Things I Have Withheld by Kei Miller (US Grove Atlantic September 14/UK Canongate, May 6)
Naledi Yaziyo, curator, Rofhiwa Book Café, Durham, North Carolina: “As a new bookstore that endeavors to capture, in its selection, the vastness of the Black imagination across geographies. Jamaican poet, novelist, and essayist, Kei Miller is the writer who came immediately to mind.
With Things I Have Withheld, Miller promises a lyrical collection of essays in which he ‘examines the experience of discrimination through silence,’ exploding the things that we do not say and testing the boundaries of what we can stand to hear. Drawing on his travels across the US, the UK, Jamaica and other places, Miller’s essays say something about the ways in which meaning, as well as our own positionality can shift as we travel through the world and encounter systemic violence.
A letter to James Baldwin forms the subject of a chapter that I am particularly excited about. Both Miller and Baldwin are known to be devastatingly concise and honest in their observations concerning race and racism. At a moment when many of the questions this country is grappling with confront the historical violences performed in the name of race, it is compelling to consider what Miller might have to share with Baldwin about where we are as a world. What might Miller say to Baldwin about all the lessons we have not learned despite his best efforts to teach us?” Read more.
Cultural Anthropology