Things I Have Withheld
"Entrancing...Miller vividly depicts the ways colonialism, racism, homophobia, and privilege have shaped his life…Sharp as blades, [his] words cut to the core."
Publishers Weekly (starred review)
An AudioFile Best Audiobooks of the Week Selection
Shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction
A London Guardian Pick of Best Books of Summer
Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
A Bomb Magazine Pick
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.
Praise