Debra sets her sights on being a novelist

Debra sets her sights on being a novelist

By Mehru Jaffer

JAKARTA (JP): As if it was not enough being a broadcaster,
feminist, wife and mother, Debra Yatim wants to be a novelist as
well.

A former journalist, Debra has been working on a novel for a
couple of years. "I told myself I will finish by the time I am 40
years old. Today I am 45 and I still have not had my say,"
regrets Debra, who feels that the tremendous success of Ayu
Utami's recently released first novella, Saman, is a great
inspiration for all writers, especially women.

"After Pramoedya Ananta Toer there was such a long gap before
another writer of that same stature could flower in the country,
and Ayu has done it before all of us although she is a whole
generation younger than us."

Debra, who worked for The Jakarta Post from 1983 to 1985 and
is now the director of the Communication for Arts Foundation
(Komseni), dreamt of being a journalist since she was 11 years
old.

Even before she was a teenager, she read about Nelly Bly, an
Englishwoman who would quietly walk into courtrooms and sit
through the day's proceedings secretly taking notes. Decades ago
when there was no such thing as a female journalist, so Nelly
reported under a pen name about crime, rape and other issues
important to women.

It was then Debra decided what her vocation in life would be.
She wanted to be Nelly when she grew up, and just like Nelly she
wanted to communicate to everyone everything that she observed
around her.

Debra drew strength and inspiration from her family in making
the important decision of what she wanted to do with her life.

Her mother left home at the tender age of 20 to work on a ship
that took her around the world. After her marriage, Debra's
mother stopped working but still drove a car and led an
independent life in her own way.

Debra recalls her mother, a Christian from Manado, being
escorted to church by her Acehnese father, who was a practicing
Muslim. Out of their five children, two are Christian and three
are Muslim, including Debra.

Religion was never an issue while Debra was growing up.
"Pancasila was actually practiced by my parent's generation. We
were told that there is no good or bad religion or superior or
inferior gender, but only individuals are good or evil."

However, as she grew older Debra looked up less and less to
her mother as a role model. "My mother grew up in Manado, where
women are genuinely equal to men. Maybe this is because the
province is largely Christian or maybe because it thinks of
itself as the 13th province of Holland, I don't know ... ,"
laughs Debra.

Debra began to believe her mother took her independence and
freedom for granted. According to Debra, her mother thought if
she was free to choose whatever she wanted to do with her life,
women everywhere must also have the same choice.

But Debra was different. She knew she could do whatever she
wanted to, but could not help noticing how restricted life was
for Javanese girls her same age. She found it cruel that most
Javanese families in Jakarta did not allow women to communicate
their feelings. Their psyche is further confused when they are
told to call their husbands "brother", and in turn are called
"sister" by them, she said.

Such traditions exist only to take the steam out of life, to
make people into passive robots she believes. Women are not
allowed to rock the boat along life's journey no matter how sick
they feel on deck. They dare not make waves. "Why? Is it only
because life for the menfolk would then be inconvenienced?"
wonders Debra.

Her mother apparently did not see the plight of women in Java,
in fact she denied that men and women were not treated equally
here. So Debra continued to love her mother, but began searching
for other role models. Eventually she found one in SK Trimurthy,
the first woman journalist in Indonesia.

"The moment I met her I was changed for life," Debra gushes.

While still a journalism student, Debra was employed by a
private news agency as a cub reporter. Her male colleagues got to
do hard-core social, economic and political analysis, while she
was assigned events like ribbon cuttings and a visit by the
president's wife to her orchid garden. However, in between all
these "soft" assignments, she got to interview the female head of
the European Union team visiting the National Development
Planning Board in Jakarta to help work out a blueprint to give
the economy here a kick. Debra was impressed. She thought if
women in Europe could hold such responsible positions in society,
why not in Indonesia?

One day she was asked to cover yet another seminar.There she
met SK Trimurthy, the then labor minister who was already in her
60s.

"When I interviewed her for The Jakarta Post, I was fascinated
with her views. I wrote the personality piece in English and
discovered two things, that I liked and could express my thoughts
in English and that SK was a socialist at heart. What impressed
me most was the fact that she was not a minister for social
affairs or women's affairs, but of labor. I was floored. That was
the kind of impact SK Trimurthy had on me."

Debra had found her role model and ever since she has kept in
touch with SK Trimurthy, impressed at the way the woman defies
her age by whipping out a thick magnifying glass, crossing her
right leg over her left one as energetically as she can, and
reading every document that is given her.

There have been other influences in Debra's life. While still
in her teens, she leafed through the pages of the girl magazine
Seventeen and found herself skipping past articles giving tips on
how to beware of boys who kiss and tell, but pausing at an
announcement for a free copy of the newly published Ms. magazine.

"I promptly filled out the form and soon held in my hands the
first issue of Ms. Just the editorial by Gloria Steinem was
enough to turn my entire life around." Debra thought if women in
America had all these problems, then what about women in her own
country? She started to question, to research and to talk, and
found that women here were uneducated, unassertive and totally
dependent, both emotionally and economically, on men. This was
not a healthy trend for any self-respecting society.

"We seemed to be so far behind. There seemed so much to do.
But I was determined to at least share my thoughts with other
women, and so I wrote," said Debra.

Then she was offered a job at Radio Australia and lived in
Melbourne for three years. While there she took the time to
observe the women's movement and decided that the problems of
women in developed countries were different from those of women
in developing countries, and so too must be solutions.

Debra was already disappointed with her idol Betty Friedan
after hearing her pontificate to the women of the world at the
Nairobi Conference in 1985. She returned to Jakarta at the end of
her three years in Melbourne, and along with four other women
activists started an archives to store documents that touched on
any aspect of women's lives here.

Without questioning the greatness of Indonesia's first
feminist, Kartini, Debra's research discovered that other brave
women from around the country had done tremendous work within
their surroundings before the Javanese aristocrat was even born.
But these women go unhonored today.

Debra feels the contribution of people from other islands in
having enriched Indonesian life is not acknowledged enough.

"The Javanese way of thinking, the language, culture, is too
dominating. Java is not Indonesia. This has to be talked about,
debated so that Indonesians from other islands also feel at home
here," Debra insists.

"I may still not have made a difference to the position of
women in Indonesia, but I think it important to at least talk
about the various problems we face."

Despite loathing the burden of domesticity, Debra found
herself saying yes to her boyfriend of 10 years. Even before she
got married, she realized that marriage and motherhood were two
worlds, poles apart. But she was desperate to have children and
decided that it would be best for all to have them within the
institution of marriage.

"I am least house proud. I can cook, but don't always. I can't
embroider or indulge in other feminine activities, but I am so
pleased to be the mother of a girl. It was the ultimate
vindication when my 10-year-old daughter told her teacher the
other day that she could not finish her homework as she had to
attend a seminar on violence against women with her mom," Debra
told the Post in a fit of laughter.

Her daughter was not lucky enough to enjoy the mirth, for she
was sternly told by her mother not to give flimsy excuses in the
future for forgetting to attend to her studies.