Ann Obama is very important to Obama’s story, in a way I did not fully realize when I wrote
The Roots of Obama’s Rage
. While researching that book I was taken in by Obama’s innocuous descriptions of his mom. “She gathered friends from high and low, took long walks, stared at the moon, and foraged through the local markets of Delhi or Marrakesh for some trifle, a scarf or stone that would make her laugh or please the eye.” Obama portrays his mom as a kind of innocent abroad, a Midwestern girl on the road, “a lonely witness for secular humanism, a soldier for New Deal, Peace Corps, position-paper liberalism.”
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Naturally, I concluded, the father was the dominant figure and the mother was peripheral.
But now I’ve modified my view. As a result of reading newly published information, and interviewing people who knew Ann Obama, I realized that Barack Sr. was indeed the dominant figure in Obama’s life, but that Ann Obama was Barack Sr.’s greatest disciple. As one who shared his anti-American, anti-colonial views, she was the main vehicle for communicating those views to her son and building his lifelong obsession with the absentee father .
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What do we know about Ann Obama? She was a white-bread girl from Kansas who became a bohemian, a sixties girl before the sixties. She rebelled against her parents, against Christianity, and against her country. “She was not a standard-issue girl of her times,” her school friend Chip Wall told the
Chicago Tribune
. “She wasn’t part of the matched-sweater set.” Classmate Susan Blake said that Ann at a young age considered herself superior to her parents. “It seemed like every time her father opened his mouth, she would roll her eyes.” Ann liked to stress to her friends how boring her mother was: “My mother’s favorite color is beige.” Ann’s best friend, Maxine Box, added that “she touted herself as an atheist, and it was something that she’d read about and could argue. She was already thinking about things that the rest of us hadn’t.” Later, Ann’s Indonesian friend Felina Pramono said that as a Christian she avoided the topic of religion with Ann because of her mocking attitude. “She would just smile and laugh, you know? And a sneer. I could feel it.” For Ann, religion was uncool but anything foreign or radical was cool. One of Ann’s teachers, Jim Wichterman, described her as an aficionado of foreign films, jazz, and Karl Marx. “As much as a highschool student can, she’d question anything: what’s so good about democracy? What’s so good about capitalism? What’s wrong with communism?”
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Ann never dated “the crew-cut white boys,” her classmates said. In fact, as far as I can determine, Ann had no serious boyfriends who were white and American. Nor was she initially interested in marriage. Her friend and associate Nina Nayar commented that “she always felt that marriage as an institution was not particularly essential or important.” Yet Ann didn’t write off marriage completely. Her close friend, the Dutch anthropologist Renske Heringa, said of Ann, “She was completely not out to ‘do the right thing’ or behave in the way people expected.”
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If Ann was ever going to marry, she knew that it would likely be a foreigner, preferably non-white, ideally anti-Western and anti-American. In Hawaii, when her family moved there, she found the one: Barack Obama Sr. They met in a Russian class. She called him “the African.” A few months later she sent a postcard to her friend Susan Blake. “I’m in love with the African.” And then, a bit later, “Big news! I married the African.” Blake comments, “She was excited about her future with this man, who was the rising hope of Africa, which was just about to emerge from under British rule. It was all so romantic.” Ann was swept up by all this, and so perhaps understandably, when the marriage soon dissolved, she kept the news to herself. “People said she went to Africa and married a black king,” classmate Kathy Sullivan recalled. “We all thought that for years and years.”
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Many observers emphasize how Ann was seduced by Barack’s confidence and charisma, and surely that was part of the story. But Alice Dewey, Ann’s thesis adviser in Hawaii who knew both Ann and Barack, told me that there was a deeper bond between them that was ideological; they shared core values, despite their cultural differences. Even though the differences ultimately proved insurmountable, Dewey said what brought the two together was their Third World affinity and anti-capitalist sentiments. “Senior and Anne would not have married unless they had things in common,” Dewey said. “At some fundamental level they had a lot in common.” And Dewey adds that eventually their son “Barry picked it up.”
