Things I Have Withheld

"The essay form is having a moment right now, which is all to the good. I can imagine a few years ago, this book probably wouldn’t have been on the shortlist because somebody would have said, ‘It’s a book of essays, it doesn’t count.’ It’s interesting that the essay form has got this legitimacy now. Kei Miller is a poet and a novelist. Here, for the first time, he’s writing in a nonfiction voice. He’s of Jamaican origin, he’s Black and queer . He is writing about his own experience, about speaking and not speaking. He’s constantly making the point that he often doesn’t have to speak in certain contexts because his body does it for him. He talks about going to a party or a shop in London and people automatically being slightly afraid because he’s big and he’s Black. It’s how people read him. His body says all sorts of things that he doesn’t authorize, they just happen. He’s trying to talk about the difficult things. It’s a very knowing collection and he starts off with a letter to James Baldwin , the late African American gay writer. He’s measuring how much has changed between his time and ours, and the answer is not a great deal. “I’m always really interested in what a book’s aftereffects are on me…I think that’s quite a good reference point” Most of it is set in Jamaica. There’s one wonderful essay which is about a dinner party. There’s a Black person, a person of Indian heritage and a white woman. He goes into what they’re thinking, their interior lives, all things that can’t be said out loud. On the surface it’s this wonderfully liberal get-together of people, it’s all absolutely fine, but the internal voices are not okay. They’re the things that we daren’t say; that we don’t want to say. He’s interested in the subtext, what is not said and the things that can’t be said but are always being said. Sometimes he does say things that I understand have got him into trouble. There’s one essay which is about white Jamaican women speaking for the Jamaican experience. He asks, ‘Can you do that? Who speaks for Jamaica?’ It’s an uncomfortable book to read. It’s one of those books that makes you feel slightly discomfited, but because he is such a beautiful writer, a poet, he does have this lyrical voice. That makes it extremely pleasurable as well, which in itself makes one feel a little bit anxious, getting pleasure from such an uncomfortable subject."