A Singular Woman: The Untold Story of Barack Obama's Mother

by Janny Scott

  In 1968, on her first visit to Taman Sari, the ruins of an eighteenth-century pleasure park built for the sultan in Yogyakarta, she learned that there were four or five factories in the area making traditional batik jarik, an ankle-length wraparound skirt. “I did not visit these but I did see a number of older women sitting in groups in front of their houses doing tulis work on jariks,” she recalled in a field notebook some years later, referring to the traditional method of hand-painting patterns in wax onto fabric before dyeing. There were no younger people involved in batik-making at that time, she noticed. But she wrote, “During a second visit in the early 70’s a handful of galleries had sprung up; many of the cheaper paintings were being done by quite young children (8-12-ish) who were knocking them out at a very fast rate.” By the time she returned, in July 1977, she found “about 40 establishments” on the west end of the ruins. As an anthropologist, Ann recognized that this was the last moment to witness the richness of Javanese culture still being produced by ancient technologies and traditions, Garrett Solyom told me. The opportunities, he said, were extraordinary.

  In late 1974, Ann passed the oral exams for her master’s degree, moved on to the Ph.D. program, and received approval to study the role of cottage industry “as a subsistence alternative” for peasant families on Java. Ann’s choice of subject was unusual, Dewey told me, in its focus on the production of handicrafts and on their economic dimension. “People have been so overawed by their beauty that they talked about them as art—but not the market, not the business,” Dewey said. Under the terms of her grant from the East-West Center, Ann had been required to take a course in entrepreneurship. The institute of which she was a part—the technology-and-development institute within the East-West Center—also had a particular focus on entrepreneurship. “She, I think, knew that these guys were smart businessmen,” Dewey said. “But I don’t think she knew the background literature.” Dewey pointed her to the work of two of the most influential names in Javanese development—the Dutch economist J. H. Boeke and the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, Dewey’s colleague from the Modjokuto project. In Dewey’s view, both had left a powerful but incorrect impression, picked up by Indonesian government officials, that the traditional handicraft industries were dying out, taking the cottage-industry villages with them. “The best scholars said it was crap, but the middle-level bureaucrats took it as the bible,” Dewey told me. So she suggested to Ann: Bounce your data off the work of Boeke and Geertz.

  In early 1975, Ann set off for Indonesia to begin her fieldwork. Maya went with her. Barry, who at that point had spent twelve of his thirteen years with his mother, remained behind. As Obama tells it in his book, the choice was his. “But when my mother was ready to return to Indonesia to do her fieldwork, and suggested that I go back with her and Maya to attend the international school there, I immediately said no,” he writes. “I doubted what Indonesia now had to offer and wearied of being new all over again.” Furthermore, there were advantages to living with his grandparents: They would leave him alone, he says, as long as he kept what he calls his “trouble” out of sight. The arrangement suited him, he says, because he was engaged in a solitary project of his own. He was learning to be a black man in America—in a place where there were few people to turn to for guidance.

  Ann’s decision to leave Barry, at thirteen, with her parents in Hawaii offends the sensibilities of many Americans who know almost nothing else about her. When people learned that I was working on a book on the president’s mother, the question I encountered most often was: “Do you like her?” Sometimes people asked, “Was she nice?” The line of questioning puzzled me: Why were those the first things people wanted to know? Gradually, it became apparent that those questions were a way of approaching the subject of Ann’s decision to live apart from her child. They were followed by ruminations on how a mother could do such a thing. As many Americans see it, a mother belongs with her child, and no extenuating circumstances can explain the perversity of choosing to be elsewhere. Ann’s decision was a transgression that people thirty-five years later could neither understand nor forgive.

