokka’s wide-ranging, multidisciplinary body of work, spanning literature—spoken word poetry, dystopian fiction, scholarly texts—and media—textual, visual, performance. In the journal Research in Drama Education, she is an academic exploring “the limits of access and the framing of disabled performers from non-Western backgrounds in Western contexts.” According to the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, however, she is a poet of “ecocritical agenda advancing environment justice against deforestation, the loss of biodiversity, pollution, further revaluing indigeneity to the more-than-human.”
In this interview, I asked Barokka about Modern Poetry in Translation, the London-based magazine where she serves as editor; her movement between genres; and translating from the languages of her homeland, Indonesia—including BISINDO or Indonesian Sign Language.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (AMMD): In your Catapult essay “The Case Against Italicizing ‘Foreign’ Words,” you made a case for maintaining an “active ethos of not italicizing supposedly foreign words,” with the hope that those in the publishing industry would follow suit. Can you speak more on how publications in the North Atlantic, and even Anglophone ones within the Global South, perpetuate a myth of “cultural purity” through linguistic gatekeeping?
Khairani Barokka (KB): It’s been really heartening to receive the kind responses people and publications have had to that article over the past two years, and it even caused Massachusetts Review to change their house style, which was very encouraging. It’s the best feeling when colleagues say that they’ve changed the minds of editors by sending them the piece, which I hope has saved the significant amount of time we writers can spend arguing these points.
I think the perception of certain words or names as ‘foreign’ does have to do with some publications’ regulations of house style, in which the word ‘foreign’ is not put in quotation marks, i.e., ‘Be careful with foreign words.’ And there have been some people who respond positively to my article, but still don’t put ‘foreign’ in quotation marks, when those quotation marks say a lot about gatekeeping. The ‘Other’ is fixed in many imaginations, which is interesting when you work in a country like the United Kingdom—where names and words come from so many corners of the globe, yet foreignising them is still de rigueur in many minds. Someone can be part of British society, and their name can still be regarded as ‘foreign,’ even if they’re a British citizen or born here (and of course, we can get into the hierarchies of bureaucracy and migration status!).
This has much to do with a certain ‘mythical English reader,’ which is usually assumed to be white, middle class, and monoglot; colleagues like Anton Hur have really been pushing back against this. Why can’t we, as supposed outsiders, be the idealised English reader for translations? Why isn’t the responsibility of a translation tied back to the linguistic communities it’s translated from, many members of which shouldn’t be forced to make literature ‘understandable’ to a very narrow demographic? The more we recognise these dynamics, the more we can unpack and minimise colonial tendencies in the literary arts. God knows it was assumed we as Indonesian children knew all the references in translated Enid Blyton books, for instance. It’s about cultural dominance, and the assumptions that go with that.
AMMD: As Modern Poetry in Translation’s first editor who is a woman of colour living with disability, in what ways do you think can publications be more accessible to people living with disability?
KB: That is an excellent question that I hope everyone is asking. And I suppose the answer is, ‘How long have you got?’ As an occasional accessibility consultant in the arts, I am constantly learning about ways to make things accessible that I wasn’t aware of before—because our bodyminds come in near-infinite varieties. Look to D/deaf and/or disabled people in publishing, because we have been writing articles and books about this for years, and are continuing to work for better practices.
At MPT, we are trying to make things more and more accessible. When the excellent Jamie Hale and myself were guest co-editors of MPT’s Bodies Issue, which came out in early 2022, we made sure there were image descriptions, which have now been instituted for the magazine. We also did a version of the Call for Submissions in Plain English, as well as in British Sign Language, which is also something I am grateful to be implementing for each issue. We are now making sure there is British Sign Language interpretation at each launch event, and that the submissions call specifically states that we welcome D/deaf and/or disabled translators and poets, as well as translations from sign languages and disabled linguistic traditions. In-person launches, when promoted, have accessibility information mentioned, and we are making sure in-person launch venues are wheelchair-accessible or step-free. We encourage contributors to launches to self-describe, and I try to always do that myself. In addition, from the Food Issue onwards, there are audio recordings of the selection of poems we put online from each issue. And we now make sure that any images we put on social media are described with ALT-text or in captions. Access as translation has been a big part of my ethos, and that of many others.
AMMD: You have been referenced in texts from Performing Disability in Early Modern English Drama (2020) to The Ends of Art Criticism (2021) to Translating across Sensory and Linguistic Borders (2019); you’ve also contributed to books on vegetal intelligence and economic science fictions. And now, your experimental work of creative nonfiction Annah, Infinite, is forthcoming from Tilted Axis Press.
