Solar Storms

“It was the north country, the place where water was broken apart by land, land split open by water so that the maps showed places both bound and, if you knew the way in, boundless.”

Hogan creates the impression of the north country’s remote mystery by not referring place wheto the names of colonial American states and instead describing a re land and water are in constant competition. In stating that the place is boundless for those who know how to look, Hogan introduces the reader to the notion of a deeper wisdom than that of cartographers.

“From the ferry, as the fog moved, I saw Fur Island, the place old people still call the navel of the world. It sat above the mirror of water like a land just emerged, created for the first time that morning.”

The clearing fog, which enables Angel to see her future home of Fur Island, is a premonition of mysteries to be unveiled. The almost magical apparition of the island, which seems a new part of creation to Angel, is a prelude to her own rebirth and rediscovery of herself in that place. 

“Now this woman, these people, were all I had left. They were blood kin. I had searched with religious fervor to find Agnes Iron, thinking she would help me, would be my salvation, that she would know me and remember all that had fallen away from my own mind, all that had been kept secret by the country workers, that had been contained in their lost records: my story, my life.”

This passage illustrates the great lengths that Angel has gone to in order to find Agnes, as well as her high hopes that Agnes will help her solve the mystery of her existence and pain. Angel’s own memory has failed her, so she will now rely on the memory of others.

“We would breathe together the way wolves do with their kith and kin, the way they nurture relations by breathing. This breath was alive. It joined us as we were joined in so many other ways.”

Angel’s most immediate bond, when she arrives at Adam’s Rib, is with the elderly Dora-Rouge. By breathing together in the manner of wolves, Dora-Rouge and Angel nurture a tribal connection. This is significant for Angel, who has spent seventeen years of her life unsettled and feeling distanced from other people.

“These men’s people, my own people, too, had lived there forever, for more than ten thousand years, and had been sustained by these lands that were now being called empty and useless. If the dam project continued, the lives of the people who lived there would cease to be, a way of life would end in yet another act of displacement and betrayal.”

This passage illustrates the differing perspectives of Natives Americans and the Caucasian authorities. While the Caucasians see the lands as empty and ripe for new opportunities, the Native Americans feel ownership over them, and see them as vital to continuing their way of life. The reference to “yet another act of displacement and betrayal” illustrates that the colonization of Native-American lands and lifestyles is a continuing phenomenon. 

“She was, in the first moment of seeing her, equal parts light and water. And she had the closed look people wear when they are too much alone. […] But even so, seeing her, I was witness to a kind of grace I was hard put to describe; I’ve seen it carried in the stillness of deer and I’ve felt it in the changing power of seasons. It was only a glimpse—that’s all I can say in words—that there was something about her that knew itself.”

Angel’s first impression of Bush, when Angel arrives to live with her on Fur Island, is that she is both reclusive and elemental. Her grace is elusive and not easily defined because it comprises both a deer’s poise and a season’s mutability. The reader senses that Bush is no ordinary woman and that she is in touch with the kind of knowing and magic that are inaccessible through Caucasian-imposed logic.

“[…] her life going backward to where time and history and genocide gather and move like a cloud above the spilled oceans of blood. That little girl’s body was the place where all this met.”

Hannah Wing’s body is the site where all the wrongs done to the Native-American community meet. This collective great wrong is expressed in the unnatural phenomenon of a young girl’s life going backwards, rather than forwards. It is also a reminder that while times have moved on, trauma left unaddressed is never forgotten.

“That day I caught Bush staring at my face. I looked down, embarrassed, but she said only, ‘Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing.’”

Bush’s reversal of the conventional wisdom around scarring indicates that the place where one was hurt is the site not so much of wounding as it is a site of healing. She indicates that if Angel travels back to where those scars were imposed on her face, she stands a good chance of healing fully from them.

“The agents from the school caught me, but I managed to escape from their big, pale hands, the way a fish would; I slipped out. They scared me to death. Their eyes were so blue, I thought they were evil spirits.”

