Toeti Heraty

Toeti Heraty was a prominent Indonesian poet and feminist who was active in the 20th and 21st centuries. She was born to a Peranakan Chinese family in Bandung, Java on 27 November 1933. Her father was a well-known engineering expert and her siblings all work in the hard sciences. Following her family tradition, she pursued medicine at the University of Indonesia (UI) from 1951 until 1955. Then she took an advanced degree in psychology in 1962 and wrote her thesis on Simone de Beauvoir. At Leiden University, Netherlands she took her degree in Philosophy and produced a dissertation on "The I Ego in Culture" or Aku Dalam Budaya. While living in the Netherlands, she met her future husband, the Indonesian biologist Eddy Noerhadi. They married in 1958. ² Heraty completed her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Indonesia in 1979 with a thesis on "The Self and Culture. ² Despite her studies in hard sciences, she found her inclination towards arts and literature. Besides being a poet, she was a philosopher, an art historian and a human rights activist. She first began to write as a college student and since 1966 has been a frequent contributor to Indonesia's leading cultural and literary journals. She has since then occupied herself actively in the academic world. She taught in the Faculty of Psychology at Padjadjaran University. She co-founded (along with Soerjanto Poespowardojo) the Department of Philosophy of the Faculty of Arts at UI and served as a lecturer. She also remained the chairperson of both the Department of Philosophy and the post-graduate program for Philosophy Studies. Heraty also served as dean of the Lembaga Pendidikan Kesenian, Jakarta Institute of the Arts, and as acting professor at the Faculty of Arts at UI in 1994. Toeti Heraty has been singled out as the only woman amongst the leading contemporary Indonesian poets. Her poetry has been described as difficult to understand, combining a deliberately cultivated ambiguity with an often unexpected, purely associative kind of imagery". ⁵ But it is possibly her effective use of irony to highlight the unfavorable position of women in a patriarchal society that sets Toeti's poetry apart from that of her peers. ⁵ She released her first major collection of poems, Sajak-Sajak 33 (Poems at 33) in 1974, including "Dua Wanita(Two Women), Siklus(Cycle) and "Geneva Bulan Juli(Geneva in July). She also wrote poems inspired by Balinese culture and mythology, such as Calon Arang and Ratu Kidul. She translated the works of Rainer Maria Rilke, Sylvia Plath, and Emily Dickinson into Indonesian. She also edited and published several magazines, such as 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. Toeti Heraty died of heart failure in Jakarta on 13 June 2021, at the age of 87. She was buried at the Kalibata Heroes Cemetery. She is survived by her husband and two sons. She is remembered as a pioneer of Indonesian women's poetry and a champion of human rights and cultural diversity.