Mikael Johani. Mongrel Kampung. New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2024. 128 pages.

 


            The poems in Mongrel Kampung are polyglottal cyclones, agile associative things that wind through the volatile landscape of now. Now: an incessant arrival that’s hunchbacked with history as it harpoons—blindly, turbulently—into the future. In this collection, Mikael Johani meets now and writes to it, of it, and for it with tenderness, playfulness, gravity, and aplomb.

The book opens with the titular poem. It establishes that Section One is an installment in a series of stories that revolve around the characters mike d. and rob g. In this section, “we” will go on a walk around a block where “the people who live on and around this narrow, tree-lined, strip remember nothing, have no memories of their past, anything, except for an instinct to use whatever devices they find waiting for them in their shops every morning” (17). What follows is a roving yet adroit exploration into where aliveness still takes root in a terrain that has been trivialized by gentrification and colonization: “so napalm death scum tee, this street has nothing but artisan / coffee shops! where will we go to escape bread products of southern / italy?!” (23). Finding and clutching the root of alive is urgent, but the speaker suggests it is unachieved by the end of the poem: “so tell me crisp, perfect biscotti, why in the dawn of someone’s life, / dreams of faulchion and perfect shields of gold, of ambrosia and / foxy iris bold, still can’t convince me that life will be anything but / just so- / so?” (24). The alive, perhaps, shimmers in Johani’s fabulous lyric flourishes and comic twists, in the question mark that refuses the line a period: no full stop, no simple deathly dot, but instead an invitation to answer, or to search alongside.

In the rest of the sections, mike d. and rob g. disappear or have slipped beneath the surface of the page; Johani seems to expand beyond the bounds of the narrative poem while exploring the same themes. In “Whose Billberry is Sweeter?” there is a desire to claw into language the way it has clawed into us, to rip into it and extract a Henrdix riff: “i wanna be a child again / and write about a mole in the back of my mind / who drills a hole into mother hubbard’s soul / who plays guitar with Hendrix at the Monterrey Gas Festival / —cack—and crack!—handed!” (46). Can we, from language, create a scorching, liberated lick? Or does the letter, that little notation of sound, prohibit us from doing so? Are “words just dead neons anyway” (18)? Or can a return to a childish engagement with language resurrect those dead neons? Like when kids “hack into their parents’ Facebook accounts / and write patapon patapon patapon pon dung dung dung dung?” (46). Johani points out that intelligence lies in excrement, excess, innocence, and a playful disregard for decorousness. The poem ends: “i wanna be a dictionary / with entries for bellycool and nano-blogging / avant-garde twart / a Plurk for help / status update mania / i wanna be the thing that contains the world and the world itself / i wanna be the universe / and a grain of macroscopic dust” (47). Perhaps the dictionary does not need to be abandoned, but rather the language needs to be updated, and in its updating, ruined. Maybe then it can contain both immensity and minutiae, can contain oneself and the world.

            Maybe language’s glisteny murk and the self’s gleaming instability finds its best container in the collection’s most dynamic and lustrous poem: “Aku Speaking Man.” The title was cribbed from Anne Waldman’s “Fast Speaking Woman” and is similarly uninterested in a secure lyrical I. As Johani illustrates in the notes section of the book—which I can unfortunately only quote and paraphrase here—“‘aku’ (i) is probably the most famous word in indonesian poetry,” made dominant by poet Chairil Anwar (“Aku Speaking Man” “contains 230 Akus, the number of Akus that appear in Anwar’s entire oeuvre of 85 poems”) (115). Johani writes that “when we talk poetry in indonesia(n), ‘i’ is always ‘aku,’ the slightly more personal, informal form of ‘saya.’ the ‘aku-lirik,’ the lyrical i, is the ultimate obsession for indonesian poets” (116). The poem was written for a performance that took place in Yogyakarta inside an old Dutch fort in 2019; some of the “subversive lines [were] made just for the Yogyakarta crowd” (118). Even on paper, the poem’s lines ring out as if being hurdled into then held by a mass of people:

Aku perfect metaphors untuk politik adu kuasa memori versus kenyataan dalam jiwa orang-orang Indo gara-gara their forced migration of the mind

Aku words no need words rearrange disarrange rearranged

Aku written in English, but refers to a world in which English is never spoken

Aku may contain a phrase in Javanese

Aku deliberately intended for an audience who will never understand what aku means—a kind of private prayer spelled out punk in drublic (101)

Go ahead and try to translate but—most importantly—take the punch in the mouth.

In “Aku Speaking Man,” and many of the other poems in Mongrel Kampung, the now that begins then embeds itself in nowhere comes into view. The self is both a moment in time and a location: we are timebound, gravitybound, capitalbound, languagebound and furiously / lovingly bound to one another. Johani dexterously navigates this terrestrial and existential makeup in entertaining and exciting poems that refuse to isolate themselves by inhabiting one space, one being, or one language. Mongrel Kampung makes us all Johani’s “lil racoon / of my hearth,” in “the mythologi simulacra simulacrae simulacri of this / our belovéd / kuntree,” zigzagging from street to street while asking “in medias what res?” (58).