Major article on Obama’s mother

I am interested in Stanley Ann Dunham Obama Soetoro, Barack Obama’s mother, and have linked previous articles about her. Here, by Amanda Ripley of Time, is the longest and most detailed account of her life and character I’ve seen so far, except perhaps for Obama’s Dreams from My Father, which I have not read.

One important new fact emerges from this article. Contrary to what is generally believed, Barack did not live with his grandparents from age 10 until his high school graduation. Instead, one year after Barack’s return to Honolulu in 1971 to go to school, his mother came back to Honolulu with her daughter from her second marriage, and the three lived together in an apartment in Honolulu for the next three years. Ann returned to Indonesia when Barack was 14 to pursue her anthropological studies. So he lived with his grandparents from age 10 to age 11, and then from age 14 until he went to college. Also, though Ann’s second husband visited her frequently in Hawaii, the couple did not live together as husband and wife after her move to Hawaii. Meaning that her second marriage effectively ended in 1972.

Here’s another new fact. Until she started college, Ann Dunham introduced herself, with embarrassment, as “Stanley,” the weird name her weirdo father had given her because she wasn’t born a boy.

And here is the movie that played a major role in Ann’s marriage to an African man and the birth of Barack Obama:

Shortly before she moved to Hawaii, Stanley saw her first foreign film. Black Orpheus was an award-winning musical retelling of the myth of Orpheus, a tale of doomed love. The movie was considered exotic because it was filmed in Brazil, but it was written and directed by white Frenchmen. The result was sentimental and, to some modern eyes, patronizing. Years later Obama saw the film with his mother and thought about walking out. But looking at her in the theater, he glimpsed her 16-year-old self. “I suddenly realized,” he wrote in his memoir, Dreams from My Father, “that the depiction of childlike blacks I was now seeing on the screen … was what my mother had carried with her to Hawaii all those years before, a reflection of the simple fantasies that had been forbidden to a white middle-class girl from Kansas, the promise of another life, warm, sensual, exotic, different.”…

When Ann told her parents about the African student at school, they invited him over for dinner. Her father didn’t notice when his daughter reached out to hold the man’s hand, according to Obama’s book. Her mother thought it best not to cause a scene. As Obama would write, “My mother was that girl with the movie of beautiful black people playing in her head.”

When I was in my twenties I was a big fan of the movie Black Orpheus. If I had known that it had led to directly to the birth of the messianic anti-American leftist who might become America’s first black president, I might have been more reflective about it.

By the way, only a hyper politically liberal would think of calling that terrific movie “sentimental and … patronizing.”

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Previous discussions at VFR of Ann Dunham

Profile of Obama’s mother

Spengler on Obama

The walking catastrophe that was Obama’s father

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Laura W. writes:

I feel sorry for Ann Dunham. To have a father who names you Stanley is bad enough, but to be denied an education at the University of Chicago and moved to a place as uncultured and depressing as Honolulu; to be seduced by a man at the age of 19 and find yourself pregnant and unmarried; to marry the man and then learn he is already married to a woman thousands of miles away; to have no choice but to get divorced: all before you are 21 years old and have reached maturity. She had some tough breaks. Her father was a strange man and living in Oahu, that weird island 1,600 miles from the U.S. mainland, can make a person desperate. I give her credit for picking herself up and making something of her life, even if it meant a few more major mistakes. It’s not surprising she found comfort in leftism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 12, 2008 02:10 AM | Send