07 Sep / Things I Have Withheld by Kei Miller [in Shelf Awareness]
Literary chameleon Kei Miller (The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion) has produced award-winning short stories, novels, poetry, and essays. Things I Have Withheld is arguably his most stupendous title to date. These 14 exquisitely vulnerable essays explore his Jamaican heritage, his British residency, his worldwide travels, particularly through African nations. Divulging searing conversations he’s self-silenced, Miller – a globe-trotting gay Black man – produces a magnificent examination of race, sexuality, and identity. “The moments when I am most in need of words are exactly the moments when I lose faith in them,” Miller writes in his introduction. Reading him is an act of empathy: “I suspect it is the same for a great many of us. We keep things to ourselves. We withhold them because of fear.”
Miller begins with a call for assistance from James Baldwin – “I do not think much of your poetry, but I think everything of your essays and it is essays that I have been trying to write but have stopped and need your help” – especially regarding confrontations he’s repeatedly eschewed about careless racism. In the standout “Mr Brown, Mrs White and Ms Black,” three Jamaican neighbors anticipating an upcoming party contemplate experiences based solely on their skin color. Other essays reveal family secrets about ancestry; crimes against Black bodies and women’s bodies; presumptions outsiders vocalize to and about Jamaicans; the fine line between homophobia and belonging; white entitlement and appropriation (Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea is unnamed but unmistakably exposed). Miller considers his insider/outsider experience of traveling in Kenya (“return is a much harder thing than I had imagined it to be,” he muses in a letter to the late Kenyan author Binyavanga Wainaina), Ethiopia (“You people should be grateful that people like me visit your country!” a white tourist yells), and Ghana (“I am disappointed in the white woman who felt a slave dungeon was a great backdrop for a picture of her wearing her biggest smile”). Miller’s closing, “And This Is How We Die,” is a stunning eulogy to Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd.
As a gay Black man from a Caribbean island working as “a full-fledged professor” in Britain – a historical center of colonialism – and producing award-winning titles while traveling the world, Miller by necessity has become especially facile in code-switching. His written language effortlessly adapts as he slips from his “own Jamaican patois” to adaptations and mannerisms necessary to deal with various locations, situations, communities. What he produces from such experiences is a wrenching record – gorgeously encapsulated – of what he’s had to withhold to survive. Filling the silence proves lifesaving.
Shelf Talker: Jamaican-born, globetrotting writer/poet Kei Miller produces a stupendous collection of exquisite, revealing essays confronting race, sexuality, and identity.
Review: Shelf Awareness Pro, August 26, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2021