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Writing Down the Vision: Essays & Prophecies
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.
- GenresEssaysNonfiction
160 pages, Paperback
First published October 31, 2013
8 people are currently reading
167 people want to read
About the author
Kei Miller
26 books432 followersKei Miller was born in Jamaica in 1978. He completed an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester Metropolitan University and a PhD in English literature at the University of Glasgow. He works in multiple genres - poetry, fiction and non-fiction and has won major prizes across these genres. He won the Forward Prize for poetry and the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. He has taught at the Universities of Glasgow, London, and Exeter. He is presently Professor of English at the University of Miami.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 7, 2023
Reading this book is like getting an inside glance in the mind of a genius and I didn’t want it to end!
Do you that feeling when you have a favorite author and you thought you read all their essays, then you find out there’s a book you haven’t read and you finally read it and it blows your mind? That is exactly how I felt reading Kei Miller’s Writing Down The Vision
If you are a Kei Miller fan, I highly recommend you read this collection, he comments on everything, and when he said prophecy, he didn’t lie because one of the essay in this collection was basically a starting point for Things I’ve Withheld . In this eighteen-essay collection he explores what it is like for a young Caribbean writer to write from what is deemed a small space, who influenced his writing, culture, identity, religion, falling out of religion, grief and so much more.
I particularly love his commentary on Caribbean literature in the essay, “IN DEFENCE OF MAAS JOE”. In this essay he spoke about what is an authentic representation of Caribbean life in literature. How do we include the contemporary and the “simple” country life while making them both stunning. A line that stood out to me was:
I agree wholeheartedly then that the citizens of the developing world ought to be allowed to live modern, urban, and even Western lives in fiction, but I disagree that only such lives are authentic, or that the so-called simple life cannot and has not been depicted in all its stunning complexity. Can we not allow the folk to hold an iPad in one hand, and a mango in the other?
If you read Nicole Dennis Benn’s Here Comes The Sun then you will love the essay where he talks about tourism and what the “Real Caribbean” looks like.
Overall, this essay is truly a breath of fresh air and I think everyone who loves Caribbean books should read this.
Do you that feeling when you have a favorite author and you thought you read all their essays, then you find out there’s a book you haven’t read and you finally read it and it blows your mind? That is exactly how I felt reading Kei Miller’s Writing Down The Vision
If you are a Kei Miller fan, I highly recommend you read this collection, he comments on everything, and when he said prophecy, he didn’t lie because one of the essay in this collection was basically a starting point for Things I’ve Withheld . In this eighteen-essay collection he explores what it is like for a young Caribbean writer to write from what is deemed a small space, who influenced his writing, culture, identity, religion, falling out of religion, grief and so much more.
I particularly love his commentary on Caribbean literature in the essay, “IN DEFENCE OF MAAS JOE”. In this essay he spoke about what is an authentic representation of Caribbean life in literature. How do we include the contemporary and the “simple” country life while making them both stunning. A line that stood out to me was:
I agree wholeheartedly then that the citizens of the developing world ought to be allowed to live modern, urban, and even Western lives in fiction, but I disagree that only such lives are authentic, or that the so-called simple life cannot and has not been depicted in all its stunning complexity. Can we not allow the folk to hold an iPad in one hand, and a mango in the other?
If you read Nicole Dennis Benn’s Here Comes The Sun then you will love the essay where he talks about tourism and what the “Real Caribbean” looks like.
Overall, this essay is truly a breath of fresh air and I think everyone who loves Caribbean books should read this.
June 13, 2021
"This is what happens when you live in a country that is not the centre of the world; you become blessed with a kind of double vision. You see your life from the inside, and also from the outside - both locally and globally. You are conscious always of the reality of what you are living, and also the strange narrative of it. You become conscious of how this might be observed — sometimes unlovingly and without empathy — if you do not find a way to tell it right."
