Things I Have Withheld, Kei Miller
Things I Have Withheld, Kei Miller
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Things I Have Withheld

Author: Kei Miller

Narrator: Kei Miller

Unabridged: 7 hr 25 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 09/14/2021


Synopsis

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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by BookOfCinz on March 04, 2023

This is what I call a brilliant collection of essays! This be read and studied widely! Brilliant! In Kei Miller’s long-awaited collection of essays Things I Have Withheld, he exams in the author note, silence, his body and how it is viewed by others. This is examination is continued throughout t......more

Goodreads review by 2TReads on July 06, 2021

"We write because there are always things we have withheld. We die because things have been withheld from us, which is to say, respect; which is to say, dignity; which is to say, love." -from the essay This Is How We Die What will it take for the uncomfortable questions to be asked, for the true, raw......more

Goodreads review by Nicole on March 18, 2025

2025 review: reread as our inaugural selection for the DEI bookclub I started at work. My review is the same - powerful. 2024 review: This is my first encounter with Kei Miller, but hopefully not the last, as even though this is not a book of his poems, it certainly has a lyrical quality. This is a......more

Goodreads review by Shayne on February 06, 2022

So this goes straight on to the favourites shelf. I have to be honest this type of literature is not usually for me - I tend to find myself steering well clear of a writer who publishes a collection of essays, short stories and the like. More often than not, I find that this type of work will usuall......more

Goodreads review by Karen_RunwrightReads on June 22, 2023

This is a stunning collection of reflections from a profound thinker. In these essays, the reader accompanies Kei Miller, a Black Jamaican man who lives and teaches in the UK, on his travels back to Jamaica, to Trinidad, Nairobi, Ethiopia and Kenya and experience with him attempted robbery, pilgrima......more