Maaf: A Poem, A Protest, A Reckoning

 by Roger B. Rueda, PhD

Khairani Barokka, an Indonesian writer, poet, and disability arts advocate, delivers in her poem “money for your english” a fierce and intimate critique of linguistic imperialism, colonial residue, and the quiet violence of having to survive through the language of one’s historical erasure.

Let me now proceed, in the voice of reason sharpened with indignation: This poem, my dear students of the Republic, is no mere arrangement of enjambed thoughts—it is a laceration of the postcolonial soul, a searing indictment of how language, under the guise of opportunity, becomes an elegant form of subjugation.

Let us begin where it hurts: "If you do not speak English, you may not be able to survive—it is sink or swim."

This is not education. This is not empowerment. This, my friends, is a declaration of cultural warfare issued by neoliberalism at a school assembly under the punishing heat of the sun—a metaphor so precise it might as well be our national condition.

The poet, Khairani Barokka, stands here as a witness and a whistleblower. She does not merely critique the colonial hangover of English—no, she excoriates it. She exposes how English, far from being neutral, functions like a global currency of survival, a ticket to legitimacy dangled before the brown child while erasing the very stories, syllables, and grandmothers that once birthed that child’s voice.

She writes: "This performance of writing in public is not a remittance of culture / it is attempt at asserting mine while erasing mine."

What glorious contradiction! What bittersweet power! The poet acknowledges the paradox of her craft—to speak truth in the tongue of the oppressor, to etch resistance in the very alphabet that once silenced her ancestors. This is linguistic survival masquerading as literary success.

And yet, beneath the rage lies a trembling tenderness: "I ask forgiveness for English every day."

Here is the crux: the speaker does not deny her use of English; she owns it, grieves it, spits it out, and swallows it again. It is not a badge of shame, nor a crown of pride—it is a lifeline she clings to while mourning the drowned languages beneath her.

She ends with a single word: maaf. Sorry. But this is not an apology of defeat—it is a mourner’s whisper, a fighter’s breath, an offering to the ancestors whose tongues were buried under plantations and PowerPoints.

In summary: “money for your english” is not a poem. It is a civil disobedience performed in syllables, a protest wrapped in prosody, and above all, a political act of survival in a world that insists fluency must always come with forfeiture.

Let us remember: In a country like ours, where fluency in English may buy you healthcare, but not dignity, this poem must not only be read—it must be carried. Like a wound. Like a weapon.

Maaf? No, my dear. We do not owe the Empire an apology. It owes us a reckoning.