I did not know Kei Miller before last year and he is already one of my favorite writers of all time. This essay collection is my second book by him and my first nonfiction. As a queer Caribbean writer from Jamaica now living in Scotland, he has a fresh, unique perspective on many things, and reading this book was a continuously enriching experience. This is also incidentally my second Peepal Tree title, the first being another nonfiction collection by a queer Caribbean writer from Trinidad, Andre Bagoo's The Undiscovered Country. They're both very different from each other & I don't want to take up space with a comparison so I will instead recommend both. Miller's writing is clear and precise. He has the innate talent of reaching into the hearts of things, plumbing their hidden depths, to reveal rich meanings lifted by richer imagination.
While I loved every piece, I would really like to single out a few. "The Texture of Fiction", which provides the quote above, delves into how life in the Caribbean, all the things that happen there, have a "quality of the unreal" for him & how he considers his job as "the need to see, and then to tell". "In Defence of Maas Joe", Miller talks about folk and their culture in Literature; Caribbean writers and their, the challenges they face, & how "we're are in danger of standing against everything we once stood for". "A Kind of Silence" is a solitary short story, about two boys born in two very different environments and homes and how it ends in tragedy for one of them.
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"Imagining Nations" is how diaspora bring alive home communities on foreign lands, immigration & its affects on the quotidian, as well as national spirit and solidarity. In "Making Space for Grief", Miller talks about seeing the ghost of his mother on a trip to the US two years after her demise, the idea of death as disaster & calamity, and finally giving in to grief to cry. "A Space Between Poems" talks of his early days of writing and reciting poetry, the difference between writing on the page and performing on the stage, the importance of generative silences and pregnant pauses, and creating the spaces where people can come together and meet.
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These are just some special mentions and I could really talk without end about the rest of them. Miller's examination of the things and people that influenced him, from other writers to preachers, pastors, and Sisters, shed a light on his writing style and explain the prosodic elements of his language and what he hopes to achieve with writing. He also explores his relationship with religion, being a part of it and taking leave of it, and how it always casts a light on how he sees the world. Another running idea is of home and belonging, his experience of Scotland, and his complex vision of Jamaica. It is a splendid collection altogether, magnificent.
(I received a finished physical copy of the book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)
June 6, 2023
Writing down the Vision: Essays and Prophecies is a collection of Miller’s work written from roughly 2007-2013. I continue to be impressed with the way Miller explores and expresses ideas. While these works were each written for different purposes (not intended at the writing to be a collection), they very much feel like they are in conversation with each other as he explores identity, connection, and what it means to be a writer as well as what it means to critique writing or have your writing critiqued. There are elements in here that feel deeply personal - Making Space for Grief was so touching. There are also elements that made me reflect on society in a much bigger scope - An Occasionally Dangerous Thing Called Nuance. (This one should be required reading.) Whether Miller is writing about something personally intimate or casting a wider vision, his writing is powerful and evocative. In a month when I am reading primarily Caribbean writers, this was an excellent essay collection to read early in the month. While no writer speaks for a country or a region singularly, some of his essays speak specifically to how his work has been viewed and how he considers ideas about Caribbean writing and I appreciate having his perspective as I dive into new and well-loved authors from this region.
“ . . .this quality of being inside and outside at the same time - of living a life while floating above it, observing, taking notes. Often times I find there is no need to invent or to create. There is only the need to see, and then to tell.”
“ . . .this quality of being inside and outside at the same time - of living a life while floating above it, observing, taking notes. Often times I find there is no need to invent or to create. There is only the need to see, and then to tell.”
August 20, 2021
Brilliant collection of essays.
If you ask me why I write stories, or novels, or poems, I would tell you it is because things that are real in my country, things that are factual, things that have happened and that continue to happen, have always had for me the quality of the unreal – the texture of fiction. -excerpt from The Texture of Fiction
Miller is brilliant and the way he probes issues and existence, examining what pours forth, presenting his experiences, opinions, and understanding, is smooth and opens a channel of reciprocity with his reader.
He is not afraid to delve into and question the murkier, more violent parts to his country and community, the divides that have some living lives of comfort and others lives of desolation and destitution. Yet everything is related with care and feeling, with connection.
When he writes of the position of Caribbean writers and writers outside of the 'central West', glaring similarities and sameness can be seen to this day; who has gotten a foot in and who still remains on the fringes, how the literature of the Caribbean is viewed and how some authors have fallen into the 'universal' trap.
