Replies

“But neither description begins to capture the unconventional life of Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, the parent who most shaped Mr. Obama.

Kansas was merely a way station in her childhood, wheeling westward in the slipstream of her furniture-salesman father. In Hawaii, she married an African student at age 18. Then she married an Indonesian, moved to Jakarta, became an anthropologist, wrote an 800-page dissertation on peasant blacksmithing in Java, worked for the Ford Foundation, championed women’s work and helped bring microcredit to the world’s poor.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/14/us/politics/14obama.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Ann Dunham: A Personal Reflection

*snip*

Then she got married and her name was Mrs. Barack Hussein Obama until she married her Indonesian husband and became Mrs. Lolo Soetoro, the old Dutch spelling. Everybody in Indonesia knew her as Ann Soetoro. She moved to Indonesia because she married Lolo Soetoro, a Javanese.

But she soon came to love Java and the arts. She was herself a craftsman and weaver. She taught weaving and just loved it. Most of her clothes were Indonesian. Java was as much her home as Honolulu.

Ideally, she moved back and forth. She’d be in Indonesia for a few years and then she’d get home sick for Honolulu and move back here for some months to pursue her studies, see her parents and friends, and then back to Java because she’d get homesick for Java and also need to earn money.

http://www.anthropology.hawaii.edu/News/Announcements/2008/dunham.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Parang Rusak Batik

http://easyweb.easynet.co.uk/~iany/patterns/batik_parang.htm

Cut From Obama’s Mother’s Cloth

By Ruth McCann
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 8, 2009

They arrived at the Textile Museum on July 31 in a suitcase, large pieces of Javanese batik-patterned cloth that Ann Dunham purchased in the 1960s. Dunham was then living in Jakarta with her second husband and her young children, Maya Soetoro-Ng and Barack Obama.

And now 16 of these hand-designed swaths of woven cloth are almost ready for display at the museum in Northwest Washington. The exhibit, which opens Sunday and runs through Aug. 23, marks the collection’s sixth and final stop in a national tour, co-organized by the Indonesian Embassy and Soetoro-Ng, who arrived Friday in D.C. After Dunham’s death in 1995, it was Soetoro-Ng who held on to her mother’s batik collection.

*snip*

Much of batik’s symbolic language is centuries-old, inherited from the Indonesian court system. The diagonal parang rusak (broken knife) pattern, Gittinger says, was once worn only by upper-class members of the central Javanese courts.

One batik that boasts the parang rusak pattern shows signs of wear.

So while there are no snapshots of baby Obama at the Textile Museum, one can at least take pleasure in imagining his mother, an adventurous woman in a new city, swathing herself in the robes of power, the formerly forbidden patterns.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/07/AR2009080703192.html