Things I Have Withheld

Written by Kei Miller

Narrated by Kei Miller

Kei Miller explores the silence in which so many important things are kept. He examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it: to risk words, to risk truths. And he considers the histories our bodies
inherit—the crimes that haunt them, and how meaning can shift as we move throughout the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood.

Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Liam Neeson, Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, white women’s tears, questions of aesthetics and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice.

Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why—our actions, defence mechanisms, imaginations and interactions—and those of the world around us.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Sep 14, 2021
• ISBN: 9781705042267

Kei Miller

Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978 and has written several books across a range of genres. His 2014 collection, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, won the Forward Prize for Best Collection while his 2017 Novel, Augustown, won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Prix Les Afriques, and the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde. He is also an award-winning essayist. In 2010, the Institute of Jamaica awarded him the Silver Musgrave medal for his contributions to Literature and in 2018 he was awarded the Anthony Sabga medal for Arts & Letters. Kei has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow. He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow, Royal Holloway and Exeter. He is the 2019 Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor to the University of Iowa and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Reviews for Things I Have Withheld

[garfield linton · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The experiences expressed within the text were personal. Most of them. At least for me. And so, I could relate, see myself or parallels to mine or those close to me within the stories.

[froxgirl · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Each one of these remarkable essays is a gem. The ones written to the spirit of James Baldwin (including a yearning to be in the number who were allowed to call him "Jimmy") are truly heartfelt and powerful. The author's perspective as a Jamaican is incredibly valuable, as he shares the culture of Carnival in his home country and in Trinidad. His vivid descriptions of his journeys to Ghana and Nigeria, and what he discovers as a Black man in African countries is truly revelatory to him and to the reader. The most touching and tragic essays deal with his Haitian family roots and with his encounters with the gay young men, the "battymen" of Kingston Harbor, and how he sees them through the lens of a gay man who lives in England and in America without being targeted as frequently for violence, nor having to sell himself. Highly recommended for all that can be learned, the beauty of the sentences, and the honesty of the narrative.Quotes: “Race and ethnicity are not the same things. Ethnicity is what is in your actual DNA, your genes, your ancestry. Race is how society constructs you.”“How strange it is that the feeling of being out of body is always felt inside the body.”“Here in Ghana, it is the harmattan – a season I have never felt or witnessed before. It is as if a huge thunderstorm is building, except there is no moisture. What I mistook as fog, I understand now is the tiniest particle of the Sahara Desert.”“Can I really be a brother in this place if I do not speak a language from here – or if I can only speak to my brothers in the language that separated us from each other?”