Whose son am I? these poems ask. What do we do with “the book as I remember it”? In McCrae’s book, the split between black and white plays out internally. There is a sense of both belonging and being held at a distance, that the world in which you find love is also the one complicit in your destruction. McCrae insists on his longing for acknowledgment and redress in “Loving Ireland,” (here in full):
Loving my father I love Ireland
And having never been
to Ireland /And thinking my
name might be Scottish I / Love Scotland too
and having never been / To Scotland
thinking my name might be Irish
might /I want to go
and knowing or thinking I know /My family name is the name
Of the man who owned my family two hundred years ago
I want to go to where
his family came from want / The land to welcome me
more than I want
To go to Africa to find my tribe if my
Tribe has not been erased from my
Blood
I want Ireland to know
whose son I am /And that I am
also its son
The ruptured “And that I am” and “also its son” reflect the simple declarations McCrae makes throughout. The conflict of the speaker’s heritage comes across in his sensitivity to lacunae. Accountability and forgiveness must join hands as history swells beneath the personal veneer of these poems.
Forgiveness (of trauma, brutality, and rape) eventually survives; one always hears in the urgent repetition in his title the frantic entreaty, “Abraham, Abraham” to stay Abraham’s hand before the slaughter of Isaac—or the devastation implicit in Faulkner’s title, Absalom, Absalom! Not a redemptive forgiveness, not absolution, it is sometimes found in the unfolding of events:
That’s where the story is
The good that came of it