THINGS I HAVE WITHHELD

Meditations on belonging, alienation, and the power of words.

In 15 thoughtful and impassioned essays, prizewinning Jamaican novelist, poet, and essayist Miller reflects on race, gender, family, language, and, most pointedly, the body: “these soft houses in which we live and in which we move and from which we can never migrate, except by dying.” As a queer Black man, Miller considers ways that bodies “can variously assume privilege or victimhood from their conflicting identities” and from the visceral reactions others have toward them. “Too often,” he writes, “the meaning that my black, male body produces is ‘guilty’ and ‘predator’ and ‘worthy of death’ ”—responses that he has encountered in the U.K., where he now lives and works as a university professor. But on visits to Kenya, Ethiopia, and Ghana, where he thinks his body “should make a kind of sense,” he is frustrated to find that “it doesn’t make as much sense as I would like.” In his home country of Jamaica, color—Black, White, and subtle gradations of brown—inflects daily life and self-perception. “When I talk about a place where our bodies make sense,” Miller writes, “what I really mean is a place where our bodies are not seen, where they raise no questions, where they are not worth pondering.” For Miller, though, race is not his only identifier: Immersed in the celebration of Carnival, he realizes that Jamaica is the place where he feels “most comfortably gay” because he knows “the language and the mannerisms of queerness. In Jamaica, I know how to dance. In Jamaica, I do not have to constantly translate my sexuality into mannerisms and speech and dances that sometimes feel to me, profoundly British.” Many of these powerful appraisals of the body come in the form of letters to James Baldwin and Kenyan writer Binyaranga Wainaina, but Miller also offers musings on his family’s secrets, portrayals of homeless gay and transgender boys, and questions of literary appropriation.

A spirited collection from a significant voice of both fiction and nonfiction.