Little Dora-Rouge’s memory of the white agents who came to put her into a conventional school is traumatic and reflects the strangeness of her first encounter with white people. The men’s otherness is such to her that she assumes that their blue eyes are those of evil spirits. This whole incident is symbolic of the Native-American response to white colonists insisting that Natives give up their ways in favor of those declared superior.

“My life, before Adam’s Rib, had been limited in ways I hadn’t even known. I’d never have thought that there might be people who found their ways by dreaming. What was real in those land-broken waters, real even to me, were things others might call the superstitions of primitive people. […] The old world dawning new in me was something like the way a human eye righted what was upside down, turned over an image and saw true.”

Angel feels that she is at the dawn of truth, now that she is witnessing the Native-American perspective of nature and the world. Her experiences, though they may seem superstitious to outsiders, feel like the most limitless version of truth to Angel.

“Above the canoe were butterflies, large and white. I begged God to let Agnes rise. I willed it, certain God would feel my pain, strong as it was, and would listen, would let Agnes step out of the boat, floating like the moths and butterflies just above the water, and come towards us.”

This passage, in which Angel is willing God to bring back Agnes from the dead, illustrates that while the women are in harmony with nature, they are not in control of it. They cannot reverse the course of life and death, however much magic they have within them. Agnes will not rise like the butterflies. 

“And in time it would be an angry land. It would put an end to the plans for dams and drowned rivers. […] Then would come a flood of unplanned proportions that would suddenly rise up as high as the steering wheels of their machines. The Indian people would be happy with the damage, with the fact that water would do what it wanted and in its own way. What water didn’t accomplish, they would.”

This extract is one of many in the novel where Angel’s perspective telescopes forward to the future. Even before the reader hears about the dam-building activity, they know that the colonists’ war on nature will be futile. Rather than prioritizing suspense in the narrative, Hogan uses this passage to reveal the wisdom of the Native-American community. 

“This was why Dora-Rouge’s return to her land was not what she’d hoped or imagined. It was nothing like the place she remembered. She looked around. She said nothing. […] The despair was visible on her face. Her eyes constantly searched for something familiar that was not there [… ] Most of the trees had become nothing more than large mounds of sawdust.”

Dora-Rouge’s sense of estrangement from her native land is both sad in the present and ominous for the future. It suggests not only that the land of the Fat-Eaters was not what Dora-Rouge thought it would be, but that there has been a foreign imposition on a once-sacred place. The trees, now mounds of sawdust, are markers of the change, suggesting that a once beautiful, natural place has now become ugly and exploited.

“The devastation and ruin that had fallen over the land fell over the people, too. Most were too broken to fight the building of the dams, the moving of waters, and that perhaps had been the intention all along. But I could see Dora-Rouge thinking, wondering: how do conquered people get back their lives? […] Those who protested were the ones who could still believe they might survive as a people.”

The devastation of the resettled Native Americans, who have given up on themselves and their children following the loss of their land, is demonstrated in their apathy towards the building of the dams. Angel detects that it might have even been the motive of the authorities to try and break the people as much as they could. The extent to which Native Americans believe they can survive as a people is crucial to whether they will protest for their rights. 

“A redheaded woman with dark skin walked beside them. It was my mother. I knew it at once. I fell into a cold stillness made worse by the water’s temperature.”

The short, blunt sentences that announce Angel’s sighting of her mother contrast with the long, flowing sentiments of the rest of the novel and convey the coldness and shock that comes over her. She has just emerged from a lake of cold, dark water, and the sensation of seeing her mother for the first time is analogous to coming out of the water.

“Like Bush traveling north, I wanted a map, something fixed, a road in. I wanted to see what was between this woman and me, a landmark, a bond. I had imagined this meeting so many times, but none of them was like this. Any path between us had long since been closed. She was, as Bush said, a wall, a place to go with no foundation.”

Angel’s meeting with Hannah is both painful and anticlimactic. While Angel imagined many things and perhaps expected a sense of discovery or closure on meeting Hannah, she actually feels as lost and unmoored as ever as a result of the meeting. The already-closed path suggests that the meeting is too little, too late. 