  For Ann, leaving Barry behind was the single hardest thing she had ever done, Maya told me. But Ann felt she had no choice. Barry, who would enter high school the following fall, was flourishing at Punahou, which dispatched its graduates to some of the best universities in the country. If he had returned to Jakarta, Ann might not have had the money or connections to send him to the international school. If she had stayed in Hawaii, it is not clear what she would have done for employment. Perhaps she could have worked as a university lecturer, for relatively little money, or as a development consultant, traveling for months at a time. But she needed to do her fieldwork in order to get her Ph.D. She needed a Ph.D. to be considered for many jobs in her field. She had a second child to support, with a father in Indonesia, to whom she was still married. Other expatriate families might have sent a child in Barry’s position to boarding school. But there was no boarding school tradition in Ann’s family.

  “It was terrible for her to leave Barry in Hawaii,” recalled her friend Kadi Warner, who knew Ann during that period and lived with her and Maya several years later in Java. “But I think she agreed with his decision. It would have appealed to her intellect: Of course, this is the thing to do if you’re in a great school. That’s easy to say on one level, but it means you’re leaving a child behind. She did trust her parents. There was no question in her mind that he would be well taken care of and nurtured. Looking back, with her first marriage, when everything fell apart there, they were extremely supportive and helpful. They enabled her to go back to school; there were no recriminations. So she knew Barry was in a situation where he was well taken care of. But nonetheless, to leave him—she adored him, she loved him terribly. She wanted to be his mother.”

  Ann, however, was not inclined to regret.

  “Might she have tried to do things differently?” Maya said. “Perhaps, yeah. But at that time, I don’t think she thought that there was any real alternative. That’s how I think she thought about everything—the dissolution of her marriages to Barack Obama Sr. and my father. She was sad about that, just like she was sad about leaving her son in his high school years without her. It was one of those things where she felt like, ‘Well, life is what it is.’ She gained a great deal—not only the experiences in the world shared by her husband, but also her children. I think that’s how she felt about Indonesia: ‘The transition may have been difficult, but look . . .’”

  Did Maya ever question Ann’s judgment, in retrospect? I wondered.

  “I think she did the very best that she could,” Maya said. “And that she wanted only the best. And that she made some good choices, given what was available to her.”

  Ann returned with Maya to Jakarta and resumed teaching English at the management school in the late afternoons and evenings, banking her East-West Center grant money until she was ready to go into the field. She spent much of 1975 laying the groundwork required before she could begin her research. She needed a formal proposal and letters of reference certifying that she was a student and that she had funding. She needed the approval of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences, which often took months. She needed permission from every level of government, each of which levied its own fee. She set about clearing the twenty-two research permits needed to enable her to do intensive survey work in cottage-industry villages. She lined up an Indonesian government sponsor. She interviewed government officials, buyers, exporters, and aid-agency representatives. In the end, said Terence Hull, an American-born demographer who was working in Indonesia at the time, “You’d wander around with this great file of letters of permission so you could talk to an illiterate farmer about what the harvest was like.”

  By January 1976, Ann had moved to Yogyakarta, a short distance from the villages she intended to study. She settled temporarily in her mother-in-law’s house in the heart of the city. The house stood inside the compound that encom
passed the sultan’s palace, or kraton, and its surrounding neighborhood, traditionally reserved for royal relatives and retainers. If Yogyakarta was the soul of Java, the compound within the crumbling, cream-colored walls was the soul of the city—the center of classical dance and drama, gamelan, batik, and puppet theater. There was a school for dalangs, the master puppeteers of wayang kulit, the shadow-puppet theater. Dancing masters instructed students in classical court dancing. Batik workshops produced by hand the classic brown-and-cream designs originally conceived for the sultan’s family. Because foreigners were barred traditionally from living inside the compound, Ann told Dewey, she received special dispensation from the palace on the grounds that she was taking care of Lolo’s mother. “She is 76 and strong as a horse but manages to look nice and frail,” Ann wrote to Dewey. Her mother-in-law’s house stood on a corner of Taman Sari, the ruins of the sultan’s “water castle,” a network of pools and waterways, like an early and more exclusive version of the water parks of today. The house was also adjacent to the bird market, where stalls stacked high with tubs of cracked corn and boxes of crickets lined narrow alleys; cages of roosters, parakeets, mynah birds, golden orioles, and turtledoves dangled from above. (In addition to a wife and a house, the markers of a man’s success in Java include a singing bird.) “I am very happy to be staying now in Jogja,” Ann wrote to Dewey, using the nickname and older spelling for Yogyakarta. “What an enjoyable city it is, especially as compared with Jakarta. I am getting a little tired of people saying ‘Hello Mister’ to me everywhere I go, but otherwise love it.”

