Annah, Infinite
https://www.tiltedaxispress.com/annah-infinite/
Sept 9, 2025 (UK); Nov 19, 2025 (US)
Translated from the painting Annah la Javanaise
An experimental work of creative non-fiction that challenges art history, confronts colonial ableism, and reclaims a stolen spirit.
This is an escape story.
In Annah, Infinite, the dominant narratives surrounding Paul Gauguin’s famous painting Annah la Javanaise (1893-94) are turned upside down. The book argues a simple point: what if the portrait is not one of a consenting muse, but a child in pain?
Annah, Infinite questions the colonial power that has defined the infamous subject’s unknown history. Through the mythology of Annah, Okka draws attention to the systems of ablenormativity, racism, and sexism that shape what we learn of art history and what we see on museum walls.
Alongside her critique, the author engages with Annah la Javanaise through poetry, fiction, and visual art. A work of emotional heft, Okka asks us to acknowledge the possibility of pain in every single portrait, as well as the possibility of escape.
praise
‘What is behind a portrait? What layers of meaning and bodily experiences are hidden or distorted when one is objectified by the artist? Khairani Barokka breaks down Annah la Javanaise by Paul Gauguin through a lens of colonialism, ableism, heteronormativity, and racism. The author sees pain written on Annah’s body and reflects on her pain journey, tracing years of torture and neglect. Annah, Infinite is a fascinating exploration of Barokka’s relationship with a brown person who was real and made into a painting.’— Alice Wong, author of Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life
‘Khairani Barokka's Annah, Infinite is staged at the limit of portraiture, metabolizing the body as a composite mode of figuration, both present and redacted in the face of violence that sometimes has a face and sometimes is just that, itself, a broad pressure with no fixed source and "multiple modes." In this context, as night falls and keeps falling, Barokka asks if it's possible: "to translate what we endure as human beings." Is it?"‘ — Bhanu Kapil
‘From the twin poles of Annah la Javanaise and her own pained body, Khairani Barokka unfurls a bold reimagining of established orthodoxies, punctuated with sharp wit and informed by wide-ranging erudition.’— Jeremy Tiang, author of State of Emergency
‘A profoundly disturbing, intriguing, and illuminating work—Khairani Barokka is so precise and empathetic that the reader aches with phantom pain.’ — Anton Hur, author of Toward Eternity and 2025 International Booker Prize judge
‘Annah, Infinite focuses on a single canvas and yet contains multitudes. The text combines poetry, fiction, critical analysis, queer theory, colonial history, artwork, pain memoir and even catalogue descriptions, tempting one to describe it as genre-defying, and yet, I would be tempted to say that this ambitious, searing work heralds the birth of a new, yet-to-be-named genre, a form of translation which demands that we summon all our faculties—seeing, sensing, thinking, hearing, raging, loving, truthing—to engage with the enormity of a single artefact.’— Daisy Rockwell, International Booker Prize-winning translator
‘Khairani Barokka exposes the full evil of oppressive systems even as she denies them the power to hold us down. A powerful alternative to life lived forever in the shadow of the colonial and postcolonial. Like Annah, we were and are and will be and always will be free.’ —Tiffany Tsao, author of The Majesties and award-winning translator
‘A major work on language and translation, art-reading and writing, race, femininity and, above all, on pain. It has a definitive and reclamatory power, combining elegy with research and personal experience in a way that is scholarly, expressive, and immensely readable.’ —Preti Taneja
‘Annah, Infinite is a powerful, poetic and urgent text that defies categorisation. It is about many things, including art and Gauguin, but also colonisation, exploitation, othering, pain, gender, and the body as it is perceived and as it is experienced – in the past and in the present. Khairani Barokka draws the reader into her concerns by layering what is known, with what might be known, and what can easily be imagined if one chooses to take the risk. And it is a risk because Annah, the 'Javanese girl’ who was painted by the artist Gauguin - naked and with a monkey at their feet - is given a voice, many voices, including that of the author. All these voices are possible and they become a chorus of truths that corrupt the art, the artist, the critic, the historian and the viewer. As with any chorus, it cannot and should not, be ignored. I read this book with awe.’ —Pip Williams, author of The Dictionary of Lost Words
