Aftermath

by Preti Taneja

Usman Khan was convicted of terrorism-related offenses at age 20, and sent to high security prison. He was released eight years later, and allowed to travel to London for an event marking the fifth anniversary of Learning Together, a prison education program he had participated in. On November 29, 2019, he sat with others at Fishmonger's Hall, some of whom he called friends. Then he went to the restroom to retrieve the things he had hidden there: a fake bomb vest and two knives, which he taped to his wrists.

Preti Taneja taught fiction writing in prison for three years. Jack Merritt, 25, who was killed in the attack, oversaw the program; Usman Khan was one of her students. "It is the immediate aftermath," Taneja writes. "'I am living at the centre of a wound still fresh.' The I is not mine, it is ours."

In this bold and searching lament by the award-winning author of We That Are Young, Taneja interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the fictions we believe and the voices we exclude. Contending with the pain of unspeakable loss set against public tragedy, Taneja draws on history, memory, and powerful poetic predecessors to contemplate the systemic nature of atrocity. Blurring genre and form, Aftermath is a profound attempt to regain trust after violence and recapture a politics of hope among the lives that many think have forfeited the right to be mourned.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Essays, Literature, Politics

239 pages, Paperback

First published November 30, 2021

About the author

Praise for WE THAT ARE YOUNG

WINNER OF THE DESMOND ELLIOTT PRIZE 2018

Sarah Perry, chair of judges, said:

“Samira, Chris and myself were absolutely unanimous in our love and admiration for this novel, whose scope, ambition, skill and wisdom was, quite simply, awe-inspiring … all three of us sat together, shaking our heads, saying, ‘If this is her first novel, what extraordinary work will come next?’”


'Revelatory. One of the most exquisite and original novels of the year.' - Sunday Times.

'Looks to hold a mirror to our times.' Observer Summer Picks.

'A masterpiece' - The Spectator

'Fierce, freewheeling' - Guardian

'An Instant Classic' - The Times of India

Praise for Kumkum Malhotra:

With its beautifully sculpted surfaces and terrifying depths, this novella literally took my breath away.'

- Maureen Freely

'Preti Taneja is a writer to watch, no doubt about it.'

- Deborah Levy

'Preti Taneja’s beautiful novella is evocative, elegant, sparse and yet enormously full. A story that, to many of us, might seem ‘other’, becomes inclusive and deeply engaging, all of it woven from a single loose thread.'

- Stella Duffy

Preti Taneja's talent lies in doing what all the greatest stories do: creating from the specific - one cast of characters, one place, one culture - a deeply moving universal, one that is perfectly paced and which, once read, lodges itself in the innermost rooms of your heart.

- Tania Hershman

Reviews

[Alwynne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part of Transit Books’ Undelivered Lecture series, Preti Taneja’s Aftermath spirals out from an event that took place in 2019, at a celebration in London's Fishmongers' Hall bringing together people who’d been involved on both sides of Cambridge University’s prisoner rehabilitation, education programme Learning Together. It was there that former prisoner and programme participant - now on probation - Usman Khan killed former Cambridge students Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt and injured several others in what was classified as an act of terror. Preti Taneja was one of the Cambridge University representatives who taught creative writing for Learning Together at Whitemoor high-security prison and Khan one of the men she tutored.

Taneja covers the facts, the feelings, the aftermath of this tragedy but not in any of the expected ways. This is not a sensationalist, tell-all piece or a dry, sociological study, Taneja roves between genres weaving together lament, memoir, meditation, literary criticism and explosive political analysis. Her approach is cogent, compelling, at times overwhelming, dense and demanding. Taneja draws on postcolonial writing strategies that decentre and destabilise conventional Western narratives around terrorism, race and violence. She deploys unorthodox forms: from her use of layout and white space, her shifting registers and points of view to her explicit dialogue with an array of texts. The resulting text’s sometimes lucid, sometimes fragmented or hovering on the edges of the coherent. Out of this emerge images of grief and loss, searing critiques of the myths and systems that uphold and perpetuate racism, individual and institutional violence. It’s a searching, sobering, urgent book, subversive and unexpectedly haunting. There are no easy answers to be found here but alongside stories of immense personal and generational trauma there’s also a commitment to Solnit’s idea of radical hope, and the possibilities found in the work of anti-racist and anti-capitalist women writers, activists and thinkers - particularly from the Black feminist abolitionist movement.

