Things I have withheld Essays

Kei Miller

Book - 2021

"In this moving, critical, and lyrical collection of essays, by the acclaimed Forward Prize winner, Kei Miller explores the silences in which so many important things are kept. Miller examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it-to risk words, to risk truth; and through the body and the histories those bodies inherit-the crimes that haunt them, and how the meanings of our bodies can shift as we move through the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood. Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, questions of aesthetics, and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice from a black, ma...le, queer perspective. Through a disarmingly personal lens, this collection is an account of his experiences in Jamaica and Britain, working as an artist and intellectual, making friends and lovers, discovering the possibilities of music and dance, of literary criticism, culture, and storytelling. With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels, Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement: a work of innovation and beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why-our actions, defense mechanisms, imaginations, and interactions-and those of the world around us"--

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Subjects
Genres
Essays
Published
New York : Grove Press 2021.
Language
English
Main Author
Kei Miller (author)
Edition
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition
Item Description
First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Canongate Books Ltd.
Physical Description
xv, 208 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780802158956
  • Considering the Silence (An Author's Note)
  • 1. Letters to James Baldwin
  • 2. Mr Brown, Mrs White and Ms Black
  • 3. The Old Black Woman Who Sat in the Corner
  • 4. The Crimes That Haunt the Body
  • 5. An Absence of Poets and Poodles
  • 6. The Boys at the Harbour
  • 7. The Buck, the Bacchanal, and Again, the Body
  • 8. Our Worst Behaviour
  • 9. There Are Truths Hidden in Our Bodies
  • 10. The White Women and the Language of Bees
  • 11. Dear Binyavanga, I Am Not Writing About Africa
  • 12. Sometimes, the Only Way Down a Mountain is by Prayer
  • 13. My Brother, My Brother
  • 14. And This Is How We Die
  • Big Up
Review by Booklist Review

As an acclaimed poet and novelist, Miller (Augustown, 2017) has mined the history of his native Jamaica. This incisive collection of short essays serves as a tabernacle for stories untold, secrets, and reflections on race and sexuality. In "The Crimes That Haunt the Body," Miller confronts the memory of a conversation with his sister from years ago, in which he failed to understand why she refused to walk a mere 10 minutes alone at night: "there were things in this world that I could never fully understand because of my body." "The Buck, the Bacchanal, and Again, the Body" situates creatures from Caribbean folklore among the revelries of carnivals; "There is a feeling in the country called Carnival that a new kind of space exists, and the space is a generous one." Immediately arresting and consistently poignant, Miller's essays engage with the urgency of gripping fiction and the authenticity of stunning poetry. An important voice of the Caribbean, who should be read with the likes of Safiya Sinclair, Oonya Kempadoo, and Colin Channer.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Jamaican poet and novelist Miller (Augustown) gives a searing voice to "the things I have been trying so hard to write" in this entrancing collection. In 14 essays that code-switch between personas and move from the incisive language of a university professor to Jamaican patois, he vividly depicts the ways colonialism, racism, homophobia, and privilege have shaped his life. As he writes in a letter addressed to the late James Baldwin, "there is little between... the set of circumstances you wrote of, and the set of circumstances we live in now." In "Mr Brown, Mrs White and Ms Black," a modern-day parable about the nuances of race, he chalks ethnicity up to being "not so much what you are, as... what people have decided you are." In "My Brother, My Brother," he witnesses the clash of whiteness and "brudda"-hood as a tourist poses for a photo in a historic slave dungeon in Ghana, while "The Boys at the Harbour" offers a glimpse of the struggles Jamaica's gay youth face and "this identity that has left so many of them homeless." Closing with another letter addressing Baldwin, Miller brings into devastating clarity the dangers confronting Black people in visualizing the final moments of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd. Sharp as blades, Miller's words cut to the core. Agent: Alice Whitwham, the Cheney Agency. (Sept.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

In this collection of interconnected memoiristic essays by poet and novelist Miller (The Cartographer Tries To Map a Way to Zion), the writer's poetic brilliance immediately awes. He folds readers into the loud silence of the blank page, a paradoxical space of whiteness that can be both an invitation and a systemic, structural force that has stifled the voices of people of color for far too long. Miller is fearless, often invoking moments of diaristic honesty without ever sacrificing or shying away from critical commentary. The essays take readers to Miller's native Jamaica as he reflects on life in Kingston; to Trinidad, where he observes Carnival; to the United Kingdom and the United States, where he teaches writing. Miller excels at writing words that resonate with readers, making them feel able to join him in conversation and to truly listen to the voices meeting them sometimes shyly, sometimes boldly on the page. After reading, one hopes that we will change dominant narratives about certain stories and bodies. VERDICT With Miller's insight and verve in each essay in this rich collection, this unputdownable book will stay with readers long after they've finished.--Emily Bowles, Lawrence Univ., WI

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Meditations on belonging, alienation, and the power of words. In 15 thoughtful and impassioned essays, prizewinning Jamaican novelist, poet, and essayist Miller reflects on race, gender, family, language, and, most pointedly, the body: "these soft houses in which we live and in which we move and from which we can never migrate, except by dying." As a queer Black man, Miller considers ways that bodies "can variously assume privilege or victimhood from their conflicting identities" and from the visceral reactions others have toward them. "Too often," he writes, "the meaning that my black, male body produces is 'guilty' and 'predator' and 'worthy of death' "--responses that he has encountered in the U.K., where he now lives and works as a university professor. But on visits to Kenya, Ethiopia, and Ghana, where he thinks his body "should make a kind of sense," he is frustrated to find that "it doesn't make as much sense as I would like." In his home country of Jamaica, color--Black, White, and subtle gradations of brown--inflects daily life and self-perception. "When I talk about a place where our bodies make sense," Miller writes, "what I really mean is a place where our bodies are not seen, where they raise no questions, where they are not worth pondering." For Miller, though, race is not his only identifier: Immersed in the celebration of Carnival, he realizes that Jamaica is the place where he feels "most comfortably gay" because he knows "the language and the mannerisms of queerness. In Jamaica, I know how to dance. In Jamaica, I do not have to constantly translate my sexuality into mannerisms and speech and dances that sometimes feel to me, profoundly British." Many of these powerful appraisals of the body come in the form of letters to James Baldwin and Kenyan writer Binyaranga Wainaina, but Miller also offers musings on his family's secrets, portrayals of homeless gay and transgender boys, and questions of literary appropriation. A spirited collection from a significant voice of both fiction and nonfiction. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.