Book Review: Pulling the Chariot of the Sun
Daniel C. Granville provides thorough and engaging insight.
A review of Shaun McCrae’s Pulling the Chariot of the Sun. A story of race, kidnapping, memory, learning and the search for meaning.
By Daniel C. Granville
Shane McCrae's memoir Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping begins its tale with the poet invoking the memory of rain falling sideways. While such an image appears mundane, given the subtitle of his book and the narrative one anticipates ahead, this focus on mundanity and, chiefly, the instability of memory and the recursion it engenders is the central rhetorical device of his work.
In 255 pages, McCrae's Telemachian journey of division from his African-American roots and inculcation into the white supremacist milieu of his white Texan grandparents makes for a tale that, by the register of its mundane moments, measures the resilience that McCrae's search for meaning requires. In fact, one of the most distinctive facets of McCrae's writing here is its preoccupation with the relativity of memory and its contiguity with fantasy. Whereas Proustian memory is an ouroboros of recursion and Knausgaardian memory is the pas-des-deux of an enfant terrible within a deeply concerned middle-aged man, McCrae's prose posits a memory and then automatically corrects or seeks to cancel any assertion of its veracity. At first, this proves frustrating to the reader coming to this memoir with the assumption that its narrator, by dint of being the narrator, assumes from the first and maintains constantly the supremacy of narrative voice by being the only one to speak; in fact, the reader seeking a wholesale repudiation of the monstrous actions of his grandparents, as if there were caricatures of Dickensian child abuse, is instead frustrated by McCrae's more subtle project.
For those who have suffered great evil at the hands of family members, one can imagine an internalised pressure to present an image of Joseph Campbell-inspired superheroics, which neatly confines the bad actors to the label of their villainy. It is undeniable that McCrae's grandparents were kidnappers. It is undeniable that their indoctrination of their grandson into the spurious fantasies of white supremacy constitutes racist child abuse. It is undeniable that McCrae's felicity with words and their mercurial properties is not only an aesthetic project to reclaim the power to create one's own truth out of the fictions of the past, but also an active construction of his identity and relation to African-American conceptions of Blackness.
“What is apparent from the beginning of "Chariot of the Sun" is McCrae's narrative inventiveness..”
What is apparent from the beginning of "Chariot of the Sun" is McCrae's narrative inventiveness, a trait which he shares with his white grandmother; as such, the irony that exists within the tragedy of his long kidnapping is a theme that becomes more and more apparent as one reads on. This too is part of what measures his resilience, and rather than constructing a simply triumphalist narrative of victorious reconnection with Black American culture over the banality of his white supremacist upbringing, he shows instead how co-constitutive each sphere of American political, social, and racial life is.
"The final test of a kidnapping's success is whether the kidnapped child, a teenager now, a thirteen-year-old-boy, turns fourteen while he's away from his kidnappers, living with his mother for the first time since he was kidnapped, the final test of a kidnapping's success is whether the kidnapped child protects his kidnappers after he leaves them. Perhaps one first assumes that protecting his kidnappers means not revealing the fact of his kidnapping to anyone not involved in his kidnapping - and this assumption is, of course, correct, but if the kidnapped child must consciously choose not to reveal the fact of his kidnapping, the kidnapping has already failed. The kidnapped child must first and above all protect his kidnappers from himself - it must not occur to him to tell anyone he was kidnapped, and so it must not occur to him that he was kidnapped. If the absence of the person from whom the child was kidnapped must be explained it's best to tell the child the person from whom he was kidnapped chose, and continues to choose, to abandon the child. My grandparents didn't teach me to hate my father to make his absence easier for me to bear. They taught me to hate my father to make his absence safe for them."
I quote the above passage in order to show McCrae's diligence in writing as exemplary of his survival. Where the memoir reads at times somewhat like a court deposition, somewhat like a private confession, is a testament to the intelligence of its writer, who at all turns challenges the reader to move beyond the shock of the subject being discussed and into understanding the mechanics of how such behaviour, such long and devious crime, could happen to him, as it does to thousands of children across the United States. Ultimately, McCrae's narrative is triumphant because the form in which he chooses to tell it, admitting freely to the instability of every element of its memorial construction, induces the reader to contemplate how survival in the face of such odds could be as equally mundane as the system of terror constructed around him.
An intelligent read.