Fight Night

The trip to Fresno, fraught with humorous and emotional incidents, creates closure for Grandma in the context of The Good Fight: Finding Joy. Her desire to visit her nephews reconnects her to her deceased family members and reminds her of her own mortality. However, instead of being a morbid preoccupation, it is a joyful occasion. Grandma is reminded of all that she has inherited and what she is passing along to Swiv. As Grandma very clearly claims, “Joy […] is resistance” (197). Just as Swiv’s act of writing and recording everything is its own form of resistance, Grandma’s insistence that life is joyful despite its travails and traumas signifies her defiance of the death that has dominated her experience of living. She continues to assert that those with fire inside them are capable of just about anything. The fire becomes a link that connects the family’s matrilineal line, as Grandma identifies the fire in both Swiv and her mother. Swiv decides to pass on this legacy to her younger sibling, reminding Gord that “there’s a fire inside [them] that [they] have to keep burning” (129). These fires signify not only the desire to stay alive despite the odds but also an aspiration to salvage the family legacy. Despite the history of suicides and repression, these women will keep the hearth fires burning.

Swiv, though she has the authority to tell the story, is also blocked—quite literally: “This morning I was constipated” (125). Symbolic of writer’s block, the constipation also signals an inability to process the emotions and memories of the adults around her. Again, her liminal status—in between childhood and adulthood—limits her understanding of the past and current events (her surprise that Grandma’s nephews are not children gestures toward her limitations). She is also consumed with anxiety regarding the trip. She worries that Mom cannot take care of Gord properly and that she herself cannot take care of Grandma properly. She worries about the status of the plane, which is delayed by mechanical difficulties, and this anxiety finally propels Swiv to ask Grandma her longstanding questions about Mom.

Thus, this section also contains the longest exposition about Mom from Grandma. Swiv wants to know “The Truth about Mom” (137), and Grandma unfolds a narrative that speaks to grief, fear, and exploitation. Mom survived not only the suicides of her father and sister but also the experience on the movie set in Albania, where she was hunted by dogs and deprived of food. She was also asked to participate in scenes that were dangerous and even life-threatening. Grandma finally reveals all this because Swiv herself has fallen prey to an anxiety that she cannot dispel: “I told Grandma I was scared she was going to die and that Mom was insane and would kill herself and that Gord would die and Dad would be killed by fascists and never come home and I’d be alone forever” (137). Swiv’s anxiety is part of her generational inheritance, but so is her instinct to fight. As Grandma points out, “We’re all fighters. We’re a family of fighters” (141). What Grandma means, however, is more elusive; it is not simple enough to say that Swiv fights her teachers and Grandma stands up to authority. Rather, the family fights against a history of trauma and mental illness, reinforcing the theme of Trauma and Triumph: Generational Inheritance. They must always be vigilant against the forces that gather in their own minds.

Grandma reveals Mom’s ordeals in an entire chapter that could be termed a Shakespearean monologue. Like Macbeth lamenting his desire for power or Hamlet waxing poetic about the nature of death—indeed, both contemplate suicide in their own ways—Grandma unleashes a sustained narrative about what happens when people question their own existence. This parallel elevates the family’s story to heroic levels, championing the efforts made by ordinary people to survive. She ends by telling Swiv, “There are few losses in life that can bring a person to her knees…have mercy on our souls” (161). This foreshadows the final line of the book after Swiv has experienced her first great loss.