Memories are an undeniable recollection of experiences that either negatively or positively have shaped our personalities and our lives in one shape or another. Whether or not we can avoid our past experiences is in part determined by our genetic make up, our coping mechanisms, and the trauma that we have experienced. In the book Solar Storms, the author Linda Hogan shows the main character, Angel’s, struggle to find a reality through her memories and a scar on her face that reminds her of the traumatic past that she had experienced.
After experiencing trauma throughout her family, Angel develops a sense of who she is and what her new reality means. Her new meaning did not come easily but, instead, she faced her doubts and her negative experiences head on. By moving onto the reservation, Angel began to feel disconnected from her previous heritage. Hogan shows Angel’s apprehensive response to her new community when she writes “I understood how it felt to be part of one thing and part of another, to be alone and away from your pack, to have a soul that wandered. [...] I suppose I thought all this because I, too felt alone.” (p. 273) Angel was both a part of American popular culture and a part of a Native American tribe. She struggled to develop in either of the communities she was in because she felt alone in her emotions and her previous experiences.
One of the memories that caused Angel to feel lonely was the torture and physical abuse that her mother, Hannah, had imposed on her. Her mother had physically attacked Angel’s face leaving her with scars that were noticeable for the rest of her life. Solar Storms references to her scars multiple times and Hogan shares the pain that it caused Angel in an emotional sense. Hogan shows Angel’s hatred toward them when she writes “My ugliness, as I called it, had ruled my life. My need for love had been so great I would offer myself to any boy or man who would take me.” (p. 54) The scars that Angel believed were ugly created a thirst for attention, a thirst for love. She desired someone who could make her feel more whole, a piece to her puzzle that her mother and her foster families couldn’t provide. Of course, this wasn’t the solution to Angel’s problems. Later in her life, she recognizes the ‘love trap’ that she fell into. Hogan suggests this when she writes “It would heal me, I thought. [...] But the truth remained that I was wounded and no one could tell me how it happened and no man or boy offered what I needed. [..] I dreaded knowing what happened me and the dread was equal to my urgent desire to learn the truth.” (p. 55)
Angel continued to develop her story and her emotions through her desire to learn the story behind her scars, the story behind her torture. Angel pursued her identity secretly at first, away from the demands of her closest family members, but eventually was consumed by the amount of information that she was provided by others. Hogan shares Angel’s desire to discover her history when she writes “For a long time I kept to myself a missing part of my own story. In the early part of my search for kin, I’d found a sister in South Dakota, my blood sister, Henriet. [...] I didn’t speak about her because her existence both horrified me and filled me with despair [...] Her skin was filled with scars.” (p. 118) Angel’s sister was a faint reflection of herself. The scars that Angel describes represent the pain that she has endured, a pain that was very similar to the pain that Angel was still experiencing.
Pain and worry did not subside until Angel discovered the true details of her mother. It took a high level of closure in order for her to feel accepted into her family and into her body. She called the closure that she experienced ‘balance’ to which she entertained as a middle ground between hell and heaven, the difference between the good and the bad. The balance that she experiences originated from her slow discovery of her mother but more specifically through the stories that others shared with her about her own life as a child. Angel began to experience comfort after a woman shared a brutal story about her mother's urgency to die and to torture her children. Hogan tells this story when she writes “We knew what had happened to you, your face, how, like a dog, she bit your face with her teeth. It was worse for you, maybe because you looked like her. She hated you for that, for coming from her body, being a part of her.” (p. 246) This was the first time that Angel had learned the truth about her scars. Hannah’s abuse caused emotional ailments that were unexplainable to Angel, they had simply became a part of her, until she was freed of the wonder.
Once she had learned the story behind her scars, Angel was able to dive headfirst into the reality of her mother and how she was going to survive and move passed the struggles that she had experienced. Angel discovered the meaning of emptiness. She found an empty soul in her mother. A soul that was ‘as cold as ice’. Death allowed whatever her mother had possessed to be forgotten and looked past. This realization brought Angel comfort, Hogan describes this comfort when she writes:
It was death, finally, that allowed me to know my mother, her body, the house of lament and sacrifice that it was. [...] I would find it in myself to love the woman who had given life to me. [...] Her desperation and loneliness was my beginning. Hannah had been my poison, my life, my sweetness and homeliness. And When she died, I knew I had survived in the best of ways for I was filled with grief and compassion. (p. 251)
Angel had finally reached a balance between her comfort and her reality. The death of her mother allowed her to conceive the horrors that her mother had done and the horrors that lived within her mother. She was able to forgive, to move past the negativity that she felt towards her life and her mother’s actions.
Comfort comes from realization and forgiveness. Angel created a reality for herself that included her mother after she lived and learned about her mother and the life that her mother created for her. Sympathy allowed Hannah to be forgiven, the mistakes that she made were looked past and forgiven. Angel desired a life of love, appreciation, and truthfulness, all of which she was granted when she returned to discover who she was to her blood family.
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