Thanks to Edelweiss and to publisher Transit Books for an arc

[Roman Clodia · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an uncomfortable review for me to write because I empathised with the sentiments and politics of the piece but found myself alienated by and disliking the writing style in which they are articulated.

Taneja takes her opening cue from the Fishmonger's Hall attacks in 2019 and while she is legitimately traumatised by what happened, I couldn't help feeling a slight sense of what veers dangerously close to personal appropriation which, even as I write that, feels unfair even to me (see? complex...) From there, she circles out to discussions of racism, of social injustice, Government and agencies' responses to radicalisation and terrorism, to the hard facts of how the prison population is disproportionately made up of Black and, since 9/11, Muslim prisoners. All of which may not be novel but bears repeating.

However, the style of writing just didn't work for me - in striving to find ways to articulate the hard to say, it tips over, too frequently, into something close to over-dramatic. I would have said 'hysterical' but that's too often used as a pejorative word applied to women who speak out boldly and without compromise so I won't but this feels too much like shouting from a soap-box to my ear and personally I wanted a quieter, more subtle and more consistently thoughtful response.

Perhaps this was written in a red-hot rage of horror and unwieldy emotions; perhaps that's exactly what some readers may love about it. For me, a cooler edit might have worked far better. But still a piece well worth your reading time.

Thanks to the publisher for an ARC via Edelweiss.

[Max Eichelberger · Rating 2 out of 5]

I started this book listening to a podcast about Daunte Wright’s trial and I finished the book as I listened to the verdict.

The reason I didn’t assign Aftermath one star is because there are 80 good pages. The editor ought to have ripped out every page that paid its token ‘art is necessary because whiteness, or conflict, or whatever, because reasons’ then went to work on the umpteenth million reformulations of Said. Somehow the book ends up over 200 pages.

Into this pile she could also throw the ponderous discussion of post-9/11 race relations and Islamic radicalization, that conversation is a dead horse, or at this point, on the edge of 2022, just actual glue sticks.

The tone and style varies chapter by chapter, sometimes paragraph by paragraph, and on a first glance is interesting enough—literary pointillism, perhaps. However like amateur artists the world over pointillism only works with discipline, and the author has neither the discipline nor direction to actually sustain the style. It’s like the motel art of Steamer on the Seine

And this isn’t necessarily a knock on the author. You try this style while talking about prison statistics and describing the clinical definition of depression. The fact is it might not be possible but even if it was, it’s not accomplished here.

The author’s politics (which are really just cultural packaging) also provide unnecessary obstacles to her main question: why write at all? It is “necessary,” it is “healing;” but, she reasons, words can’t heal and it’s unnecessary to try and explain the inexplicable. These precocious observations are hardly a step above fortune cookie wisdom, or NPR bookchat, which amounts to the same thing in the end.

For me the unspoken monster lurking around every corner is that she was unable to reach him. She taught him. She spent time with him. He got out of prison and went to this program to kill people. He must’ve passed dozens of then-convenient places to butcher people so *something* reached him. Art yadda yadda. Ok, so why did she fail? To what part is she in the system? Well none, if you ask her, which would be more palpable if she wasn’t in the business of assigning responsibility. But she is. So a sincere reader must invest hours into hearing her list reams other potentially responsible parties that stumble from stage left, make a curtesy, and then depart stage right while the narrator churns on and on that it isn't her fault.

