Q&A with Kei Miller
"I’ve always been secretly more drawn to the essay than the other genres I write in."
The Orwell Prizes for Political Writing and Political Fiction 2022 shortlists highlight the finest politically engaged books published in 2021. Throughout the Orwell Festival we’ve been sharing new writing and insights from this year’s finalists. To see the full lists, visit our website here. The winners will be announced on Thursday 14th July at the Prize Ceremony at Conway Hall, London.
Kei Miller is a writer who ranges across genres - from his 2014 poetry collection The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion, winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection, to his 2017 novel Augustown, which won the Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. We talked to Kei, who is currently in the US, about his essay collection Things I Have Withheld, a finalist for The Orwell Prize for Political Writing.
Things I Have Withheld is a book about silence - why we seek it and what it costs. Can you say when you first started thinking about silence in this way? How did the collection come together?
It’s not always easy for me to trace the seed of an idea; by the time you’re preoccupied with the thought, so many little things have fed into it. Certainly the Dionne Brand quote that becomes an epigraph was one of the first things – this idea that in many conversations she would always withhold the most important things. That resonated with me profoundly. I recognized myself, what had become a habit in me, and not always for the best. For years then that became a preoccupation – not just recognizing the many times I’d fall back into silence, but asking myself in each of those moments – why are you being quiet? What are you withholding? And why? The essays spring out of these seemingly simple questions.
You describe the book very personally - as a journey with your own body, and an effort to regain your own trust in words. Looking back, where has that journey taken you? How have you found its reception?
I’ll answer that in reverse order: I’ve been overwhelmed by the reception, even a little scared by it to be perfectly honest. It’s such a personal book and I don’t think I appreciated all that I was revealing when writing it. Now as for the journey that it’s taken me on – I’m too much on that journey still to think about any destination that I have arrived at, and I probably won’t know fully until the next book. I think books change you a little – sometimes a lot. This book I feel opened this huge door to talk about myself and my body, things I almost never write about, not even in poetry which is often the genre of confession and vulnerability. So now that that door is open, what changes? I’m not sure. I’ll have to write and see.
“We write because there are always things we have withheld." You write prolifically across poetry, essays and fiction. Do you feel this process - that relationship with silence - working differently in the various different forms you work in? Are there some things you can say in one, but not the other?
I don’t think of it quite like that. I think anything can be said anywhere, in any genre. My concern isn’t what can’t be said, but what we choose not to say and why. In that regard, I do feel the weight of silence in everything I write - the power of it, and its politics. That’s not always a bad thing. In fiction for instance, the silence has everything to do with the tension you’re hopefully building throughout the narrative. Or in poetry, the precision that’s demanded of you there means you have to skillfully evoke things without always naming it fully. While I certainly want to hold silence up and ponder the politics of it, I also think of it as a powerful tool we use on the page.
You start and finish the collection with letters to the great American writer James Baldwin. Who are the essay writers you most admire - and how did they shape your approach? What made you return to the essay, in particular?
Again, I’ll take this in reverse: I’ve always been secretly more drawn to the essay than the other genres I write in. Perhaps it’s because it’s a space where I can be all these other things – I can be a storyteller as much in the essay as in the novel; I can be as lyrical in the essay as I am in poetry; I can be as thoughtful in the essay as I am in an academic paper. So the return to the essay form was inevitable in the way that I know I’ll always circle back to it at some point. The essayists that I love – Baldwin as you mention, and Dionne Brand and Zadie Smith who has the most beautiful mind ever – I’m not sure if they shape my approach as they make me afraid of approaching at all. But I aim for what they all achieve, which is this devastating clarity of thought – this ability to write an essay that finds the rhythm, the hum of someone’s thoughts and matches it so that reading it is itself the process of thinking.
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.