Soon after the accident, Jolie’s paternal grandmother, Agnes, didn’t think that Jolie’s mother was adequately caring for Jolie’s father. It is through these women that Jolie learned strength, and throughout the many trying times ahead, she carried with her this quality-the ability to find her way through, to learn the messy work of healing or compartmentalizing, and to move forward. And always, always in their glorious excess, they showed up. Jolie and her mother learn to resiliently carry on, and at the same time, still appreciate the magic and the glow that life can offer no matter how disembodied and difficult a time may be.Īmid the “white trash banality” of Jolie’s early years with race cars and beer-drinking men, her heroes became the “women who survived despite men’s absence.”īy the time I was five, I was surrounded almost entirely by resilient women … those lightning bugs fighting with persistent glow against the odds. This singular moment, tied to the trauma of her father’s accident, comes to symbolize much in Jolie’s journey. The bottom end of the bug continued to glow, and she felt a complicated mix of protest and appreciation. In her memory of the lightning bugs before her father’s accident, a boy that Jolie had a crush on ripped the glowing bulb from the insect’s body, and with a blade of grass, made a ring to slip on her finger. graduate and professor, she explains the “complex personhood” of poor, white America. One moment, as a daughter in the trenches of poverty, she describes Sunday mornings at her house with her father’s race car crew filling the living room to watch NASCAR, swear, and make lewd jokes.
Jolie’s writing elegantly maneuvers between the different worlds that make up her identity. He once raced stock cars and took Jolie to the circus, but now he was physically aggressive and in a wheelchair. Waking up from a coma with a traumatic brain injury, her father was greatly changed from the man he was before the accident. At the end of their driveway, where just days earlier Jolie played in the grass, her father was hit by a drunk driver. One evening, Jolie’s father returned home from a late-night work shift and took out the trash.
It is the fireflies Jolie recalls first when she thinks about her father’s accident. During summertime in a rural working-class Ohio village called Valley View, neighborhood children ran barefoot through unmown front lawns to catch fireflies. These memories may not make sense on their own, and they may seem disconnected from what actually happened.įor Raechel Anne Jolie, in her coming-of-age memoir Rust Belt Femme, the unlikely memory is of lightning bugs. The brain often holds onto distinct and unexpected images and memories at the time of traumatic events.
0 kommentar(er)
