Ultimatum Orangutan
SynopsisPlot
Khairani Barokka's 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 bodyparticularly the disabled bodyis 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.
Story
About this book
Ultimatum Orangutan is the second poetry collection by Khairani Barokka, an Indonesian poet and artist. The poems trace lines between colonial exploitation of land, people, animals, and ecosystems, treating these as connected rather than separate histories. Indonesia's forests, wildlife, and communities appear throughout the work, with the orangutan of the title standing at one visible edge of environmental destruction driven by extraction and resource control.
A central thread in the collection is the body, particularly the disabled body, treated as its own ecosystem. Barokka, who writes and works across disability arts and ecology, positions bodily experience alongside landscapes shaped by colonial violence. The poems move between personal and political registers, linking damage done to places with damage done to people who depend on them. Resistance appears alongside loss, and the language is precise rather than decorative.
The collection connects climate crisis to its colonial roots, grounding broad environmental questions in specific geographies and lived realities. Barokka's approach is layered, with individual poems often holding several scales of attention at once, from a single body to an entire forest system under threat.
