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Annah, Infinite
In Annah, Infinite, the dominant narratives surrounding Paul Gauguin’s famous painting Annah la Javanaise (1893-94) are turned upside down.
In questioning the ‘facts’ surrounding Annah’s life, Annah, Infinite draws attention to how historical narratives, shaped by colonial powers, have distorted Annah’s story. It critiques the systems of ablenormativity, racism, and sexism embedded in art institutions, and the way these structures mask the violent colonial legacies still haunting museum walls.
The work doesn’t just deconstruct mythologies; it brings to light the material realities of Annah’s portrait as both a commodity in the global market and a stark contradiction of the tropes surrounding disabled Southeast Asian girls in the so-called ‘developing world.’ It is an exploration of colonial ableism and a profound look at the long histories of resistance led by disabled people.
Interspersed with the author’s own poetry, fiction, and visual art on the painting’s subject, this is a book of emotional heft. It asks us all to acknowledge the possibility of pain in every single portrait, as well as the possibility of escape.
In questioning the ‘facts’ surrounding Annah’s life, Annah, Infinite draws attention to how historical narratives, shaped by colonial powers, have distorted Annah’s story. It critiques the systems of ablenormativity, racism, and sexism embedded in art institutions, and the way these structures mask the violent colonial legacies still haunting museum walls.
The work doesn’t just deconstruct mythologies; it brings to light the material realities of Annah’s portrait as both a commodity in the global market and a stark contradiction of the tropes surrounding disabled Southeast Asian girls in the so-called ‘developing world.’ It is an exploration of colonial ableism and a profound look at the long histories of resistance led by disabled people.
Interspersed with the author’s own poetry, fiction, and visual art on the painting’s subject, this is a book of emotional heft. It asks us all to acknowledge the possibility of pain in every single portrait, as well as the possibility of escape.
352 pages, Paperback
Published November 11, 2025
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November 11, 2025
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“To use a term from poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, everything I’ve created of your stories over the past fourteen years feels ‘ancestrally co-written’. It feels as though you are banging down the door from inside a canvas, that all of you are, with an urgency that has not dissipated in 121 years.”
It’s not that I was ever a fan of Gauguin, but being on the ‘periphery’ often means being exposed to all of the metropole’s obsessions. I have learnt, however, with time, to be leery; to regard anything European culture celebrates with suspicion, rather than with the wide-eyed acceptance expected in my youth. Reading Khairani Barokka’s book, I feel vindicated.
*Annah, Infinite* tackles and brings clarity to what’s been in plain sight for over a century, but what seems not to have made one iota of difference to his fans: Gaugin’s legacy of abuse of young, non-white women—in particular, the subject of this book, the young woman in the painting *Annah la Javanaise*. Gauguin’s *paedophilia*. Barokka says:
“There continues to be a ‘towardness’ socialised towards Gauguin despite knowledge of his relationships with young children. … The public is not taught that Gauguin was a menacing and abusive man by the arts institutions where *Annah la Javanaise* might be hung, nor is the public taught that Annah is a human child, nor is the public taught the power differential between a child coded ‘Javanese’ and an older man coded ‘French’, one that persists to this day. … So strong are these emotions of reverence and congeniality towards a specific version of the legacy of Gauguin as genius,” Barokka says, “so difficult to mar is it, that even the clear equivocation that he was an abuser sparks only mild wavering.”
It’s not an easy read. Barokka peppers the text throughout with photos of that singularly horrible painting. And she brings the the full horror of Gauguin’s behaviour to bear:
“Gauguin lived twice in what was then French Polynesia, first from 1891 to 1893 – when he was in charge of an official mission from the French Ministry of Education and Culture – and again from 1895 until his death in 1903. During his first trip to Tahiti, he reportedly took three brides, aged between thirteen and fourteen, and was rumoured to have given them and others syphilis.”
Why does Gauguin not ever get cancelled? Barokka has a theory: It’s about upholding power structures, about all the ways that the western art complex—museums, galleries, dealers, billionaire art collectors—creates and maintains stories that protect the value of western-produced art—such as Gaugin’s. There’s an unholy alliance, Barokka demonstrates, between (neoliberal) capitalism and (neo+)coloniality, in the commodification and racialisation of non-white, othered peoples—including the subjects of Gaugin’s art. Including Annah.
