The author’s abduction as a child remembered in poetry and a memoir
THE MANY HUNDREDS OF THE SCENT Poems
SHANE MCCRAE 97pp. Corsair. Paperback, £12.99.
PULLING THE CHARIOT OF THE SUN A memoir of a kidnapping
SHANE MCCRAE 272pp. Canongate. £16.99.
IONCE HEARD the forensic botanist Mark Watson, on Saturday Live (Radio 4), explaining how he helped solve a murder by working out how long a corpse had lain hidden in a hedgerow. Brambles, it turns out, grow the same amount every year; if you measure them carefully, you have a reliable historical record. They’re obstructive, thorny plants, too – a metaphor for the trickiness of memory; that feeling we often have that the past is there, but inaccessible, a bit like Sleeping Beauty, her palace life on pause behind a palisade of thorns.
Shane McCrae’s most recent collection of poems, The Many Hundreds of the Scent, begins:
Friend, I have turned the brambles back. No strangeness mars the path Now, friend. I’ve turned back even the strangeness that once made the path […] Amidst the orange Trees, their suspended flames, you’ll find A peaceful place, my memories of which I’ve Until now guarded by allowing dense Brambles to overgrow the only path to the orange Grove.
The brambles are both an obstacle, the things the poet has to get through in order to reach the “orange / Grove”, and the destination. McCrae is more interested in what blocks the path to memory than he is in memory itself; the brambles-as-explanation, not the crime they conceal.
In McCrae’s case, the crime is his kidnapping, aged three. He is mixed-race, with a Black father. His maternal grandparents were white supremacists who took him from his parents. This is the story explored in McCrae’s new memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun, and the exploration is characteristically digressive, less a narrative of time spent with his grandparents and more an investigation of the phenomenon of recall. The chapters have esoteric titles that lean on the interconnectedness of things from a child’s point-of-view: “My Grandmother the Sideways Rain”, “My Mother the [Honda] Civic”, “California the Death”, and so on. They span his whole early development, from infancy to late adolescence. And we are always on shifting ground, not just because new information continually troubles our understanding of his family arrangements, but because the writing itself is a thicket of snagging constructions:
I’ve only recently – yesterday – discovered that the story my mother and I were told about her early childhood, that my grandmother divorced my mother’s biological father when my mother was two, is untrue. Having seen the divorce decree … I know my mother was a week shy of ten months old when my grandmother divorced her father (just
