Tulisan Puan comes from a background that people do not want to talk.
Let’s start with Angie, our founder. She is a woman who grew up in Yogyakarta, 10 minutes walking distance to the city’s centre, in a place called Kampung (slum area). And she was not from a wealthy family. There was a moment when she was almost unable to continue her higher education when she graduated from high school due to family economic reasons.
Her father asked her to stop her dream of studying and started to find a job to reduce his burden.
She was sad, angry, felt unfair and afraid of losing her future. She was upset with everything. It was unfair as she always had good ranks at school, but poverty hampered her to continue her study. She thought that her father did not do enough for her daughter’s dream. Something that she did not understand.
Luckily, she got support to take a Diploma degree in Secretarial study. Although it was not in line with her dream to be a psychologist, staying at the university gave her hope. So she got a job after she graduated and made some money to continue to reach a Bachelor’s degree. She earned cum laude for both degrees.
However, her father died one year after she graduated with her diploma degree.
Until this point, she finally realised it was not her father’s fault to think she would be his burden. It was because gender equality affected men, too: her father carried a burden society expected him to be, a strong single breadwinner.
Eighteen years after a discussion with her father, she finally got a scholarship to pursue a Master’s degree in Australia. Something that she never expected when she was upset with the situation. This achievement led her to be brave to share her story with us. And her story is not intended to compare it with other women but to share the facts that were never discussed.
One of the facts is that her starting point differs from other women. Poverty and gender inequality have put her in a long queue for what society calls success. Some women start their steps already higher than hers. For instance, Maudy Ayunda (an influential artist in Indonesia who pursued her study in The UK and The US), who comes from a wealthy family, has been a motivator for many Indonesian women. However, Maudy’s stories are irrelevant to Angie and never relevant. And it may not be relevant for any other poor women, women with disabilities, or women from marginalised groups.
Recently, many improvements in the development sector, particularly in education, have been made available by many development agencies. For instance, many scholarships for women and girls to take higher education. Nevertheless, competition within the higher institution is still unfair for those who come from marginalised circumstances. Marginalised situations could be manifested in many ways, such as no money to take English lessons, less nutritious intake and supplements, no mental health support, a sandwich generation situation that almost all Asian people face (in which you have to take care of your parents and your siblings or children) and other things that are ignored by the system in education and society.
Such a story has helped Tulisan Puan to decolonial knowledge. Why decolonial? Because Indonesian women (especially those in vulnerable groups) are being colonised by many dimensions and actors: Western knowledge and practices, modernisation, capitalism, and gender inequality. This is what Maria Legones called with coloniality of power and coloniality of gender in her book, Toward a Decolonial Feminism. And we agree with her.
A first step into a mindset
As the decolonial gaze has many different dimensions, deconstructing Tulisan Puan as a local feminist who wants to seize global attention has been the first journey that requires understanding our situation in an unjust world system. That is why Tulisan Puan accommodates all knowledge that differs from the existing narratives. It comes from different backgrounds, conditions and unusual circumstances. These backgrounds give Tulisan Puan another starting point.
For us, listening to other narratives has shaped our thinking in a way that it otherwise wouldn’t if we only continue the same stories perpetuated by inequality.
None of these are easy topics to deconstruct. Recognising our privileges or non-privileges, as well as the existence of societal classification requires self-awareness that people usually do not want to admit. Everyone has privilege. And becoming aware of our privilege is crucial. Angie, for instance, despite coming from a low-income family, was born in Yogyakarta as an urban girl with access to infrastructure than girls in rural areas. But when she was in Australia, she became a minority and faced another systemic inequality. People say that we have to follow international standards for our good and modernisation will make us more ‘civilised’. Really?
So here we come. Decolonial our knowledge from the margins. We will make this website bilingual (English and Indonesian) in the future as we realise that for some people who speak only one language, their knowledge matters, and they are valid resource persons too.