But how did Annah end up in Gaugin’s hands in the first place? As in most cases, there was an intermediary; and as we have come to see is common, she was a woman: Nina Pack. From the testimony of Gaugin’s art dealer, Ambroise Vollard:
“[Mme Pack said] ‘I would like to have a little negro girl.’ A few months later a policeman brought Mme Nina Pack a young, half-breed, half-Indian, half-Malayan, who had been found wandering about the Gare de Lyon. She had a label hung around her neck, with the inscription: Mme Nina Pack, rue de la Rochefoucauld, á Paris. Envoi de Java. She was given the name of Anna.”
“Nowhere,” Baroka points out, is Nina Pack “reviled as slaver of a young, brown child.”
*Annah, Infinite* is essentially unclassifiable: it’s a monograph, a memoir, an ‘art’ book, a prose poem in parts, speculative history, and more. It’s a book about the harm of the colonial gaze, here in western art history—how it distances itself from the dehumanised subject; how it’s complicit in the subject’s commodification. The colonial gaze really what Gauguin mastered, what he helped construct, what the continued celebration of his art represents. It’s the point Barokka makes throughout the book.
In *Annah, Infinite*, Barokka reintroduces the concept of “bodyminds, or jiwa raga, soulbody/ies” to the reader, and shows how she took a “cripping” approach to *Annah la Javanaise*:
“In verb form, ‘cripping’ means to put disabled interpretations onto something, onto all manner of things. In this all-consuming project of pondering Annah/s, it means I do not, as per abled assumptions, assume they are non-disabled before they are ‘proven’ by ableist, ocularcentric assumptions, to be disabled. It means that I crip everything I see, and therefore I assume people can definitely be disabled, chronically ill and/or neurodivergent before assuming otherwise.”
In Gaugin’s painting, Annah is positioned in a way that implies physical pain and/or discomfort. It led to Barokka questioning why she could see pain in Annah’s posture where western art critics did not—and she understood it as coming from both her own positionality. She realised her own experience of living with chronic pain, and of being a disabled scholarship student in the colonial metropole opened her eyes to imagining this potential ancestor’s experience:
“How we are seen as capable of pain hinges on all the inequalities that structure racial capitalism: race, gender, sexuality, religion, class, age, caste, citizenship status, an unfurling stack of characteristics wielded against the kindness of belief.”
Central to this is the colonial gaze, which positions itself as being always truly neutral and truly objective. It constructs identity for the colonised, changing meanings to suit the story it’s telling. It others, exoticises, fetishises-as Barokka shows in the book regarding the construction of “Javanaise”:
“In 1893 at the World’s Fair, the Javanese Pavilion captivated the French imaginary so much that, eventually, ‘Javanaise’ would become a term for a kind of French slang, a somewhat Pig Latin, meant to make language seem near impenetrable. Interchangeable sounds, haziness of meaning. A body, a body of text, a turn of speech. And a series of movements called the Java became a form of dance among the French. At one point, Parisian socialites would don Javanese dress to soirées…”
(This, of course, is reminiscent of [the Egyptian craze (“Egyptomania”)](https://www.epoch-magazine.com/post/t...) that overtook Victorian England in the 1800s and continued into the 1920s.) “Cultures deemed ‘other’ by European art were,” Barokka says, “and continue to be, simultaneously stolen from and advertised as infantile.” And this is what the colonial gaze does: it denies these infantilised their complexity and nuance, ascribing centrality and progress only to the coloniser, the Western viewer. It’s invested in maintaining a power differential between those in the metropole and those in the periphery—ultimately serving capitalism.
Who gets to tell history? Who gets to be fully human? Barokka wants us to see Annah—to really see them/her. She inhabits Annah and/or Annah inhabits her, an “ancestor,” enabling Barokka to write back to Western art history and the colonial commodification complex. Barokka’s are interpretations of Annah from an Indonesian gaze—in her descriptions of her encounters with prints of Annah, in her speculative histories, her artworks, and in this book. “All my Annah possibilities are fictions,” she says, “in order to show that what we think of as ‘art historical fact’ are also fictions.” And Barokka wants to “trouble the value of Annah la Javanaise” through “so many Annah/s to flood[ing] the market with different self-representations.” A wonderful, heartening thought, imagining Annah’s revenge.
