Things I Have Withheld
Essays
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Fourteen “thoughtful and impassioned” autobiographical essays exploring race, sex, gender, belonging, and alienation by an award-winning author (Kirkus Reviews).
In a deeply moving, critical and lyrical collection of interconnected essays, award-winning writer 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, male, queer perspective. An almost disarmingly personal collection, Kei dissects his experiences in Jamaica and Britain, working as an artist and intellectual, making friends and lovers, discovering the possibilities of music and dance, 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.
Praise for Things I Have Withheld
Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction
BOMB Magazine’s Editor’s Choice
Best Book of 2021 at Slate and Buzzfeed
Times (UK), 16 best philosophy and ideas books 2021
“Miller gives a searing voice to ‘the things’ I have been trying so hard to write” in this entrancing collection. . . . Sharp as blades, Miller’s words cut to the core.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“There’s no didacticism or sermons here, merely curiosity and sometimes anger and a deep commitment to speaking the uncomfortable truths we’d rather not hear. A bold and daring collection.” —Buzzfeed
“This incisive collection of short essays serves as a tabernacle for stories untold, secrets, and reflections on race and sexuality. . . . 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 together with the likes of Safiya Sinclair, Oonya Kempadoo, and Colin Channer.” —Booklist
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