I also love how he is willing to examine his own position in certain spaces and what he knows now that would have served him well then. There is fire, humour, and vulnerability in all these essays. Miller is not afraid to evaluate self, country, region, and religion; always seeking a path that leads to answers and illumination. There is an interrogation of foresight and hindsight.
-Often times I find there is no need to invent or to create. There is only the need to see, and then to tell-
If you ask me why I write stories, or novels, or poems, I would tell you it is because things that are real in my country, things that are factual, things that have happened and that continue to happen, have always had for me the quality of the unreal – the texture of fiction. -excerpt from The Texture of Fiction
Miller is brilliant and the way he probes issues and existence, examining what pours forth, presenting his experiences, opinions, and understanding, is smooth and opens a channel of reciprocity with his reader.
He is not afraid to delve into and question the murkier, more violent parts to his country and community, the divides that have some living lives of comfort and others lives of desolation and destitution. Yet everything is related with care and feeling, with connection.
When he writes of the position of Caribbean writers and writers outside of the 'central West', glaring similarities and sameness can be seen to this day; who has gotten a foot in and who still remains on the fringes, how the literature of the Caribbean is viewed and how some authors have fallen into the 'universal' trap.
I also love how he is willing to examine his own position in certain spaces and what he knows now that would have served him well then. There is fire, humour, and vulnerability in all these essays. Miller is not afraid to evaluate self, country, region, and religion; always seeking a path that leads to answers and illumination. There is an interrogation of foresight and hindsight.
-Often times I find there is no need to invent or to create. There is only the need to see, and then to tell-
December 27, 2022
I read this book after reading Kei Miller's latest collection of essays, Things I Have Withheld, and I think I actually regret not reading this collection first. Not because it was written and published before Things I Have Withheld and chronologically that makes sense, but because it demonstrates the natural progression of Kei the writer and shows that many of the issues he highlighted then, are still very relevant in 2022, and he continues to highlight them. It was refreshing to see he has held true to his beliefs, such as not necessarily subscribing to the idea of being an Africanist or Pan-Africanist. My favourite essay was But In Glasgow, There Are Plantains, but I do have a personal bias that accounts for that love. Although lengthy, the unpublished interview Kei had with Gloria and Irene was interesting as, in my view, it was a back and forth of two cunning interviewers trying to trap an interviewee into saying something controversially quotable.
If you liked Things I Have Withheld, you will like Writing Down The Vision. Or, should I say, if you liked Writing Down The Vision, then you will like Things I Have Withheld?
5/5
If you liked Things I Have Withheld, you will like Writing Down The Vision. Or, should I say, if you liked Writing Down The Vision, then you will like Things I Have Withheld?
5/5
June 6, 2023
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.
November 9, 2019
Kei Miller's perspective (as a gay Jamaican who lives in Britain and an ex-Pentecostal who retains respect for religion, both poet and novelist) is unique. His insights in these essays helped to enlarge my view of Jamaica, Britain, racism, persecution, and writing.
January 2, 2015
I really enjoyed this collection of essays. They are all well written and incredibly thought-provoking. I think I've also benefitted tremendously by reading this at the perfect time; a time in which I am questioning everything I believe and hold dear, a time in which I am seeking answers to things I have always taken for granted. Kei has captured the essence of storytelling.
July 15, 2014
Best written book of essays. This show why Kei is such a Bad Bwoy Writer. He has the unique ability to get to the heart of situations we find hard to articulate. He does this with an ease and honesty that disguises his academic flare. It is a must read.
February 28, 2015
Kei's work makes me feel understood.
April 22, 2017
This grouping of Kei Miller's previously published essays deals with the eccentricities of his life and his approach to writing and performing his writing. Elsewhere in this volume, he describes aspects of Jamaicans' lives in Jamaica and in the Jamaican diaspora: spiritual religions, remaking Jamaican life in England, homophobia, &c. Prefacing the text is a quotation from The Book of Habakkuk, 2.2, "Write down the vision and make it plain, so that he who readeth may run". Miller says during an audio reading that for him the significance of the prophet Habakkuk's words is an 'instruction' for his own writing.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews