FORMATIVE YEARS IN HAWAII AND INDONESIA

Chapter 2 FORMATIVE YEARS IN HAWAII AND INDONESIA

I was raised as an Indonesian child and a Hawaiian child and as a black child and as a white child. And so what I benefit from is a mul- tiplicity of cultures that all fed me.

—Barack Obama In 1959, just after her high school graduation, Ann Dunham moved with

her parents to Honolulu, Hawaii. Her father, Stanley, had been offered

a job at a new furniture store, and her mother, Madelyn, began working at a local bank. Ann, a shy, extremely bright 18-year-old, enrolled in the University of Hawaii. In one of her classes, Ann met a 23-year-old man named Barack Obama, the first African student accepted to the univer- sity. Studying econometrics, Barack was an intense scholar; he was also quite gregarious and had formed many friendships throughout the univer- sity community. Ann and Barack fell in love and were married, despite the misgivings of Barack’s father, who wrote from Kenya that he didn’t approve of the marriage. Barack’s father threatened to have his son’s visa revoked, which would have required his immediate return to Kenya. He didn’t know the marriage had taken place until a few years later.

Ann’s parents were wary at first but soon accepted their son-in-law. His charm, his intelligence, and the couple’s obvious love impressed them. On August 4, 1961, Ann and Barack had a son they named Barack Hus- sein Obama—Barack after his father and Hussein after his grandfather. The son, born to a white American woman and a black African man, was called Barry. In 1963, Barack Sr. was awarded a scholarship to study at Harvard University for a Ph.D. Although the scholarship money was

18 BARACK OBAMA

sufficient to support him, it was not enough to support Ann and their son. Barack Sr. went to Boston, leaving Ann and Barry, now two years old, in Hawaii. Ann and Barack Sr. divorced, and Ann continued her studies at the university. Ann’s parents, Stanley and Madelyn (known as Toots, short for Tutu, the Hawaiian word for grandparents), were a con- stant presence in Barry’s life.

Barry didn’t know his father, except from the stories he heard from his mother and grandparents and from the photographs he found tucked away in closets. Barack writes in his memoir Dreams from My Father about an early memory of sitting on the floor with his mother staring at photos of his father’s dark laughing face, his prominent forehead, and his thick eyeglasses. His mother told him about his father growing up in Kenya, as part of the Luo tribe, in a village named Alego. Barack listened as his mother told him about his father tending goats and attending a local school, where he was thought to have promise. She described how he had won a scholarship to study in Nairobi and was selected by Kenyan leaders and American sponsors to attend a university in the United States. She added that his father was expected to learn about Western technology and return to Africa with the skills to help create a new, modern Africa. She explained that his father had returned to fulfill that promise to his country. And even though she and Barry stayed behind, the bond of love

survived the distance. 1 By the time Barry was old enough to listen to and remember the stories, his mother had begun a relationship with a man who would become her second husband.

After his father left to study at Harvard, Barry began to spend a good deal of time with his grandparents. He accompanied his grandfather to

a park to play checkers and went fishing with him and his friends. All the while, he knew his father was missing. The stories he heard didn’t tell him why his father had left or what life might have been like if he had stayed. Barack didn’t blame his family for what was left out or what they didn’t tell him. Instead, he created his own picture of his father. In his memoir, Barack wrote about finding an article that appeared in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin at the time of his father’s graduation from the uni- versity. In the picture that accompanied the article, Barack describes his father as guarded and responsible, a model student, and an ambassador for Africa. Barack Sr., he writes, scoffed at the school’s treatment of for- eign students, who were forced to attend programs designed to promote cultural understanding, which he said was a distraction from the training the students were seeking. Barack writes that his father noted that other nations could learn from Hawaii how races are willing to work together toward a common development, adding that this was something whites

F O R M AT I V E Y E A R S I N H AWA I I A N D I N D O N E S I A 19 of Ann or their son, Barack notes; the omission of this information made

him wonder whether this was on purpose, based on his father’s pending departure from the family, or due to the fault of the reporter not asking more questions. Barack found the article about his father with his own

birth certificate and vaccination records. 2 For years, Barack pictured his father in his mind, always wondering why he left. Years later, memories of his “ghost” of a father were triggered, sometimes by reading an article about Africa or seeing a group of children on a street corner. Barack might wonder if any of the children were without their fathers.

In December 2007, Barack said that thoughts of his father would “bub- ble up”; memories would come to him at random moments. “I think about him often. . . . Men often long for their fathers’ approval, to shine in their fathers’ light.” And when asked how he feels about his father today, what is the dominant emotion in these thoughts, Barack answers, “I didn’t know him well enough to be angry at him as a father. Mostly I feel a cer- tain sadness for him, and the way that his life ended up unfulfilled, despite his enormous talents.” 3