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

by Janny Scott

  With friends at Nancy Peluso’s, Yogyakarta

  Martowikrido told me, when I asked, that he did not know how Ann felt about him. Perhaps she liked him, he said, because she would come by to visit. When I asked him about his feelings for her, he turned away, as though embarrassed by the question, and said he could not answer.

  Ann’s return to Indonesia had done little to shrink the distances that had opened up in her marriage to Lolo. According to Maya, the day she and Ann arrived in Jakarta, they found a young woman, who was quite beautiful, in Lolo’s house—the woman he would marry five years later, after he and Ann divorced. Maya, who was four at the time, told me she remembered little about the encounter. She did remember, however, her father’s nervousness and a lingering impression that her parents had argued about the woman’s presence.

  Ann and Maya lived in Lolo’s house in Menteng Dalam that year, but it seems that much of the time he did not. “I think he had another place that he lived,” Kay Ikranagara told me, but she said Lolo was often there when she and her son would visit. On the van ride to and from the business school, Samardal Manan, who had known Ann well during her first couple of years in Jakarta, said he was struck now by how free she seemed, as though “relieved from something.” After Ann and Maya moved to Yogyakarta in early 1976, Lolo would fly in to visit, staying in the house with his mother. Ikranagara recalled Ann telling her, on a visit to Yogyakarta, that Lolo was involved with another woman. “At that point, they were separated,” Ikranagara said. “I didn’t feel that they were husband and wife anymore, whether or not they were divorced formally.” To Maya, Ann said Lolo’s job with the oil company kept them apart. “They were still, though, supposedly trying to make the marriage work,” Maya recalled. Years later, Ann suggested to Maya that Lolo, whose health was poor, had been feeling mortal and contemplating the possibility that his name might not carry on. “He must have been lonely, though, on some level,” Maya told me. “I mean, there was a lot of back-and-forth: She was in Hawaii; he was in Indonesia. I’m not sure that you can really build a satisfying marriage with so much movement. So that’s understandable—a pretty, lively thing who’s present when your wife is not. I’m not saying that I forgive him, because I was upset that he hurt my mother. But I can’t see that, even in advance of that, there was a marriage in the sense that I would expect a marriage to be—a sort of daily negotiation and conversation and affection and that sort of thing.”

  Sometime in the late 1970s, Lolo became seriously ill. Returning home from a game of tennis at the Petroleum Club late one afternoon, Kadi Warner remembered Ann telling her, Lolo collapsed. The diagnosis was liver disease. Maya referred to it as cirrhosis; others told me that the damage to his liver was the result of a childhood illness acquired during the Japanese occupation. After at least one hospitalization in Jakarta in June 1977, it became apparent that Lolo needed a level of medical care that was not available in Indonesia. “They couldn’t treat him in Indonesia,” Warner said. “But because he was a local hire, he didn’t have the benefits to go outside. What Ann said was that she shamed the oil company into sending him out.” She appealed to his boss at Union Oil to allow Lolo to be treated in the United States. “She went in and wept on his boss’s desk, begging him to pay for Lolo to go to the United States,” Kay Ikranagara remembered. “She said, ‘You must send him to the United States, he will die without care.’ She cried on the desk till he agreed.” When I asked how Ann felt about having done that, Ikranagara said, “She was proud she’d done it. But she didn’t want to have to go through that again.”

  Lolo was flown to Los Angeles, hospitalized, and treated there. His nephew, Sonny Trisulo, a student at the University of California at Los Angeles in the late 1970s, recalled visiting him in the hospital on several occasions. Before returning to Jakarta, Ann and Maya took Lolo to Honolulu to recuperate in the second-floor bedroom at Dewey’s house, overlooking the breadfruit tree.

  Once, I asked Maya how her parents’ marriage had ceased to be a functioning marriage. She said she did not know. For a long time, she said, she was too “young and foolish and self-centered” to ask that sort of question. Later, she said, her mother may have shielded her from the truth. “She probably wanted to be very careful that my memories of him weren’t blemished in any way,” she said. “I mean, she was a great mom and really wanted to make sure that I wasn’t too hurt by things. It was not just that she didn’t want to speak ill of the dead; she didn’t want to speak ill of my father.”

