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.