Annah, Infinite

by Khairani Barokka / 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

for Indigenous Species

‘Everyone who is interested in art/poetry/politics should be reading and looking at Khairani Barokka’s work.’ — Sophie Collins

contributors’ details

Khairani Barokka is a writer, artist, arts consultant, translator and editor from Jakarta. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis, environmental justice, and access as translation. She regularly teaches, mentors, and consults for arts organisations, and has a PhD by Practice in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London. Among her honours, she has been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, a Delfina Foundation Associate Artist, an Artforum Must-See, and Associate Artist at the UK’s National Centre for Writing. She was the first Poet-in-Residence at Modern Poetry in Translation, and later became the magazine’s first non-British Editor. In 2023, Okka was shortlisted for the Asian Women of Achievement Awards in the Arts and Culture Category. 

Her books include Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches, as co-editor), Rope (Nine Arches),Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the 2022 Barbellion Prize, and 2024’s amuk (Nine Arches), longlisted for the Jhalak Prize. Annah, Infinite (Tilted Axis) is her creative nonfiction debut.

more information

• Publication date: 9 September 2025 (UK print) | 11 November 2025 (US + UK ebook)

• Extent: 352pp

• Format: B-format paperback (198mm × 129mm)

• Rights held: WEL

• ISBNs: 978-1-917126-03-8 (paperback) / 978-1-917126-04-5 (ebook)

• Price: £19.99 | $25.95 US (paperback) / £10.99 (ebook)