The union between Ann and Barack Sr. did not even last until their baby, Barack Obama Jr., was born. By August 1961, the two had already separated. Ann moved to Seattle and enrolled at the University of Washington, but returned to Hawaii in 1962. Barack Sr. left for Harvard that fall, when his son was one year old.
Even after Barack dumped her, Ann still thought of him as the noble embodiment of their shared ideological values. During this period, Janny Scott writes, “she dressed in dashikis, kept African artifacts on her desk, and gravitated in conversation toward international topics.” Ann praised her former husband as “principled” and “uncompromising.” She would defend him against her son’s demands to know why he wasn’t there. At one point she told her son, “It wasn’t your father’s fault that he left, you know. I hope you don’t feel resentful toward him.”
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She implied he was away on some grand crusade, fighting to liberate his people from oppression. Actually, he was philandering at Harvard or getting drunk back in Nairobi, but this was Ann’s continuing romance with her former husband. He was her perfect Third World, anti-American guy, and she looked for and found a second husband who was another Third World, anti-American guy.
His name was Lolo Soetoro, a student from Indonesia. Ann met him at “Indonesian Night” at the East West Center at the University of Hawaii. What appealed to Ann was that Lolo’s family had been engaged in the anti-colonial struggle—his family home had been burned by the Dutch during Indonesia’s war for independence after World War II. Indonesia was now ruled by a left-wing dictator named Sukarno who refused to count himself in the Western camp. Sukarno called himself “non-aligned,” but in practice he was anti-American and anti-Western, and effectively pro-Soviet. Sukarno had infuriated Western investors by nationalizing major industries, including oil. Ann adored Sukarno, and she planned to accompany her new husband Lolo to Indonesia so that the two of them could together support this Third World, anti-American dictatorship. In 1967, Ann took young Barack Obama Jr. to live in Indonesia.
But things went wrong for Ann right from the start. The year before she arrived, the Indonesian military launched a coup against Sukarno. Taking over was anti-Communist General Suharto, who ordered a purge of Communists inside and outside his government. In
Dreams from My Father
, Obama implies that Ann’s romance was just as much with Sukarno as it was with Lolo. “In later years,” Obama writes, “my mother would insist that had she known (about the coup and the purge), we never would have made the trip.”
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Even worse, Lolo was drafted into the Indonesian army to fight the Communists, the very people that Ann viewed as the true liberation forces in Indonesia.
Ann tried to make the best of it. She began doing anthropological research, and placed her son in the care of a different sort of nanny. This nanny was an openly gay man named Turdi, who enjoyed dressing in women’s clothing and who carried on a public affair with a local butcher. The nanny later changed his name to Evi and joined a transvestite group called Fantastic Dolls, which collected money by playing street games and dancing.
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Lolo added to the multicultural atmosphere by giving Obama a pet ape from New Guinea named Tata. Obama’s backyard was a swamp that was said to contain crocodiles. For the first time he ate dog, snake, and grasshopper. He attended schools with Muslim students and learned about Islam, which was no surprise, since Indonesia is the largest Muslim country in the world. Jakarta in those days was not the megacity that it is now; rather, it was a tapestry of towns and villages. Obama recalls rickshaws, animals crossing the road, beggars asking for money. It reminds me a lot of my own upbringing in a suburb of Mumbai, although my exposure to transvestites was considerably less than Obama’s.
Obama spent four years in Indonesia, and during that period he became very close to Lolo. Indonesia was, at least at first, an elusive and strange place, and Obama recalls that “it was to Lolo that I turned for guidance and instruction.” After all, “his knowledge of the world seemed inexhaustible.” He offered the young boy “a manly trust.” Mostly Lolo taught Obama that the world was a tough place and that men must learn self-reliance. At one point Obama asked Lolo, “How many beggars are there on the street?” Lolo replied, “Better to save your money and make sure you don’t end up on the street yourself.” Lolo taught Obama to box and frequently gave his step-son lessons in the importance of strength. “Better to be strong,” he said. “If you can’t be strong, be clever and make peace with someone who’s strong. But always better to be strong yourself.”