  Maya had written a short story, she said, in which a child keeps asking her mother, “Did you love him?” The mother keeps batting away the question. “I never really asked those questions,” Maya said. “It’s just a short story because I wondered later why I didn’t ask those questions about how much they loved each other. It was sort of like I felt, maybe in my youthful arrogance, that I knew. What I surmised, I guess, ultimately, was that they did love each other, but sometimes love isn’t quite enough. That it was a gentle love that followed a very passionate love that she had with Barack’s father. That my mother thought of my father as being a very sweet man but could be frustrated by his lack of communication about certain things. And ultimately, I think that she was disappointed that the marriage didn’t work. I felt so certain in that assessment of her feelings for him and her perception of him that I don’t think I ever asked.”

  Six

  In the Field

  It is not difficult to understand why people become entranced by Java. The landscape is breathtaking—shimmering paddy fields, terraced hillsides, luminous green plains carved by rivers and studded with volcanoes. The people are, as Francis Drake wrote after sailing there in 1580, “sociable, full of vivacity and beyond description happy.” The culture is the product of centuries of cross-fertilization—Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic influences mixed with elements of animism, ancestor worship, and Javanese legend. The past lives on in the patterns in textiles, in the performing arts, in thousand-year-old temples. Before dawn, visitors clamber up the sides of the twelve-centuries-old Buddhist monument of Borobudur to watch Gunung Merapi, Indonesia’s most active volcano, materialize out of the darkness, swathed in mists, the silence broken only by roosters and the whine of a motorcycle in the distance. At first glance, Javanese life seems to unspool in the open, as though on a vast and meticulously painted canvas: The dusty village streets shaded by mango and mlinjo trees where children skitter barefoot, the man bending in the flooded paddy field with his pants rolled, the women selling peanut fritters and gado-gado in the market. But the fact is, Java reveals itself, layer by layer, only over time, challenging Western assumptions about what it means to understand or know. “It’s not that they do it differently,” a British friend of Ann’s, Clare Blenkinsop, told me. “You have to be in a different way.” After returning to Java and Morocco several decades after doing fieldwork there as a young anthropologist in the 1950s and 1960s, Clifford Geertz confessed to having had, as he put it, a rather shaking experience—“the reawakening of an imperfectly suppressed conviction that I have never understood and never will understand a damn thing about either of these peculiar places, or, for that matter, myself.” Java rewards patience, Garrett Solyom told me one afternoon in Honolulu. His observation struck me as cautionary, not just about Java but about trying to understand his friend Ann. Java rewards patience, he said: diligence, patience, and long study.

  When Ann began her fieldwork in Central Java in the mid-seventies, sixty percent of all Indonesians lived on the island of Java, though it makes up just seven percent of Indonesia’s total land area. It was, and remains, among the most densely populated agricultural areas in the world. Most Javanese were peasants living in rural villages, working on small farms, raising crops by hand. But aspects of that life were changing. The “Green Revolution” of the 1970s had increased rice production, but it also had less immediately visible effects. The introduction of pesticides, sickles, and mechanical rice hullers took away much of the work of weeding, h
arvesting, and hand-pounding, traditionally done by women. Meanwhile, circuit traders driving trucks, mostly men, were taking the place of female traders who traditionally traveled on foot. Wage labor had been rare in rural areas before 1965. Now handicraft industries—including weaving, batik, and ceramics—faced competition from imported goods and products made in new factories set up with foreign capital. Hand-loom weavers, predominantly women, were being squeezed out of production. Many Western-style factories favored men in hiring, training, promotion, and pay. By the end of the 1970s, hundreds of thousands of women had moved out of agriculture and into rural manufacturing, many of them as part-time unpaid cottage-industry workers, Ann estimated in an apparently unpublished paper in the early 1980s. Some had difficulty finding stable employment as hired workers. With credit hard to come by and interest rates high, they also lacked the capital needed to become successful small-scale entrepreneurs.

