“What is remembering if not giving each bloody knife a body?”, writes American poet and Guggenheim fellow Shane McCrae. This is one of many powerfully visceral ruminations on memory in his new book billed as a “memoir of a kidnapping”. But this is not a memoir in the traditional sense. It’s more a transcript of recounting memories, sitting somewhere between diary and epic poem.
McCrae was kidnapped from his Black father, aged three, by his maternal white supremacist grandparents, who in their youth, he says, looked like Elizabeth Taylor and George Clooney. They lied to him and physically abused him, and it’s this, not necessarily the motivations behind the kidnapping, that McCrae unravels poetically.
The event of the kidnapping is used mostly as an epoch. “Before I was kidnapped” or “after I was kidnapped” are prefixes to anecdotes – a trip to the fabric store with his grandmother; skateboarding with friends; the time he snuck out of and broke into his friend’s house, his brief stint of living with his mother as a teen.
There are some facts of the kidnapping that McCrae reveals, though. His grandparents had told his father they wanted to take him away for the weekend but never returned him (his parents had split up). They then told McCrae’s mother (their daughter) that she’d never see him again if she revealed their whereabouts. However, they told McCrae a different story – that his father had abandoned him, and that his Black family were criminals, who one year “stole his Christmas presents”. The grandparents tried to divert McCrae away from anything “Black”, and thus himself, and throughout the book he tries to separate fact and reality from delusion and deception.
McCrae is an unreliable narrator and turns unreliability into technique. The shaky and slippery nature of memory becomes the main character here. If McCrae doesn’t remember something, he lets us know. It works to emphasise the inability to articulate trauma as a child (“I don’t remember ever talking to anyone about my grandfather hitting me”), or how youth can disable someone from bearing witness to their own life (“I don’t remember anything about the visit except near the end of it, maybe just before she drove away”).
In this recollection and reconstruction of the self, McCrae takes us down his rabbit holes through perpetual backtracking and reiteration, as a means of rehabilitating his identity amid the violence and cruelty he endured. It brings the reader closer to the narrator, but not necessarily the narrative. He circles around trivial details: was the tricycle red? Did I turn left or right? Was I 17 or 18? These endless queries overpopulate.
The abundance of repetition that often works so powerfully in poetry feels less triumphant here: “My grandfather and I stopped at the intersection. My grandfather stopped at the intersection, checked, he must have checked, for approaching traffic.” Prose physically lacks the air of a poem, where repetition can intensify impact or build momentum. It’s clear what McCrae is trying to do – illustrate the undoing of repression and the labour of reminiscence, but it lugs.
Still, there is value in the same tale being told again and again when new details surface, such as when McCrae recalls the story of reconnecting with his father. There’s value in the book’s intentional haziness. Its honesty and integrity honour the fallacy of memory. Traditional memoirs might feel “honest” because of their clarity, but a rehearsed fiction can sound like honesty too. McCrae’s work is experimental because it is so transparent. He doesn’t always deliver a body to a bloody knife; sometimes it’s a limb, or a memory, or just a question. But his moments of lucidity are striking. Lines such as “The only thing I could trust was my own fear” and “I am not the story I was told” evoke indelible feelings.
• Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping by Shane McCrae is published by Canongate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
