“There is a phrase in Indonesian, diam dalam seribu bahasa,” Obama’s half-sister Maya tells David Remnick, “that means ‘to be silent in a thousand languages.’ It’s a very fitting phrase for this country.”¹⁰⁰

In 1967, when Obama was six years old, his mother Ann took him to Jakarta to live with her second husband, Lolo, who worked as an army geologist surveying roads and tunnels, and later as a liaison with the government for Union Oil. In Hawaii, Lolo had been fun and talkative, but in Indonesia he became withdrawn and started drinking more.

There were hints that Lolo had either seen things or somehow been involved in the events of 1965. That year, a military coup led by General Suharto—backed by the CIA—had toppled the country’s president and founding father Sukarno. Shifting blame onto the Indonesian Communist Party, Suharto incited a countrywide purge of the Left, and over the next year there were violent reprisals in towns and villages across the country, spilling into full-blown slaughter when the Chinese community were singled out. This was partly because of their loose association with Communist China and partly because they were a minority who had always been held in suspicion. The Chinese, resident—and persecuted—in Indonesia since the sixteenth century, were killed in the hundreds of thousands.

Remnick, in his account, says that not long after arriving in Jakarta Ann came across a field of unmarked graves and asked Lolo about it. He was unresponsive. In Obama’s memoir, he describes how Lolo had started to rebuff Ann when she asked what was wrong with him: “It was as if he had come to mistrust words somehow. Words, and the sentiments words carried.”¹⁰¹

Obama’s way of putting this reminds me of my mum’s family, of the thousandfold silence surrounding what happened in the mid-sixties. My grandma was living on the east coast of Sumatra then. Her husband was arrested; friends disappeared. It was a long time ago, she used to say. After my grandad was released from prison he took the family to Jakarta, leaving Sumatra for the relative anonymity of the capital. My grandma lived there until her death, many years after him. When asked, she would say that she was never scared. It was hard to get more out of her than that.

Talking about Lolo, Obama fixates on “power” and how “words” might be used to conquer it. Barack Senior, the father he never knew, thought he could stand up to power. Like Dixon, his education and natural eloquence—his way with words—enabled him to humiliate those who would have power over him. Lolo was different. Lacking that same verbal fluency and mistrusting words anyhow, he crumpled at the first sign of pressure.

Without the power to talk, Lolo fell silent. Later, Obama would conclude that this silence—the incapacity to describe what he’d seen—was what made him powerless.

I don’t know if Lolo deserves pity—whether he was defeated by his circumstances or brought defeat upon himself—but I resent, on his behalf, the injunction to be superhuman. Stories like that of Barack Senior may be inspiring but speaking out doesn’t necessarily confer power on the speaker. And not everyone can speak out. For my grandma, as for thousands of others living in Indonesia in the ’60s, silence was a matter of survival. A response to extreme danger, requiring courage and work, it wasn’t just a form of self-preservation but a means of protecting others.

“Language cannot do everything,” writes Adrienne Rich in her poem “Cartographies of Silence,” “chalk it on the walls where the dead poets / lie in their mausoleums.”¹⁰²