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A review by jada
Writing Down the Vision: Essays & Prophecies by Kei Miller
4.0
i’m continuing my quest to read kei miller’s bibliography, and this essay collection did not disappoint.
i read the first essay twice (first and last, since i had started this book a few months ago but never continued), and in it i was delighted to finally find an explanation for the women who carry pencils behind their ears. of course the part about taking inspiration from a wide variety of sources was cool too, but that part really stuck with me. i also liked in defence of maas joe, not only for its warning against becoming too foreign/cosmopolitanly minded, but in acknowledging that so much of the caribbean books we read in school are painfully dull (looking at you, green days by the river). these islands of love and hate was quite predictable, nothing really to write home about.
a kind of silence was more of a short story than an essay, but i appreciated it all the same. it was filled with miller’s characteristic way of introducing characters in seemingly unrelated vignettes, then revealing how they all fit together in one dramatic climax. imagining nations was interesting because of its development of the idea of colonisation in reverse, of the colonised imagining their nation onto the coloniser’s land. i enjoyed how that intersected with louise bennett’s poem of the same name, and the spectacle surrounding the olympics. making space for grief fits very well with some thoughts i’ve been rotating in my brain. an eulogy for dub poetry was a good exploration of the rise and fall of dub poetry and how it intersects with the concept of the diaspora. I loved an occasionally dangerous thing called nuance; i’ll definitely reread it 6 months from now. That, and maybe bellywoman was on “di tape” were my two favourite essays because of how they meandered, telling seemingly unrelated stories then neatly tying them up with astute observations about society at large. the transcription of his interview made me laugh, not because it was funny, but because of how thinly veiled the insults were and how absurdly long the questions were.
all in all, this essay collection contained miller’s typical exploration of caribbean society and its intersections with other aspects of life. it put into words some concepts i’d only half-started thinking about, and introduced me to some entirely new ones.
i read the first essay twice (first and last, since i had started this book a few months ago but never continued), and in it i was delighted to finally find an explanation for the women who carry pencils behind their ears. of course the part about taking inspiration from a wide variety of sources was cool too, but that part really stuck with me. i also liked in defence of maas joe, not only for its warning against becoming too foreign/cosmopolitanly minded, but in acknowledging that so much of the caribbean books we read in school are painfully dull (looking at you, green days by the river). these islands of love and hate was quite predictable, nothing really to write home about.
a kind of silence was more of a short story than an essay, but i appreciated it all the same. it was filled with miller’s characteristic way of introducing characters in seemingly unrelated vignettes, then revealing how they all fit together in one dramatic climax. imagining nations was interesting because of its development of the idea of colonisation in reverse, of the colonised imagining their nation onto the coloniser’s land. i enjoyed how that intersected with louise bennett’s poem of the same name, and the spectacle surrounding the olympics. making space for grief fits very well with some thoughts i’ve been rotating in my brain. an eulogy for dub poetry was a good exploration of the rise and fall of dub poetry and how it intersects with the concept of the diaspora. I loved an occasionally dangerous thing called nuance; i’ll definitely reread it 6 months from now. That, and maybe bellywoman was on “di tape” were my two favourite essays because of how they meandered, telling seemingly unrelated stories then neatly tying them up with astute observations about society at large. the transcription of his interview made me laugh, not because it was funny, but because of how thinly veiled the insults were and how absurdly long the questions were.
all in all, this essay collection contained miller’s typical exploration of caribbean society and its intersections with other aspects of life. it put into words some concepts i’d only half-started thinking about, and introduced me to some entirely new ones.