Things I Have Withheld , livre ebook

Kei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978 and has written several books across a range of genres. His 2014 poetry collection, The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion , won the Forward Prize for Best Collection; his 2017 novel, Augustown , won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, the Prix Les Afriques and the Prix Carbet de la Caraïbe et du Tout-Monde. In 2010, the Institute of Jamaica awarded him the Silver Musgrave medal for his contributions to Literature and in 2018 he was awarded the Anthony Sabga medal for Arts & Letters. Kei has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University and a PhD in English Literature from the University of Glasgow. He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow, Royal Holloway and Exeter. He was the 2019 Ida Beam Distinguished Visiting Professor to the University of Iowa and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. @keimiller
Also by Kei Miller
Fiction
Fear of Stones and Other Stories
The Same Earth
The Last Warner Woman
Augustown
Poetry
Kingdom of Empty Bellies
There Is an Anger that Moves
New Caribbean Poetry: An Anthology (ed.)
A Light Song of Light
The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion
In Nearby Bushes
Essays
Writing Down the Vision: Essays & Prophecies
 
The paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2022 by Canongate Books First published in Great Britain in 2021 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2021 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Kei Miller, 2021
The right of Kei Miller to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
‘Letters to James Baldwin’ was originally commissioned by Manchester Literature Festival. ‘The Buck, the Bacchanal, and Again, the Body’ and ‘The White Women and the Language of Bees’ previously appeared in PREE
Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for any errors or omissions and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 282 5 e ISBN 978 1 83885 280 1
For Karen Lloyd and Jaevion Nelson who not only say, but also do, the most important things . With all my admiration .
Forty years ago when I was born, the question of having to deal with what is unspoken by the subjugated, what is never said to the master . . . was a very remote possibility; it was in no one’s mind.
—James Baldwin, speaking at Cambridge University, 1965
CONTENTS
Considering the Silence (An Author’s Note)
1. Letters to James Baldwin
2. Mr Brown, Mrs White and Ms Black
3. The Old Black Woman Who Sat in the Corner
4. The Crimes That Haunt the Body
5. An Absence of Poets and Poodles
6. The Boys at the Harbour
7. The Buck, the Bacchanal, and Again, the Body
8. Our Worst Behaviour
9. There Are Truths Hidden in Our Bodies
10. The White Women and the Language of Bees
11. Dear Binyavanga, I Am Not Writing About Africa
12. Sometimes, the Only Way Down a Mountain is by Prayer
13. My Brother, My Brother
14. And This Is How We Die
Big Up
CONSIDERING THE SILENCE (AN AUTHOR’S NOTE)
Consider, for a moment,
the silence –
this terrible white
space;
all the things
we never say,
and why?

T his is what comes to mind when I consider the silence: how I saved my words for the stairwell right outside the flat I lived in at the time; how I would sit there many nights, a little shell-shocked, and mumbling to myself.
If that sounds a bit like madness, maybe it is because that is what it was. I had ended up in a bad relationship. It was never violent but always volatile. I could never predict what would set things off – what might produce the latest bout of rage. I felt ashamed as well, to be a man such as I was, such as I am – tall and black – and so fearful of a person I was supposed to feel safe with; afraid of doing the wrong thing, and especially afraid of saying the wrong thing. Instead, I saved my words for the stairwell – rehashing arguments to myself, trying to unravel them, to understand them, and wondering how I might say things better the next time.
I was often accused of being silent, which was fair. My silence was also a strategy – a way to survive. Whenever I risked words – however carefully, however softly, even if it was just to answer the innocuous question, ‘How are you feeling?’ – it could be met with such an explosive tantrum that I quickly learned to rarely take the risk. The specifics of that experience were new to me; I had never been in a relationship like it before. My reaction, however – the way I responded – was familiar. It was an old habit. Sitting on that stairwell at nights only emphasised what had always been true for me – that the moments when I am most in need of words are exactly the moments when I lose faith in them, and when I fall back into silence.
I suspect it is the same for a great many of us. We keep things to ourselves. We withhold them because of fear – because those things that we need to say, or acknowledge, or confess, or our own failings that we need to own up to – they can feel so important, it is hard to trust them to something so unsafe as words.
The essays that follow are not about the awful relationship, but they are about things I have withheld. The book’s title is one that I have borrowed from the poet, Dionne Brand – something she once said at the beginning of one of her own essays, and which I find myself pondering over and over, the way she connects her own body to the bodies of others and the silence between:

Some part of this text we are about to make is already written . . . for that I am a black woman speaking to a largely white audience is a major construction of the text. Blackness and Whiteness structure and mediate our interchanges – verbal, physical, sensual, political – they mediate them so that there are some things that I will say to you and some things that I won’t. And quite possibly the most important things will be the ones that I withhold.
Each of these essays is an act of faith, an attempt to put my trust in words again. They are attempts to offer, at long last, a clearer vocabulary to the things I only ever mumbled, at night, sitting there on the stairwell outside my home.
1
LETTERS TO JAMES BALDWIN

Dear James,
I wish I could call you Jimmy, the way that woman you described as handsome and so very clever – Toni Morrison – always called you Jimmy, which meant that she loved you, and you her, and that in the never-ending Christmas of your meetings (this is how she described it) you sat, both of you, in the same room, the ceiling tall enough to contain your great minds, drinking wine or bourbon and talking easily about this world. I wish that I could sit with you now and talk that easy talk about difficult things – the kind of talk that includes our shoulders, and our hands on each other’s shoulders, the way we touch each other, unconsciously, as if to remind ourselves of our bodies and that we exist in this world. But here is the rub, this awful fact – that you do not exist in this world, not any more – at least, not your body; only your body of work, and I can only write back to that and to the name that attached itself to those words rather than the name that attached itself to your familiar body. Not Jimmy then, but James – a single syllable that conjures up kings and Bibles – appropriate in its own way, except it does not conjure your shoulders or your hands which I imagine as warm and which I never knew but somehow miss, and I am writing to you now with the hope that you might help me.
Dear James,
I read your review of Langston Hughes. ‘Every time I read [him],’ you wrote, ‘I am amazed all over again by his genuine gifts – and depressed that he has done so little with them.’ ‘The poetic trick,’ you went on to say, moving from review to sermon (because there was never a pulpit you could refuse, and never a pulpit you did not earn), ‘is to be within the experience and outside it at the same time.’ You thought Hughes failed because he could only ever hold the experience outside, and you understood the why of this – the experiences that we must hold outside ourselves if we are ever to write them and not be broken by them.
But you were never able to do that. You were never able to write anything that did not implicate your own body.
James, here is a truth: I do not think much of your poems, and I suspect you will not think that a cruel way to start this exchange, and that it says more about me and my insecurities that I must begin in this way of making you fallible, approachable. To read you as I have been reading you all these years is, quite frankly, to encounter majesty – something enthroned, something that can only be approached on one’s knees, with one’s eyes trained to the floor. I know that image would bring you no comfort or pride, to have a black man so stooped, so lowered before you. Forgive me then my truth. I read Jimmy’s Blues and was struck by your genuine gifts and how little you had made of them.
That isn’t really fair. I know. You had never tried seriously to be a poet. Jimmy’s Blues was more our collection than it was yours – just our own desperate attempt to read something new from you, to find once again in your words some shard of beauty and truth. So we gathered together the few poems you had written – one here, one there – and put them together in a book you had never imagined. And the thing is this: the beauty was there, the elegance of thought we have come to expect from you – but the beauty was cumulative, a result of the whole poem and not of its individual parts. You were always poetic but you weren’t quite a po