  Like any anthropologist contemplating fieldwork in Java, Ann found her way to the Population Studies Center at Gadjah Mada University, a research institute established several years earlier by an Indonesian anthropologist named Masri Singarimbun, whose pioneering research on rural poverty had challenged official claims about the progress of poverty eradication. The center, which has now trained generations of Indonesian social scientists, was a lively gathering place for scholars. It also contained a mother lode of data of interest to international development institutions. There were ongoing research projects on everything from marriage, fertility, and family planning to infant mortality, poverty, and divorce. There were workshops on how to conduct village research. International visitors, such as Ivan Illich and E. F. Schumacher, would drop by. “Ann and hundreds of others came to Masri for advice,” said Terence Hull, who, with his wife, Valerie, had done a village study under Singarimbun’s supervision in the early 1970s and worked with him from 1975 to 1979. During the hot, dry season, he told me, development consultants descended like locusts, ravening information and data. They would drink tea and eat snacks on the porch, skimming off the impressions of scholars who had been immersed for months or years in village life.

  “When you’re in that crowd, there are a lot of discussions about what people are doing in development—the World Bank, et cetera,” Hull said. “There’s a lot of cynical humor. Ann was not a cynical person, but she did appreciate the ironies that you would encounter all the time. The fact that the World Bank teams would always come between June and September with their vacuum cleaners, taking up reports every which way in any Indonesian institution, sometimes sitting down, taking their tea, telling people to go and photocopy hundreds of documents. Ann would appreciate the total inappropriateness of that sort of behavior, the irony of these people blowing in from Johns Hopkins or Michigan State or Iowa State or wherever, on what must be really, really high salaries or consultants’ fees, and coming into a research institute where people are being paid a pittance to do really hard work with 24/7 kind of responsibilities. They just showed no sensitivity to the vast gaps. Ann was totally attuned to the enormous gaps between Westerners’ lives and people who were really living tough lives in Indonesia.”

  Ann found other kindred spirits in Yogyakarta. Nancy Peluso, the daughter of a Fuller Brush salesman from Bridgeport, Connecticut, had arrived in the city in 1975 as an undergraduate from Friends World College in the United States, doing independent research. She learned Indonesian, moved to a village, and decided to study the economic roles of women. “This was a big topic at that time,” she told me thirty-three years later in her office at the University of California at Berkeley, where she was a professor in the department of environmental science, policy, and management, specializing in forest politics and agrarian change in Southeast Asia. Women were breaking into academic fields in which they had once been scarce; research on women and development was in vogue. When Peluso applied to the Ford Foundation for a grant, she landed $2,000, which seemed to her an extravagant sum. “They asked me what I wanted to live on and I said, ‘Fifty dollars a month,’” she remembered. “They said, ‘How about a hundred?’” She began studying market traders—women who bought household items, such as ceramic pots, from craftspeople and sold them in markets. At two or three in the morning, Peluso would set off with a trader on a four-hour hike into the mountains, the woman maneuvering a cart piled high with pots up the slopes of a volcano in darkness, to arrive at the market as dawn was breaking. “These people had nothing,” she recalled. “It was often women—women in a family where there wasn’t a lot of agricultural land would go into these other kinds of businesses. They would either do small-scale trade or they would do crafts, like in the villages that Ann worked in.”