‘Annah Infinite is essential, groundbreaking work, deconstructing and reframing colonialism, art, disability, ableism, racism and the understanding of pain, exploring selfhood and interconnectivity under the multiply dehumanising colonial gaze of the art world and medical gaze of the abled world. A unique and life-changing read.’ — Polly Atkin
‘Khairani Barokka reclaims the figure of Annah la Javanaise, once a footnote in Gauguin’s colonial fantasy, and reimagines her into a multiplicity. No longer the exoticised muse, Annah fractures into a thousand selves: disabled, racialised, violated, yet surviving, subverting, resisting. Through Barokka’s daring, intellectual, and poetic experiment, Annah becomes a portal between the empire's past—dehumanised bodies from colonial archives—and contemporary violence: the persistent structures of colonialism, racism, ableism, and heteropatriarchy. Annah, Infinite is ambitious, defiant, and haunting.’ —Intan Paramaditha
‘Through this study of a single canvas and its subject, Barokka presents a brilliant book that defies classification, one that delves into linguistics, colonial history, queer theory and memoir, and is by turns lyrical, angry, tender and pained, harking back to the pioneering work of Linda Nochlin and John Berger, but blazing a new trail that is as unexpected as it is enthralling.’ — Frank Wynne, The Irish Times
Buy Okka’s latest book amuk (Nine Arches Press, March 2024) here.
Cover artwork: Khairani Barokka
Khairani Barokka’s uncompromising third collection of poetry amuk sheds light on the devastating and ongoing effects of a single word's mistranslation, and emphasises what exists in opposition to such hostile histories and presents: hope, resistance, and joy.
Groundbreaking in its use of form and poetics, amuk deconstructs the brutal workings of oppressive systems to examine how, “through macheted etymology”, violence and suffering is replicated through (mis)translation. From linguistic corruption and domination, the poems make connections to the mutilation and ruin caused by an extractive colonialism that destroys whole peoples, cultures, languages, and environments. Through Khairani Barokka’s own recognition of "linguistic cosmology – how stars move and imprint upon the body", radical poems of fury and prayer look towards the sacred and ancestral, towards survival and continuance, and the vital, living resistance of persisting languages, and resilient peoples.
Praise for amuk:
‘amuk is Khairani Barokka's best book so far, exploring incisively the (linguistic) possibilities of resistance. 'amuk', the longest poem in the book, ingeniously enriches the discussion about Global South rage towards colonial powers. This book 'is/was/will-be' a gift.’ - Norman Erikson Pasaribu, author of Happy Stories, Mostly
‘Khairani Barokka’s poetry both makes and unmakes, picking apart the fabric and function of language so that we may put it to braver and more necessary use. amuk is the work of a visionary.’ - Victoria Adukwei Bulley
‘A poetic act of resurrection. A defiant and hope-giving epic of a collection, reversing colonisation's murders to restore its victims to life. In these poems, buds sprout from what was severed, forests spring from land made waste. The end transforms into a beginning, a prayer stretching its tender leaves towards the sun.’ - Tiffany Tsao
Image description: ULTIMATUM ORANGUTAN cover. Book cover shows a dark purple background with two asymmetrical gold stripes running down the left and right sides of the frame, and a diagonal white rectangle with the words 'ULTIMATUM ORANGUTAN' and 'KHAIRANI BAROKKA' on it, in black text, separated by a small, purple stripe. The image shows a brown hand, upright with palm out, throwing purple and white energy attacks at a black-and-white bulldozer. Behind them is a purple-tinted image of Tanah Datar, West Sumatra, Indonesia.
Cover illustration by Khairani Barokka.
Buy Khairani Barokka's 2021 book Ultimatum Orangutan here.
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.
