Kei Miller is a brilliant writer of poetry and prose, and his new book, the essay collection Things I Have Witheld, promises to be as vital a read as the rest of his books. Here, Kei reads from the book, and you can read the extract afterwards too.

Extract taken from Things I Have Witheld
By Kei Miller
Published by Canongate

It is always the body that I return to – our bodies and their various meanings.

This is what happened: in the winter of 2004, a woman enters a shop in Manchester, England. It is a student shop attached to the student union and all the workers here either study at Manchester Metropolitan University or the University of Manchester. The vibe of the shop is a relaxed one, and the student-workers have not only devised a rota for their work shifts and their lunch breaks, but also one for DJ privileges – each taking turns to play their music as it filters through the speakers of the shop.

The woman who has entered the shop seems to carry with her the weight of some deep annoyance. At the till she is unimpressed by the man (the man is me) who smiles brightly at her and asks, as he has been taught to, ‘Anything else for you?’ There is something about her eyes and the curl of her lips that seems almost disgusted by him, but the man does not feel this is directed towards him. How could it be? What could he have done to earn such a visceral reaction by a stranger? She does not answer his question with words but by a sort of twitch of the head signals, no, no… nothing else. I just want to leave. As the man scans and cashes her goods and then sorts out her change from the ten-pound note she has handed him, it seems the woman can finally hold it in no longer. ‘For godsake could you turn that music off! Don’t you know how hateful it is?’

It is 2004. Terrifying stories have been leaking out about the violent homophobia on the island. Across England, Jamaican artistes are frequently being unbooked from shows after protest by LGBT rights groups accusing them of peddling hate music. In 2006 it will all culminate in an article in the Times declaring Jamaica ‘The Most Homophobic Place On Earth’. It is only when the woman snaps, it is only when she asks ‘Don’t you know how hateful it is?’ that the man (who is me) realizes that he has been humming all along to the music in the background, that the rota says he has DJ rights for this hour and so he has been playing music from his island. It was only now that he listens more intently to the words of I-Wane singing ‘Lava Ground’

We stan up pon de lava ground
An’ nuff a dem ah look fi see I mawga down
hype pon warrior cause dem have a gun
but tell dem seh de warrior naah guh run (we naah guh run!)
We stand up pon de lava ground.

A loose prose translation of the lines could be this: We stand up on this troubled ground, and lots of people would love to see us diminished, they taunt us because they have guns, but tell them that we, the warriors, will not run. We will not run! We stand up on this troubled ground.

The man wonders what could possibly be seen as hateful in this declaration of defiance, this insistence on standing one’s ground, this refusal to be intimidated even when we are approached with guns or with the threat of violence – this stance which has in fact been the stance of so many heroic LGBT Jamaicans? It takes the man a second – a solitary second of being reduced by the woman’s stare, her clear repulsion of him and his body, to understand what she is hearing and understanding. She understands correctly that the music is Jamaican and she understands that the man is also Jamaican. She had observed him – his over 200lbs black male body, his dreadlocks – and having read all the stories, she understands that Jamaica is a homophobic island and that much of its music stridently advocates for the killing of gay men. It stands to reason then – the big black man in front of her who is clearly the cause of this Jamaican music, who is singing along to it, must necessarily be humming a tune of hatred. If Jamaica is only defined by its homophobia, then every Jamaican must be either an agent of or a victim of such hate. She has, in her mind, some imagination of the broken, brown queer body. It is that body on whose behalf she believes she is now speaking. She does not imagine that the body before her is one such body. She does not understand that in the actual moment of encountering a brown, queer body from Jamaica, all she does is to berate that body and to silence it. But because the customer is always white (or is it that the customer is always right? In that moment they mean very much the same things) the man turns off the radio and hands his DJ rights over to another student worker whose music being less black will undoubtedly be less offensive.

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

Things I Have Witheld by Kei Miller is published by Canongate, May 2021, priced £14.99.

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