Sariamin Ismail

Sariamin Ismail was the first female Indonesian novelist to be published in the Dutch East Indies. She was born to a Peranakan Chinese family in Talu, West Pasaman, West Sumatra, on 31 July 1909. Her father was a well-known engineering expert and her siblings all worked in the hard sciences. She pursued medicine at the University of Indonesia from 1951 until 1955, then took an advanced degree in psychology in 1962 and wrote her thesis on Simone de Beauvoir. She also studied philosophy at Leiden University, Netherlands, and produced a dissertation on The I Ego in Culture or Aku Dalam Budaya. She married an Indonesian biologist named Sidik Kertapati in 1958². She completed her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Indonesia in 1979 with a thesis on The Self and Culture². She began writing poems for magazines like Zaman Gelombang (Era of Waves) in 1946, and moved on to write short stories, children's stories and novels. She was the editor-in-chief of Soeara Persatoean Kaoem Prempoean Tionghoa Indonesia, the first Malay language Chinese feminist magazine in the Dutch East Indies, and Kalam, a journal of philosophy and culture. She also translated the works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Sylvia Plath, and Emily Dickinson into Indonesian. Her first novel, Kalau Tak Untung(If Fortune Does Not Favour), was published by Balai Pustaka in 1934 and is considered one of the most important early Indonesian novels by a female writer. It depicts the struggles of a modern Indonesian woman during the Indonesian Revolution and the post-independence period. It contrasts the freedom enjoyed by male characters, who can choose to dedicate themselves to a cause, with the constraints faced by female characters, who yearn for love, work, and family. She was also a political activist and a member of LEKRA, the cultural wing of the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). She was chosen as a member of LEKRA's central leadership in 1959. However, after the overthrow of President Sukarno and the banning of the PKI in 1965, her books were banned and she suffered emotional trauma, which affected her creative output. She died of heart failure in Jakarta on 15 December 1995, at the age of 86. She is remembered as a pioneer of Indonesian women's poetry and a champion of human rights and cultural diversity.