Writing professors Shane McCrae and Timothy Donnelly discuss McCrae’s new memoir, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping. Introduced by Sarah Cole, Interim Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts and Parr Professor of English and Comparative Literature.
About the Book
“When Shane McCrae was three years old, his grandparents kidnapped him and took him to suburban Texas. His mom was white and his dad was Black, and to hide his Blackness from him, his maternal grandparents stole him from his father. In the years that followed, they manipulated and controlled him, refusing to acknowledge his heritage — all the while believing they were doing what was best for him.
For their own safety and to ensure the kidnapping remained a success, Shane’s grandparents had to make sure that he never knew the full story, so he was raised to participate in his own disappearance. But despite elaborate fabrications and unreliable memories, Shane begins to reconstruct his own story and to forge his own identity. Gradually, the truth unveils itself, and with the truth, comes a path to reuniting with his father and finding his own place in the world.
A revelatory account of a singularly American childhood that hauntingly echoes the larger story of race in our country, Pulling the Chariot of the Sun is written with the virtuosity and heart of one of the finest poets writing today. And it is also a powerful reflection on what is broken in America — but also what might heal and make it whole again.”
Books available for purchase by Book Culture.
Co-presented by Book Culture; the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race; the Creative Writing Program, Barnard College; the Division of Narrative Medicine, Columbia Vagelos College of Physicians & Surgeons; the Institute for Research in African-American Studies; and the School of the Arts Writing Program.
About Complex Issues
Complex Issues explores difference, visibility, and representation through recent work by faculty of Columbia University and Columbia University School of the Arts in particular. Conversations will invite challenging questions of racial, ethnic, gender, economic, sexual, religious, and cultural complexity, and how they are articulated across disciplines and genre today.