“Death stood in Hannah’s eyes, small and forlorn. It didn’t look triumphant. Hannah was alive, but barely. Her eyes were already set, her breathing rougher. Even death didn’t want her, I could see. Maybe it, too, feared her.”

The idea of death fearing Hannah expresses the extent of the woman’s possession by uneasy spirits. Moreover, if death is often seen as mighty, it becomes small and forlorn in Hannah’s body because it is wrestling with demons that want to live.

“Standing before mirrors, people looked at themselves as if for the first time, and were disappointed at the lines of age, the marks and scars they’d never noticed or seen clearly before. I, too, saw myself in the light, my scars speaking again their language of wounds.”

This is a powerful description of the harsh cruelty of electric light, which reveals to the Fat-Eaters all the flaws in their faces. Though light is traditionally aligned with goodness, there is the sense that it can be unkind, whereas darkness can be flattering and empathetic. The question is, however, whether the light-given reflections are true. 

“One smart village of Crees to the east of us rejected electricity. They wanted to keep bodies and souls whole, they said. Some of the Inuits said if they had electricity then they’d have indoor toilets and then the warm buildings would thaw the frozen world, the ground of permafrost, and everything would fall into it.”

The Cree villagers’ reasons for rejecting electricity unite Native-American spiritual beliefs with some forward-thinking insight on the effect of warm buildings on snow and the flooding that will ensue. They describe a phenomenon akin to melting ice-caps and global warming. This is one of many passage where an old-world, Native perspective speaks to modern ecological arguments on protecting the environment from the worst ravages of human intervention.

“Hearing Tulik speak, Aurora began to make a fuss and Tulik lifted her from Dora-Rouge’s arms. As always when he held her, she became quiet. But I could see right away that this lost him points in the white men’s book. Tenderness was not a quality of strength to them. It was unmanly, an act they considered soft and unworthy.”

Angel here is aware of the white world’s rigid gender binaries, which seek to divorce masculinity from the quality of tenderness. The white men’s disdain of Tulik’s ability to nurture Aurora—a cipher of new life—relates to their dismissal of life itself in favor of the prospect of making money, regardless of ecological cost. 

“Maybe he thought it was a Molotov cocktail. ‘It’s only a soda,’ I said. But he opened it and began to drink it, looking at me. This disturbed me nearly as much as their […] intrusion […] when I understood that he was one of those who thought it all belonged to him.”

This passage describes how the young Caucasian dam worker seeks to gain control over Angel by intimidating her. At first, he makes her think she is under suspicion for filling a bottle with an explosive, but then he makes a point of opening the bottle and drinking the soda in front of her, as though she doesn’t have a right to her own possession. Angel is disturbed by the worker’s feeling of superiority and ownership over her.

“They were men who would reverse the world, change the direction of rivers, stop the cycle of life until everything was as backward as lies. Tulik would say that such men could not see all the way to the end of their actions. They were short sighted. They had no vision. They had no future within them, no past.’”

Angel reflects with horror on the Caucasian authorities’ attempts to control nature, so that everything was backwards and untrue. Tulik’s explanation that the men are shortsighted indicates how they can only see the present and the immediate future. Their lack of roots and connection with the earth means that they cannot draw upon the perspective of the past or the distant future when planning their interventions. 

“There are such cruel tricks I have wondered about in nature, the way a whale must surface to breathe in the presence of its waiting killers, the way the white tails of deer and rabbit are so easily seen as they run from danger. There is something, too, in some human beings that wants to die, that drives us to our own destruction. There is something that makes us pretend to be less than we are, less than the other creatures with their grace and dignity.”

Here, Hogan draws a parallel between the “cruel” deathward-leaning tricks of nature and the destructive side of human nature. Just as the rabbit’s white tail makes it visible to predators, human beings’ limitations and shortsightedness causes them to take actions that will be destructive to their own kind.