*Annah, Infinite* is therefore Barokka’s wrenching act of resistance. She has shown, through it, that coloniality is never benign but “violent, brutal, maiming, debilitating”; not in the past, but present. She’s ripped away the backdrop to show what was going on backstage as Gauguin was painting a naked little girl—and what has sustained his reputation as a titan of western art. Above all, Barokka has given the child Annah a way to speak from the canvas, a way to emerge from the frame Gauguin put her in.
“… I am always imagining, and laughing into, all of our escapes – all my ancestors as children, we are escaping the frame together, towards tenderness, as we always have been.”
“To use a term from poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, everything I’ve created of your stories over the past fourteen years feels ‘ancestrally co-written’. It feels as though you are banging down the door from inside a canvas, that all of you are, with an urgency that has not dissipated in 121 years.”
It’s not that I was ever a fan of Gauguin, but being on the ‘periphery’ often means being exposed to all of the metropole’s obsessions. I have learnt, however, with time, to be leery; to regard anything European culture celebrates with suspicion, rather than with the wide-eyed acceptance expected in my youth. Reading Khairani Barokka’s book, I feel vindicated.
*Annah, Infinite* tackles and brings clarity to what’s been in plain sight for over a century, but what seems not to have made one iota of difference to his fans: Gaugin’s legacy of abuse of young, non-white women—in particular, the subject of this book, the young woman in the painting *Annah la Javanaise*. Gauguin’s *paedophilia*. Barokka says:
“There continues to be a ‘towardness’ socialised towards Gauguin despite knowledge of his relationships with young children. … The public is not taught that Gauguin was a menacing and abusive man by the arts institutions where *Annah la Javanaise* might be hung, nor is the public taught that Annah is a human child, nor is the public taught the power differential between a child coded ‘Javanese’ and an older man coded ‘French’, one that persists to this day. … So strong are these emotions of reverence and congeniality towards a specific version of the legacy of Gauguin as genius,” Barokka says, “so difficult to mar is it, that even the clear equivocation that he was an abuser sparks only mild wavering.”
It’s not an easy read. Barokka peppers the text throughout with photos of that singularly horrible painting. And she brings the the full horror of Gauguin’s behaviour to bear:
“Gauguin lived twice in what was then French Polynesia, first from 1891 to 1893 – when he was in charge of an official mission from the French Ministry of Education and Culture – and again from 1895 until his death in 1903. During his first trip to Tahiti, he reportedly took three brides, aged between thirteen and fourteen, and was rumoured to have given them and others syphilis.”
Why does Gauguin not ever get cancelled? Barokka has a theory: It’s about upholding power structures, about all the ways that the western art complex—museums, galleries, dealers, billionaire art collectors—creates and maintains stories that protect the value of western-produced art—such as Gaugin’s. There’s an unholy alliance, Barokka demonstrates, between (neoliberal) capitalism and (neo+)coloniality, in the commodification and racialisation of non-white, othered peoples—including the subjects of Gaugin’s art. Including Annah.
But how did Annah end up in Gaugin’s hands in the first place? As in most cases, there was an intermediary; and as we have come to see is common, she was a woman: Nina Pack. From the testimony of Gaugin’s art dealer, Ambroise Vollard:
“[Mme Pack said] ‘I would like to have a little negro girl.’ A few months later a policeman brought Mme Nina Pack a young, half-breed, half-Indian, half-Malayan, who had been found wandering about the Gare de Lyon. She had a label hung around her neck, with the inscription: Mme Nina Pack, rue de la Rochefoucauld, á Paris. Envoi de Java. She was given the name of Anna.”
“Nowhere,” Baroka points out, is Nina Pack “reviled as slaver of a young, brown child.”
