Kei Miller

Augustown

Things I Have Withheld

In this collection, acclaimed Jamaican poet Kei Miller dramatizes what happens when one system of knowledge, one method of understanding place and territory, comes up against another. We watch as the cartographer, used to the scientific methods of assuming control over a place by mapping it, is gradually compelled to recognize—even to envy—a wholly different understanding of place, as he tries to map his way to the rastaman’s eternal city of Zion. As the book unfolds the cartographer learns that, on this island of roads that “constrict like throats,” every place-name comes freighted with history, and not every place that can be named can be found.

The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion

Adamine Bustamante is born in Jamaica, inside one of the island�s last leper colonies. When she goes to a Revivalist Church, she discovers her gift of `warning�. But no one has bothered to warn Adamine that when she migrates to England her prophecies of hurricanes and earthquakes will no longer be respected. People will think she is crazy and lock her away in a mental hospital. Now, an old woman, Adamine wants to tell her own story but she must compete with `Mr Writer Man� the novelist who is twisting her words for his own book, and Adamine doesn�t know why. In a story about magic and migration, about stories and story-telling, we discover it is never one person who owns a story, or who has the right to tell it.

The Last Warner Woman

After spending her adult years in England, where her parents sent her for a better life, Imelda Richardson returns to the small village of Watersgate, Jamaica. The village is still dominated by the Evangelical church, and a Pentecostal fervour threatens to sweep both sinners and the righteous away.

The Same Earth

WINNER OF THE OCM BOCAS PRIZE FOR CARIBBEAN LITERATURE SHORTLISTED FOR THE RSL ONDAATJE PRIZE, THE GREEN CARNATION PRIZE, and the HISTORICAL WRITERS AWARD 'Miller's storytelling is superb' SUNDAY TIMES One April day in Augustown, Jamaica. Ma Taffy, old and blind, sits in her usual spot on the veranda. No matter how the world tilts around her, come hurricane or riot, she knows everything that goes on in this small community. Which is why, when her six-year-old nephew returns home from school with his dreadlocks shorn, she realises that trouble won't be far behind. And so she tells him the story of Alexander Bedward, the flying preacherman. She remembers what happened to the Rastaman and his helper, Bongo Moody; she thinks of Soft-Paw, the leader of the Angola gang, and what lies beneath her house. For trouble is brewing once more among the ramshackle lanes of Augustown, and as Ma Taffy knows, each day contains much more than its own hours, or minutes, or seconds. In fact, each day contains all of history...

11 April 1982: a smell is coming down John Golding Road right alongside the boy-child, something attached to him, like a spirit but not quite. Ma Taffy is growing worried. She knows that something is going to happen. Something terrible is going to pour out into the world. But if she can hold it off for just a little bit longer, she will. So she asks a question that surprises herself even as she asks it, "Kaia, I ever tell you bout the flying preacherman?" Set in the backlands of Jamaica, Augustown is a magical and haunting novel of one woman’s struggle to rise above the brutal vicissitudes of history, race, class, collective memory, violence, and myth.

A Novel

'There is an Anger that Moves' announces the arrival of Kei Miller, an exciting new voice in Caribbean poetry.

There is an Anger that Moves

"Two moments shape the space in which these essays take place. He writes about the occasion when as a youth who was a favoured spiritual leader in his charismatic church he found himself listening to the rhetoric of the sermons for their “careful craft of prophecy”; but when he writes about losing his religion, he recognises that a way of being and seeing in the world lives on – a sense of wonder, of spiritual empowerment and the conviction that the world cannot be understood, or accepted, without embracing visions that challenge the way it appears to be.

Generating this collection is the conviction that telling stories is the most powerful means to revelation. So, there are stories about the experience of migration, of leaving familiar places (Jamaica in all its wondrous and sometimes hellish reality) and making connections with new ones (Glasgow); stories about the grief and joy of family, friendship, and nation; pieces on tourism, cosmopolitanism and dub poetry; and autobiographical essays on influences and the rituals of writing. There is prophetic truth-telling about social and economic injustice and with the corrosive power of violence and homophobia – and playful celebrations of transgressive sexual cultures in the Caribbean from lisping Anansi to cross-dressing dons. As Kei Miller writes, there are “some things… worth shouting about.” And, as anyone who has encountered Kei Miller on the page or in performance will expect, this does not preclude the use of humour."

Copied from Peepal Tree Press website 


Writing Down the Vision: Essays & Prophecies

When Imelda Richardson leaves the small village of Watersgate, she is doing so for the second time. One of the young Jamaicans who left the island in 1974, Imelda's journey has taken her to England, and a law degree. But when her mother dies, Imelda returns.The village is still dominated by the Evangelical church and the thundering voice of Pastor Braithwaite. When Tessa Walcott's panties are stolen, she and Imelda decide to set up a Neighbourhood Watch. But they haven't counted on Pastor Braithwaite and the crusading zeal of Evangelist Millie. As a Pentecostal fervour sweeps through the village, the tensions between old and new come to a head.