  Ann and Peluso would meet in Yogyakarta and wander over to the marketplace for snacks, fried noodles, or durian in season. (The fruit of the durian tree is a local delicacy, but its smell disgusts many foreigners. At the Phoenix Hotel in Yogyakarta, it gets special mention in the directory of services. Coming after “duty manager” and before “extra bed,” the durian entry states, “By respect to others, it is strictly forbidden to bring durian into the hotel.”) At other times, Ann and Peluso would take Maya to dance performances at the palace or to shadow-puppet performances in the alun-alun, the grassy square with its two sacred banyan trees. “To this day, I nearly faint with pleasure when I smell hot wax, because I grew up roaming around the batik makers,” Maya told me. She remembered running in the ruins of the sultan’s “water castle,” gazing at the animals in the marketplace, watching the court dancers performing stories from the Hindu epics. She and Ann lived on a budget, she remembered her mother telling her, of about seventy-five dollars a month. Ann would take her to a bakery on Jalan Malioboro, the main commercial street in Yogyakarta, and pretend to look around while the owners plied her captivating child with chocolate and coconut breads. On one occasion, Peluso recalled, the three of them spent a night on a mountain. A professor had told Peluso of the practice of spending the night on certain mountains in pursuit of good fortune. People would climb to the top, burn incense, eat, talk, sleep, or stay awake. There would be people selling food. “It’s supposed to bring you good luck or you’re supposed to get a wish or get money,” Peluso remembered. “Well, we didn’t get money. We just did it to do it. Maya went with us. We took public transport to get out to this mountain. I remember getting there and starting to walk up the hill with Ann. You did things like this. You were single—and she was effectively single.”

  With Nancy Peluso, Yogyakarta, 1977 or 1978

  Not long before moving to Yogyakarta, Ann had appeared in the office of a young assistant curator at the National Museum in Jakarta named Wahyono Martowikrido, an archaeologist specializing in material culture, particularly gold objects and textiles. A museum guard brought her to his office, Martowikrido told me, after Ann had asked to speak with an anthropologist, who turned out not to be in the building at the time. She seemed to be looking for someone to explain certain objects in the collection. According to Martowikrido, they talked and Ann invited him to join her for a meal. When he arrived later at the designated restaurant, he found her talking and laughing with a friend. They were celebrating Ann’s birthday, it seemed. After that encounter, Martowikrido told me, he and Ann became friends. They would talk about Javanese culture and the meaning of certain handcrafted object
s—how the design on a piece of fabric indicated that the wearer was a widow, or the significance of a certain crescent-shaped comb. After Martowikrido moved to Yogyakarta to study, and Ann moved there to begin her research, she would stop by the room he rented, where students often came by to study and talk. “She is very open-hearted,” he told me. “Nothing to hide.” She did not reveal, however, where she was living, Martowikrido said. He introduced her to lurik, the handwoven striped cotton from Yogyakarta, which he collected. He explained its history, the meaning of its design, and the varieties of stripes. Because Yogyakarta was famous for its silversmiths and goldsmiths, he took her to workshops in Kota Gede, a section of the city, so she could see how silver jewelry was made. “I told her that I am not interested in the objects but in the making of them,” he said. After a while, he said, “I think she is now looking at the object differently. At the beginning, she looks at the object as it’s written by the scholars. But she saw objects made by Javanese in society, then you see it a little bit differently.”

  Their friendship created talk, according to Renske Heringa, a close friend of Ann’s in the early 1980s. “He exposed her to all kinds of things that, without him, she might not so easily have gotten access to,” said Heringa, known as Rens. “He knew all kinds of villages that would not have been easy for her to go to. And he liked to be with her in the field.” He knew where to buy fabric and objects for little money. “She went all over Yogyakarta, as far as I know, with him on this motorbike,” Heringa said. “Why not? She was free, and he was free. Most of all, it was just the fact that they went around so much. For Indonesians, that would immediately mean that there was an affair. For Westerners, not so. Ann was there by herself. Why wouldn’t she be able to do what she wanted?”