*Annah, Infinite* is essentially unclassifiable: it’s a monograph, a memoir, an ‘art’ book, a prose poem in parts, speculative history, and more. It’s a book about the harm of the colonial gaze, here in western art history—how it distances itself from the dehumanised subject; how it’s complicit in the subject’s commodification. The colonial gaze really what Gauguin mastered, what he helped construct, what the continued celebration of his art represents. It’s the point Barokka makes throughout the book.
In *Annah, Infinite*, Barokka reintroduces the concept of “bodyminds, or jiwa raga, soulbody/ies” to the reader, and shows how she took a “cripping” approach to *Annah la Javanaise*:
“In verb form, ‘cripping’ means to put disabled interpretations onto something, onto all manner of things. In this all-consuming project of pondering Annah/s, it means I do not, as per abled assumptions, assume they are non-disabled before they are ‘proven’ by ableist, ocularcentric assumptions, to be disabled. It means that I crip everything I see, and therefore I assume people can definitely be disabled, chronically ill and/or neurodivergent before assuming otherwise.”
In Gaugin’s painting, Annah is positioned in a way that implies physical pain and/or discomfort. It led to Barokka questioning why she could see pain in Annah’s posture where western art critics did not—and she understood it as coming from both her own positionality. She realised her own experience of living with chronic pain, and of being a disabled scholarship student in the colonial metropole opened her eyes to imagining this potential ancestor’s experience:
“How we are seen as capable of pain hinges on all the inequalities that structure racial capitalism: race, gender, sexuality, religion, class, age, caste, citizenship status, an unfurling stack of characteristics wielded against the kindness of belief.”
Central to this is the colonial gaze, which positions itself as being always truly neutral and truly objective. It constructs identity for the colonised, changing meanings to suit the story it’s telling. It others, exoticises, fetishises-as Barokka shows in the book regarding the construction of “Javanaise”:
“In 1893 at the World’s Fair, the Javanese Pavilion captivated the French imaginary so much that, eventually, ‘Javanaise’ would become a term for a kind of French slang, a somewhat Pig Latin, meant to make language seem near impenetrable. Interchangeable sounds, haziness of meaning. A body, a body of text, a turn of speech. And a series of movements called the Java became a form of dance among the French. At one point, Parisian socialites would don Javanese dress to soirées…”
(This, of course, is reminiscent of [the Egyptian craze (“Egyptomania”)](https://www.epoch-magazine.com/post/t...) that overtook Victorian England in the 1800s and continued into the 1920s.) “Cultures deemed ‘other’ by European art were,” Barokka says, “and continue to be, simultaneously stolen from and advertised as infantile.” And this is what the colonial gaze does: it denies these infantilised their complexity and nuance, ascribing centrality and progress only to the coloniser, the Western viewer. It’s invested in maintaining a power differential between those in the metropole and those in the periphery—ultimately serving capitalism.
Who gets to tell history? Who gets to be fully human? Barokka wants us to see Annah—to really see them/her. She inhabits Annah and/or Annah inhabits her, an “ancestor,” enabling Barokka to write back to Western art history and the colonial commodification complex. Barokka’s are interpretations of Annah from an Indonesian gaze—in her descriptions of her encounters with prints of Annah, in her speculative histories, her artworks, and in this book. “All my Annah possibilities are fictions,” she says, “in order to show that what we think of as ‘art historical fact’ are also fictions.” And Barokka wants to “trouble the value of Annah la Javanaise” through “so many Annah/s to flood[ing] the market with different self-representations.” A wonderful, heartening thought, imagining Annah’s revenge.
*Annah, Infinite* is therefore Barokka’s wrenching act of resistance. She has shown, through it, that coloniality is never benign but “violent, brutal, maiming, debilitating”; not in the past, but present. She’s ripped away the backdrop to show what was going on backstage as Gauguin was painting a naked little girl—and what has sustained his reputation as a titan of western art. Above all, Barokka has given the child Annah a way to speak from the canvas, a way to emerge from the frame Gauguin put her in.
“… I am always imagining, and laughing into, all of our escapes – all my ancestors as children, we are escaping the frame together, towards tenderness, as we always have been.”
Displaying 1 of 1 review