A Singular Woman (20 page)

“This highly distinctive voice yelled back, ‘Put the kettle on and make tea.'” Kennedy told me. “There was a profusion of tea, I made the right one, I think it was lapsang souchong. That day, Alice said, ‘Why don't you move in?' The basis for her household was very clear: She liked to live with people, she didn't want to be a landlady, she didn't charge us rent. She liked to be fed, she liked to have company, she liked to have a household that ticked over. There was always going to be someone who was there, so she could have dogs and not be worrying about traveling. It seemed to me on the one hand quite eccentric and on the other hand utterly sensible.”

Ann became a regular visitor and occasional short-term denizen of Dewey's house in Mānoa. At any time, there were five or six people in residence and others dropping by to talk to Dewey or stay for dinner. An anthropologist in transit might be camped on a mattress on the floor. In several periods during the 1970s, Ann and Maya—and even, on one occasion, Lolo—occupied a second-floor bedroom overlooking a breadfruit tree at the northwest corner of the house. Kadi Warner recalled long discussions between Dewey and Ann on, say, the impact on Java of the introduction of Bahasa Indonesia, the national language, gradually supplanting the more status-attuned language, Javanese. For a book of anecdotes put together on the occasion of Dewey's retirement in October 2007, Maya reminisced in writing about “the wonderful labyrinth” of the house, with the secret staircases and “oversized flora” she knew as a child. She remembered being awakened by the cat, Kretek (the Indonesian word for clove cigarettes), sitting on her chest. Dewey introduced her, Maya wrote, to Alfred Hitchcock and good British mysteries. There were long meals followed by Javanese coffee, clove cigarettes, and fine storytelling.

“I remember feeling quite proud when one day Alice said that I was the most tolerable child she knew,” Maya wrote.

Ann loved to talk. If she got interested in a topic, she seemed able to remember everything she had ever heard about it. “She could remember conversations almost verbatim,” said Benji Bennington, who shared Ann's interest in Indonesia and the arts. “If you were reading, say, about a particular textile technique and talking to Ann, she seemed almost to be playing back a mental tape recording of some conversation she'd had with the source of the information.” Garrett Solyom, who met her when they were graduate students, found that once he started talking with Ann, everything else seemed to disappear. “There was a certain amount of fencing,” he said. “She was smart. We have all these stupid words in English that don't say anything. Well, she would stick you. She would say, ‘I wouldn't put it that way.' Or, ‘No, I don't think so. Wouldn't it be this?' There would be a flash of the eye; and then you realized it was a flash of the brain.” In a box of Ann's papers, I happened on a comment in her handwriting in the margin of an unpublished article by Solyom and his wife, Bronwen, that they had given her to read. “I guess we'll avoid our usual argument on what is iron versus low-grade steel carburized by forging in the presence of charcoal,” she wrote. “It's really a continuum.”

The Solyoms had lived in Indonesia in the late 1960s and had returned to the United States, as Bronwen Solyom put it in a talk at the University of Hawai‘i in 2008, “fired up for one reason or another about Indonesia.” Like Ann, they had arrived at the university as graduate students in the early 1970s, a time when, in the waning days of the Vietnam War, programs in Southeast Asian studies were blossoming. They were captivated by traditional Javanese art, ancient patterns on textiles, the origins of rituals they had witnessed. They were especially interested in “the making of things,” Bronwen Solyom said—batik, shadow puppets, and the asymmetrical, often wavy-bladed, ceremonial dagger known as the kris, or
keris
, seen as both magical and sacred. Over the course of a twenty-year friendship, their interests and Ann's intersected and overlapped. The Solyoms focused on the object, its aesthetics and iconography, and its meaning in a ceremonial context; they studied the kris as a high art form, a court art, in its most refined form. Ann came to focus on the lives of craftspeople in the present day. When she studied blacksmiths, she immersed herself in everything from the making to the marketing of everyday agricultural tools. Her interest was function.

I once asked Maya if she could identify the source of her mother's interest in handicrafts. Using a phrase that stuck with me, she said her mother had always been “fascinated with life's gorgeous minutiae.” When Ann was young, she had owned a loom and had woven wall hangings as a hobby. After moving to Indonesia, she began collecting batik and other textiles, handcrafted silver jewelry, rice-paddy hats, and woven baskets. In a foreword to the version of Ann's dissertation that was published in 2009 by Duke University Press, Maya wrote that her mother “was interested in the place where vision meets execution, and where the poetic and the prosaic share space. She loved the way something beautiful could speak about the spirit of both the maker and the owner; the skill and soul of the blacksmith are revealed in the
keris,
but so too is the desire and perspective of the buyer.”

Ann had landed in Indonesia when the country was on the cusp of a renaissance in the traditional arts—a rebirth that resulted from scarcity. “Artistically, the 1960s were the best time for traditional arts, because people were so poor,” Garrett Solyom told me. Renske Heringa, who lived in Indonesia in the same period, said, “We didn't have books, we couldn't buy clothes, we all went around in batik because that was all there was. There was nothing—but suddenly people became aware that they had something that nobody else had.” Indonesians who traveled abroad noticed that Indonesian handicrafts were treasured elsewhere. With the growth of tourism in Indonesia in the 1970s, the market for handicrafts grew. At the same time, opportunities for women to earn a living in agriculture were shrinking. With the introduction of mechanical rice hullers, for example, fewer women could expect to make a living by hand-pounding rice. Many turned to small industries, including handicrafts, and petty trade. The government even adopted policies intended to encourage rural craft industries as a source of income for the poor. Ann had lived through that period.

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.”