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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