Praise for Ultimatum Orangutan:
"Khairani Barokka's Ultimatum Orangutan is a book like no other. But what does that mean? It means that Barokka finds a new music via which she is able to tell us things we thought we knew, but didn't quite know. How to tell the time by sky. How to see our planet's history of climate change through a lyric poet's eye and be astonished. She tells us that strangeness is perhaps our last chance. She finds a language to speak about everything and anything. Even to speak about eight hundred-odd US military bases ("they stud me like a punk"). I am writing from a drowning ship, she says. Meaning our planet, friends. She teaches rage, that sun-cloaked wrath. Violence taught us elegance, she says. That ghost orchid is wisdom, she says. This is planetary poetics. Listen. Listen to the voice of this poet. It might not be too late for us, after all. Ultimatum Orangutan is an inimitable, necessary book." -
Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
"Ultimatum Orangutan is a vital, generous, hugely ambitious collection. Written against all forms of extinction, it reminds us that even in these end-times ‘there is still the new’. I always feel I learn from Okka’s poems, as a poet and a human. Everyone should read this book." - Clare Pollard
“At once ethical, sensual and lyrically embodied, Khairani Barokka’s poems harness the weight of linguistic inheritances amid global dangers: climate change, postcolonial violence, inequality. Through this insistent intimacy, a rapport with both the dead and the living, she challenges each of us to carry the charge of our own lives with decency, care and responsibility. These are daring poems that require us to urgently listen.” – Sandeep Parmar
“Barokka’s work has the urgency of an ultimatum, but not its finality - nothing is settled in these original, stylish, questioning poems. Ranging across epochs and continents, they confront a Colonial past of ‘plunder mausoleumed' and a future apocalypse of 'rainforest tindering quick’, finding the hidden threads of continuity between the two. Environmental catastrophe, global inequality and bodily ill-health take their toll on the ‘fracked nervous systems’ of the individual life, in poems that walk alongside pain and hold its hand. I was blown away by this book: Barokka is an extraordinary poet, whose work is both memorial and wake-up call in this ‘world burnt already’.” – Sarah Howe
The cover of Rope, Nine Arches Press. Cover photograph by Khairani Barokka.
Buy Khairani Barokka's debut full-length poetry collection Rope here.
'With Rope, Khairani Barokka braids a helix from the “metronomic hum of human breath” and history’s apparitions, daring to “strangle Myth whole.” These are poems to reach for in times of emergency, a nerve-bright lifeline for exploring how “Survival is an eternal thing”. Polyphonic, and polychromatic, Barokka’s work pulls us up from the brink “all-cells awake” to belt out to the void: “Thank you abysses, rock-bottoms, … morasses of salt – I am singing.” What a blessing to have this lyrical, defiant book, this provocation and hymn.’
– R.A. Villanueva
‘Rope is the debut of a unique lyric voice – inventive and varied, rich in imagery, and always rooted in a searching intelligence. These beautifully written poems fizz with all the ‘shimmer and jazz’ of modern life.’
– Jane Yeh
‘In a fertile genesis of tundra and twilight, with the life-giving tenderness of olive oil, spinach, and sambal, Khairani Barokka’s radiant full-length debut, Rope, weaves the guiding lights of womanhood with a weathering of desire “quietly washing our skin / into the drains of Kathmandu.” Here is a lush world of regeneration where aubergines are “nourished from disintegrated bone,” where a sea-turtle is a “Salt-tongued priestess,” and where flood season changes “each ounce of rainfall” into a woman. Mingling syllables of Baso Minang, Javanese, and Indonesian with an Anglophone tongue, Barokka’s voice transforms her polyglot, transnational experiences – of rogue loves spanning a quartet of continents, of cathedrals and archipelagos unmoored from empires – into a global compass rose, celebrating journeys of ruin and restoration with renewed praise: “Ada sungai di pesisir. / Sini kalian. / Ikat tali diri ke samudra. // There’s a river on the shore. / Come closer. / Tie the rope of yourself to the sea.”’
– Karen An-hwei Lee
The cover of Indigenous Species, Tilted Axis Press. Cover artwork by Khairani Barokka.