The same earth

By acclaimed Forward Prize winner, novelist, and poet, Kei Miller's linked collection of essays blends memoir and literary commentary to explore the silences that exist in our conversations about race, sex, and gender. In a deeply moving, critical and lyrical collection of interconnected essays, award-winning writer Kei Miller explores the silences in which so many important things are kept. Miller examines the experience of discrimination through this silence and what it means to breach it — "to risk words, to risk truth; and through the body and the histories those bodies inherit" the crimes that haunt them, and how the meanings of our bodies can shift as we move through the world, variously assuming privilege or victimhood. Through letters to James Baldwin, encounters with Soca, Carnival, family secrets, love affairs, questions of aesthetics and more, Miller powerfully and imaginatively recounts everyday acts of racism and prejudice from a black, male, queer perspective. An almost disarmingly personal collection, Kei dissects his experiences in Jamaica and Britain, working as an artist and intellectual, making friends and lovers, discovering the possibilities of music and dance, literary criticism, culture, and storytelling. With both the epigrammatic concision and conversational cadence of his poetry and novels, Things I Have Withheld is a great artistic achievement: a work of innovation and beauty which challenges us to interrogate what seems unsayable and why, "our actions, defense mechanisms, imaginations and interactions" and those of the world around us.

Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize 2020 A Telegraph Book of the Year 2019 The highly anticipated new collection from Forward Prize-winner Kei Miller explores his strangest landscape yet - the placeless place. Here is a world in which it is both possible to hide and to heal, a landscape as much marked by magic as it is by murder.

In Nearby Bushes

When Kei Miller describes these as essays and prophecies, he shares with the reader a sensibility in which the sacred and the secular, belief and scepticism, and vision and analysis engage in profound and lively debate. Two moments shape the space in which these essays take place. He writes about the occasion when as a youth who was a favoured spiritual leader in his charismatic church he found himself listening to the rhetoric of the sermons for their careful craft of prophecy; but when he writes about losing his religion, he recognises that a way of being and seeing in the world lives on - a sense of wonder, of spiritual empowerment and the conviction that the world cannot be understood, or accepted, without embracing visions that challenge the way it appears to be.

Essays & Prophecies

Writing Down the Vision

Kingdom of Empty Bellies

There Is an Anger That Moves

From the WINNER OF THE FORWARD PRIZE FOR BEST COLLECTION 2014, a 'humorous, bittersweet fiction, combin[ing] the fantastical realism of Marquez with the domestic comedy of Andrea Levy' INDEPENDENT It all begins with the theft of Tessa Walcott's panties... After the hurricane of 1974, Jamaica is devastated. Imelda Richardson is sent to England, without a place to stay or a plan of what to do. Luckily sheis taken in by Purletta Johnson, a member of the ex-pat bourgeoisie who has decided to become more Jamaican than any Jamaican: sucking her teeth, sporting a gold tooth, and growing ganja on her balcony. But when her mother dies Imelda returns to Jamaica. When Tessa Walcott's panties are stolen, she and Imelda set up a Neighbourhood Watch. But they haven't counted on Pastor Braithwaite who denounces them in Church. The church-goers turn on Imelda, and when the river suddenly floods her home it is seen as a punishment from God. A Pentecostal fervour sweeps through the village of Watersgate, fuelled by Evangelist Millie. In her last great crusade, Miss Millie organises 'fire to burn their sins away', equipping the villagers with kerosene as they set about burning everything. Now they are marching on the gay man's house and only Imelda can save him.

Kei Miller's work was acclaimed by the distinguished Jamaican writer Olive Senior as 'Some of the most exciting poetry I've read in years... An extraordinary new voice singing with clarity and grace.' A Light Song of Light sings in the rhythms of ritual and folktale, praise songs and anecdotes, blending lyricism with a cool wit, finding the languages in which poetry can sing in dark times. The book is in two parts: Day Time and Night Time, each exploring the inseparable elements that together make a whole. Behind the daylight world of community lies another, disordered, landscape: stories of ghosts and bandits, a darkness violent and seductive. At the heart of the collection is the Singerman, a member of Jamaica's road gangs in the 1930s, whose job was to sing while the rest of the gang broke stones. He is a presence both mundane and shamanic. Kei Miller's poems celebrate 'our incredible and abundant lives', facing the darkness and making from it a song of the light.

A Light Song of Light

Ecoutez l'histoire d'une femme puissante... Adamine Bustamante vous dira peut-être qu'elle est née en Jamaïque dans une léproserie où sa mère d'un jour, Pearline Portious, tricotait des bandages arc-en-ciel parce que c'était plus beau. Où Miss Lily lui faisait la classe en lisant et relisant Jane Eyre. Où Mman Lazare, la vénérable gardienne des lieux repoussa l'heure de sa mort jusqu'à ses cent cinq ans. Deux voix ne sont pas de trop pour raconter toute l'histoire. La voix claire de l'écrivain venu de Londres réveiller la mémoire de l'authentique prophétesse. Et la verve, le souffle tellurique d'Adamine, livrant au vent sa version des temps où elle était la plus grande crieuse de vérité de Jamaïque – Tempête & Ouragan & Inondation ! Leurs vérités se croisent, se répondent, se retoquent, tissant peu à peu la carte de filiations plus secrètes... Le magnifique premier roman d'un écrivain plus que prometteur, qui livre une interrogation magistrale sur l'articulation de la fiction et de la vérité, de la raison et de la folie. En bref... Il était une fois une léproserie en Jamaïque. Ainsi commence l'histoire de deux générations de filles du vent, l'authentique Pearline Portious, qui tricotait des bandages multicolores pour des lépreux, et sa fille, Adamine Bustamante, dite Ada, célèbre prophétesse en Jamaïque, cas psychiatrique en Angleterre. Plusieurs voix alternent pour restituer cette histoire entre deux mondes : celles de Pearline et d'Adamine, et celle de l'écrivain qui interroge la mémoire...

Kei Miller

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