Things I Have Withheld

In this moving and lyrical collection of essays, the award-winning poet and novelist 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 Derek Walcott, 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.

General Impressions

I picked up "Things I Have Withheld" before bed with every intention of reading half, perhaps one chapter before going to sleep and ended up staying awake till 6 am and hugging this book to my chest.

This was without a doubt one of the best, most impactful books I have ever read and I don't know what else to say about it other than everyone should read it.

It's a book full of considerations about race, colourism, privilege, gender, queerness and how all of those intersect into a complicated puzzle that depending on the situation makes you an oppressor or a victim of the world we inherited and are painfully trying to change, if often without realizing how it will affect others. That was why the author putting himself in all kinds of shoes across his essays was what made this book the masterpiece it is.

Thank you so much to Canongate for gifting me a copy.

Rating: 5/5