KB: In a world with so much violence against disabled people—especially from the majority world, and especially against women and gender non-conforming people—working in the arts and getting to share my ideas has been really cathartic, and community-making at its best. I think for the majority world, western genres or disciplinary conventions aren’t as applicable, so I just put out what I’m thinking and feeling, which is inherently interdisciplinary.
Annah, Infinite is a work I’ve been thinking about for eleven years; I was creating at first piecemeal, then more intensively, in various forms that will all be discussed in the book. It’s about Gauguin’s Annah la Javanaise through the lens of disability, and how colonialism in ‘the art world’ has shaped so much of how young people, female-presenting people, Black and brown people are treated, how our pains and needs are not taken seriously—but it’s also about the beautiful forms of resistance that have always existed, in art and language. It is a work of speculative non-fiction, and is a book I see firmly as a translation, though not in the conventional sense. I’m working on edits at the moment, and am grateful for Tilted Axis’s sensitivity and support. It’ll be out in 2024!
AMMD: When poet Rishi Dastidar asked you about artistic process in The Writing Life podcast, you said that as a poet living with chronic illness, it is vital “to listen to my body.” What is the role of the poet living with disability in the perennial struggles against, among others, ableism, environmental plunder, sexism, colonialism? And why is there a need for disability activism and disability justices—the plurality of it, as you have asserted elsewhere—to be seen through the lens of indigeneity?
KB: I think everyone should be listening to their bodyminds, whether or not you identify as disabled. We should all be determining for ourselves what we will and won’t do based on how our bodyminds are protected and nurtured—which is such an difficult act amidst all the noise, and I certainly have to persevere at this listening to really grasp it.
Disability justice (a term coined by queer crips of colour collective Sins Invalid) is the basis of so many struggles, and has so many local nuances based on indigeneities. One thing I talk about often is how indigenous cultures often have much more humane understandings of disability in our spiritualities and stories than colonial capitalist culture. There is a higher proportion of disabled people in indigenous communities everywhere (and in stolen-from communities more generally), and we are on the frontlines of environmental justice. I learn from so many fellow disabled thinkers like Slamet Amex Thohari and Jen Deerinwater with regards to this.
AMMD: “. . . translation as a cleaving, a refracting,” were your words from your essay published in Violent Phenomena: 21 Essays on Translation. Tell us more about the parallelisms between environmental destruction and literary translation.
KB: Environmental destruction and environmental justice has everything to do with translation. There are indigenous cosmologies that are so beyond anything a reductive sense of ‘nature’ can convey; in my mother’s village, for instance, there weren’t words for North-South-East-West, there was only ‘upstream’ and ‘downstream,’ as everything was connected to the river. Translation has so much to do with advocating for the stewardship indigenous communities have the right to, which is so often diminished by colonial models of extractivism, and environmental violence in the form of mines, factory pollution, you name it. The more language homogenisation and colonial capitalism take hold, the more people are made to forget the names of our relatives who are flora, fauna, sea, earth, and sky.
AMMD: You are Minang-Javanese in heritage. I’m curious about the hierarchies within Indonesian literatures—by ethnicities, by languages. And what role does translation play in this hierarchy within Indonesian languages (including BISINDO) and the act of translating into Western languages?
KB: Thanks for bringing this up. There are over seven hundred languages in Indonesia, and therefore so many kinds of localised social hierarchies, in different contexts. Being Javanese, we are both coloniser and colonised when it comes to other languages. There are indigenous Javanese communities fighting for environmental justice, and also Javanese people participating in a colonial relationship with other peoples. Sign languages in general are, unfortunately, still regarded as lesser than non-sign languages, and D/deaf colleagues have committed their lives to combating this. In my essay “Translation of/as Language, Sanctuary, and Weapon”, which I expand upon in Violent Phenomena, I discuss how these D/deaf and disabled language hierarchies interact with translation into languages with a western gaze.
Khairani Barokka is a London-based Minang-Javanese writer and artist born in Jakarta, Indonesia. She was the inaugural Poet-in-Residence of Modern Poetry in Translation, where she currently serves as editor. She is co-editor of Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches), and the author of Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), Rope (Nine Arches) and Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches) which was shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize. Formerly researcher-in-residence at the University of Arts London’s Decolonising the Arts Institute, New York University’s Tisch Department fellow, and National Centre for Writing Associate Artist, her works have been presented in at least sixteen countries.
Alton Melvar M Dapanas (they/them) is Asymptote’s editor-at-large for the Philippines. They’re the author of Towards a Theory on City Boys: Prose Poems (UK: Newcomer Press, 2021), assistant nonfiction editor at Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature and Atlas & Alice Literary Magazine, and former reader at Creative Nonfiction. Find more at https://linktr.ee/samdapanas.
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