  The subject of Ann’s fieldwork was cottage industries and their role as a subsistence alternative for peasant families on Java. “In many areas of the developing world the native handicraft industries have either died out completely in this century, or have managed to hang on only in a very weakened state, catering to a much-reduced market of curio-seekers and tourists,” she wrote in an early proposal to the East-West Center. Time once spent making handicrafts now went to “more profitable pursuits,” such as wage labor in foreign-owned operations. “Java offers the startling contrast of a case where cottage industry has not only survived, but rapidly expanded in the last fifteen years,” she continued. As many as six and a half million people on Java worked in cottage industry production—up from as little as half that number in 1961. Many Javanese villages specialized in a single product—bamboo birdcages, clay roof tiles, leather puppets, to name a few. In some villages, almost every adult took part. “Instead of being merely a quaint and minor survival of days gone by, cottage industry is the major mode of manufacturing many types of light consumer goods, including such items as roof tiles, bricks, ceramics, textiles, furniture, shoes, umbrellas, wall matting, baskets and containers, cigarettes, silver and brassware, herb medicines, snack foods, etc.,” Ann wrote. “The central problem of my research is to explain this expansion of cottage industry on Java.”

  Her hypothesis arose out of a harsh fact of Javanese life: As the population grew and the amount of agricultural land remained constant, more and more laborers worked the same finite plots of land. As a result, each laborer’s share of the yield decreased, requiring that he or she work longer just to keep up. The rural economy, however, was based not only on agriculture but also on petty commerce and cottage industry. Rather than work unnaturally long hours with diminishing returns, peasants found it more profitable to spend more time on other ways of making a living. “This tendency to turn to subsidiary occupations in the face of declining agricultural returns lies, I suggest, behind the expansion of cottage industry activities on Java in recent years,” Ann wrote.

  Ann was challenging what she believed was a common misconception. In the literature on peasant societies, she argued, peasant industries got short shrift. “Typically an ethnography of a peasant group will devote a hundred pages or more to describing the agricultural sector in great detail, and then dismiss peasant industries in a few throwaway lines,” she wrote. “Peasant industries are frequently characterized as ‘spare time’ activities, low in productivity and profitability, which are carried out mainly by poor women and children, and then only when they can find no agricultural work to do.” Ann started from a different premise—one rooted in her years of experience on Java, and in an appreciation for the economic decision-making of Javanese peasants. Peasant society, she said, “produces rural generalists rather than specialists. By this I mean that nearly every peasant has a repertoire of various skills which can be utilized for productive or income-generating purposes. A Javanese man, for example, may have skills in plowing and land preparation which are related to rice agriculture, but he may also know how to repair bicycles, make bricks, drive a pedicab (becak), raise fish or eels in ponds, make noodle soup and hawk it around the streets of a nearby town, etc. Similarly, a Javanese woman may have agricultural skills in transplanting, weeding and harvesting rice, but she may also know how to make batik cloth, operate a roadside stall or coffee shop (warung), collect teak leaves from a nearby forest for sale as food wrappers, trade vegetables or spices in a nearby marketplace, deliver babies for her neighbors, make palm sugar or cassava chips, etc.” Some researchers had remarked on this pattern. But Ann intended to expand the concept to encompass not simply an “observable pattern of activity” but a conscious strategy.

  She began her fieldwork with short visits to several dozen cottage-industry villages near Yogyakarta. For a time, a nationwide ban on village research in the six months leading up to the May 1977 general elections forced her back to Jakarta (where she taught a course for development planners at the University of Indonesia until she could return to the field). But by late June, she was back in the villages. In a long entry in her field notebook about a visit on June 25, 1977, to a basketry village called Malangan, her recorded observations included such things as the percentage of the village population active in making basketry products (fifty percent), an accounting of the products made (rice steamers, lampshades, nesting boxes, et cetera), the age at which children are considered fully productive (ten years old), a description of the photos in the industry leader’s living room, a list of raw materials and their sources, a list of sources of credit, and a detailed accounting of “prosperity indicators,” which included school attendance, livestock, crops grown in house yards, bicycles and motorcycles, a television, and sweet tea and snacks offered to visitors. “Twice asked whether women did modern work (no) and why not,” Ann wrote. “Answer that they are too ‘busy’ and too ‘lazy’ to study the new techniques.” Over the next few weeks, she could be found noting the benefits of burning coconut husks in the fire pit in a candy factory in Bantul, counting the twenty-eight sizes and types of chisels on the worktable of an elderly maker of masks and wooden puppets, and examining the buffalo hides used by a leather puppetmaker in Gendeng (“Cow hides having a tendency to roll up and curl,” she noted). From there, she moved on to bamboo villages, batik villages, and weaving villages, as well as to factories producing fruit wine, coconut-fiber matting, and dolls.