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While Obama relished having a step-father, Ann was dismayed to see her husband becoming more pro-American and pro-capitalist. After leaving the army, he took a job with the Jakarta branch of the Union Oil Company of California. He moved his family into a bigger house with three bedrooms, a library, and a terrace; he employed domestic staff, including a cook, a houseboy, and two other female servants. He joined the Indonesian Petroleum Club, where he socialized with Europeans and Americans. He began to listen to American music; his favorite song was “Moon River.” While many other women might appreciate these trappings of success, Ann couldn’t stand any of it and got into fierce arguments with Lolo. As Obama writes, “I would overhear him and my mother arguing in their bedroom, usually about her refusal to attend his company dinner parties, where American businessmen from Texas and Louisiana would slap Lolo’s back and boast about the palms they had greased to obtain the new offshore drilling rights, while their wives complained to my mother about the quality of Indonesian help. He would ask how it would look for him to go alone, and remind her that these were her own people, and my mother’s voice would rise to almost a shout. ‘They are
not
my people.’”
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Ann made new friends, mostly left-wing academics from the West and an assortment of Indonesians: newspaper editors, artists, academics, foundation program officers, and local activists. To this group, she scorned Lolo. She told her friend Yang Suwan that Lolo seemed indifferent to corruption and he might even be involved, at least indirectly, with it. “She was upset,” Suwan recalled. “She said, Suwan, after he did that, my whole respect for him was gone.” She told another pal, Kay Ikranagara, that Lolo was a crass materialist. As Ikranagara puts it, “She felt that he had grown up without material things, and now he put so much importance on material things.” Lolo, Ann told her friend Bill Collier, “was becoming more American all the time.” Ann thought of herself as becoming more Indonesian, more Javanese. Yet she refused to play the role of the dutiful Indonesian wife. “By the time I knew Ann,” says the Dutch anthropologist Renske Heringa, “she was a hefty woman. She didn’t care about getting dressed, wearing jewelry, the way Indonesian women do. That was not her style. He expected her to do it. She absolutely refused.”
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Soon Ann and Lolo were living in different worlds, and a divorce between them seemed imminent.
Ann recognized, of course, that Lolo was just trying to survive in a Third World country where corruption was a way of life. Lolo found Ann’s leftist and anti-American sympathies impractical; he thought in terms of power rather than ideals. “Guilt,” he once told her, “is a luxury only foreigners can afford.” Ann understood this, but she understood it in terms of Lolo being an ideological sellout. Obama puts the point very well. “Power. The word fixed in my mother’s mind like a curse . . . . Here power was undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory. Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped, making him feel its weight, letting him know that his life wasn’t his own . . . . And so Lolo had made his peace with power.” This fact, Obama writes, created an “unbreachable barrier between them.” Yet she had an option. “She could always leave if things got too messy.” But then it struck Ann with the force of a revelation that her son admired Lolo, and might pattern his life after him. “She looked out the window now and saw that Lolo and I had moved on, the grass flattened where the two of us had been. The sight made her shudder slightly, and she rose to her feet, filled with a sudden panic. Power was taking her son.”
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Right here we see why Ann Obama packed up her son, age ten, and sent him back on his own to America. She didn’t want his values to be shaped by Lolo. She viewed Lolo as a sellout, a power-seeker who had made his peace with capitalism and with America. She wanted her son to be a principled anti-capitalist, anti-American, like her and like someone else she used to know: Barack Obama Sr. Obama writes that his mother “had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad.” Lolo, from Ann’s point of view, was undermining these lessons, and in her conflicts with him, Obama writes, “She had only one ally . . . and that was the distant authority of my father.... His life had been hard, as hard as anything that Lolo might have known. He hadn’t cut corners, though, or played all the angles. He was diligent and honest, no matter what it cost him. He had led his life according to principles that demanded a different kind of power, principles that promised a higher form of power. I would follow in his example, my mother decided. I had no choice. It was in the genes.”
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