Things I Have Withheld

Kei Miller

Canongate

A vacuum of silence can be unbearably loud. In the essay collection, Things I Have Withheld, Kei Miller lifts up a heavy bell jar of long-withheld, suppressed quiet, and out pours a rush of meticulously crafted essays which dance between poetry, memoir and fiction. Miller is best known as a poet. He’s also best known as a Black, queer, Jamaician writer, and in these essays, the simultanous silence and loudness of living with these identities is teased apart. 

‘My silence was a strategy—a way to survive,’ writes Miller. Across fifteen essays, the weight of silence is considered: the responsibility of words, the damage of silence, the social pact some of us make to withhold our truths. What does it mean to transgress these social codes? What is the cost of breaking a silence? Recounting daily incidents of racism—including having to verify his identity as a professor to campus security—Miller probes why he often holds his tongue: for safety, for security, for avoiding the discomfort of naming the violence he experiences every day. 

In the essay, ‘The White Women and the Language Of Bees’, Miller listens to white women writers as they confide to him their anger at the Jamaican literary community for criticism of their privilege. In another essay, ‘The Old Black Woman Who Sat In The Corner’, Miller records his grandmother as she unburdens herself of family secrets before her death. Positioned as the listener within the essays, Miller’s voice is patient. He often comes across as passive, seemingly a vessel presenting these stories. But rather than playing the powerful priest at confession, Miller’s narrative placement is often the consequence of unequal power dynamics as a Black man forced into the role of silent confidante. 

In other essays, Miller is the active speaker. James Baldwin is the collection’s most significant influence, and his presence looms large over Miller’s writing—quite literally, as entire essays are structured as letters to the great American writer. Miller describes to Baldwin the state of being racialised as Black in the USA, the state of writing for white readers, the state of self-preservation through silence. Miller presents no neat solutions to these states of being. Instead, he evokes the interiority of fictional characters. In the sublime essay, ‘Mr. Brown, Mrs. White, and Ms. Black’, each of the titular characters stands in for different shades of race in Jamaica. Language, class, gender and hierarchy are not so much described but represented through ventriloquism in this essay which is split into three short stories. 

Giving voice to the unsaid is the throughline which runs through Things I Have Withheld. Listening to ‘the sour aftertaste of history’, speaking through real and fictitious characters, writing to a dead author—these are Miller’s methods to combat the madness of deadly, deafening silence.

—Katie Goh