  On August 3, Ann left Yogyakarta, heading southeast on the road to Wonosari, a market town in the dry, hilly district of Gunung Kidul, which lies between Yogyakarta and the Indian Ocean. About a half-hour outside of Yogyakarta, the road to Wonosari climbs into the hills in a series of loops overlooking the Central Java plains. From Wonosari, a smaller road heads northeast toward Kajar, a cluster of hamlets where, in 1977, hundreds of village men worked as blacksmiths at backyard forges, hammering agricultural tools out of old railroad rails and scrap iron. By eight a.m., Ann would later write, the sounds of forging could be heard coming from every corner of the village—the three-beat rhythm of the hammer swingers striking metal on metal, the “light counterpoint” of the master smith tapping instructions on the anvil, “the muffled plops of the bellows,” the scraping sound of the filing and polishing of tools. Peak-roofed houses with woven bamboo walls and earthen floors lined a loose grid of narrow dirt and gravel roads. Bamboo, coconut palms, and fruit trees grew in the house yards, alongside a few cattle and goats. Women and children operated roadside stands selling snacks, kerosene, cooked food. There was no plumbing in Kajar; only one household had electricity, supplied by a diesel engine. Ann had first heard of Kajar one week earlier in an interview with a consultant on a World Bank team looking into possible development projects in the area. “There is a cooperative in the village, which has been controlled since 1962 by the same three men (elections are open, not by secret ballot) which purchases and farms out 30 million rupiahs worth of scrap iron per year!” she had written in her notes on the interview. The following week, having attached herself to a ten-day press tou
r organized by the Indonesian Department of Industry in connection with the anniversary of its ladies’ auxiliary, she was there. The smiths made more than tools, she learned that day; they also hammered gamelan gongs for village orchestras, using the ends of kerosene and diesel-fuel drums. They used a double-piston bellows made of two hollowed-out tree trunks—a style of bellows so old it can be found in a scene of a smithy in the reliefs at Candi Sukuh, a fifteenth-century temple on the slopes of Gunung Lawu, seen as one of the holiest mountains on Java. “The work is backbreaking and earsplitting, but no protective equipment is used,” Ann wrote after that first day in Kajar. The hammer swingers, positioned around the forge, stood up to their knees in a pit—a position, she learned later, designed to prevent their calf muscles from atrophying from constant squatting.

  Farming was a tough way to make a living in Kajar, Ann was to discover. Flanked to the east by barren karst limestone hills, the village was situated in an ecological transition zone. The rocky soil was fertile enough for cassava, corn, and dry rice as staples, and peanuts and other legumes for sale to traders. But rainfall was unpredictable. Drought had wiped out crops, and famine had killed off most of the livestock and some villagers, as recently as the early 1960s. Not long afterward, there had been a plague of rats. Over several decades, blacksmithing had edged out farming as the dominant occupation. The industry was said to date back to the arrival in Kajar in the 1920s of two migrant smiths, who then married local women and brought their sons and sons-in-law into the business. During the Japanese occupation, Japanese military officers brought broken weapons and confiscated scrap metal to the village; they ordered the original smiths to teach other villagers how to turn scrap into tools. Forced to copy new items, village smiths learned to custom-make whatever a buyer might want. They also discovered that tools could be made more economically from scrap iron than from imported bar iron. After the famine and the rat plague of the 1960s, more smithies opened. The market for agricultural tools grew during the Green Revolution and under the Suharto government’s policy of transmigration, in which impoverished Indonesians were being induced to move from crowded Java to less populous corners of Sumatra, Kalimantan, and East Timor. In the late seventies, thirty more smithies opened in Kajar, bringing the total to ninety-eight, employing a total of six hundred men. Because of the demand for workers, the ancient taboo that had kept women from working in the forge began to crumble. “Kajar men consider themselves craftsmen first and agriculture a sambilan,” Ann wrote after her first full day of surveying in Kajar, using the Indonesian word for a sideline or second job. Kajar would prove a fascinating case study of the phenomenon she had set out to explain, the expansion of cottage industry.