[Ella Porteous · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a really heavy read. I like that Taneja wrote it rather than shying away from the criticism she received for believing space for creativity belongs in prison. I liked that she used poetry to express grief but sometimes it is too academic and inaccessible like went over my head with lofty references. But i suppose it is complicated topic so she was just trying to unpack it all the best she could.

I would like to read her novel too.

[Daniel Sevitt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to read without instinctively calling up Jo Ann Beard's essay, "The Fourth State of Matter". There are lots of directions being pulled here and sometimes they seem to be opposite ends of the same thread, which is confusing. There are also some weird digressions including a lengthy takedown of a minor Atwood work, Hag-Seed and some other literary reference to books and prisons. It's a bit like one of those worthy-cause quilts where each patch is made by someone else and they're all sewn together to make something comforting. Some of the paragraphs are moving and thoughtful, but it never came together for me as a complete work.

[Martin Cowles · Rating 1 out of 5]

I would say half of this book went over my head and I had no clue what the author was saying or trying to tell me. It’s a highly personal and very politized view of the causes and who was to blame for the horrible events at the Fishmonger’s Hall. I personally shared almost none of those views.

[Marianne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wrenching and complicated.

[Bethan Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars rather than 1 because I agreed with the message (it’s about abolition so obviously).

But I’m sorryyy this style of narrative prose is just not for me! It felt like rambling streams of the writer’s conscience with no structure or direction. 200 pages is already short for a book but could have been 20 as felt it was very repetitive. A miss

[Devan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. That’s all

[Mads Butler · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favourite read in years. This is a book about compassion, before you dive in you should not read the blurb, you should begin with her words before you think about the tragedy she describes. I feel so grateful to Preti for the work she put in to this beautiful, poetic book which elucidates so much around a complex and painful subject. It is a masterful way to handle something so politicised.

[S.C. Gordon · Rating 1 out of 5]

I feel that this hugely important story would reach a wider audience if it weren’t for the bewilderingly inaccessible style the author chose to express it with. It actually makes me a little angry how uninclusive it is, given the subject matter.

[Theodora · Rating 1 out of 5]

Some obscure gibberish. It’s a no for me. The style is just awful and the author’s views and opinions are very controversial…

[Kathleen Creedon · Rating 5 out of 5]

this is the best book i've read so far this year.

a tale of grief and trauma and abolition, i'm not quite sure how Preti Taneja wraps it all together so effortlessly. i'm always a little drawn to prose that looks and feels like poetry. something about it feels more natural and instinctive.

here, she talks about one of her students, to put it most directly. she's a teacher of creative fiction and has a course at a prison, where university students and inmates come together to make art. one of her former students, Usman Khan, was convicted of terrorism at a young age. nearly a decade later, he kills himself and two people after posing with a fake bomb and knives strapped to his wrist in a public place. the two people he killed tried to prevent him from killing more.

but instead of directly and solely vilifying him for this crime, Taneja takes a look at the systems that worked against Khan. this book is a lament: of Khan, of the people who died, of the people who lose to these systems everyday. it's an abolitionist's poem, a sort of attempt to figure out what one believes in after such an unspeakable loss. very intense. very heavy. very good.

[Greta Gorsuch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very stream-of-consciousness and hard to follow, but with potent ideas on racism, stereotypes, and how society constructs checks and balances for people who are wholly un-checkable and unstoppable. She writes knowledgeably about grief. She is a keen observer of how narratives repeat themselves and are completely changeable.

[Laila Ghaffar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This text is lyrically slippery and theoretically dense but opens up a discussion on abolition that speakers to the rhythms of collective trauma!!

[isra · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.50 💫

The lyricism was insane. So much to learn here.

[mymona · Rating 5 out of 5]

Taneja's Aftermath is a book I've attempted numerous times to read but couldn't because it hit too close to home. For me, it was too raw, too real, too honest. I finally got through it and I'm so glad I did. Taneja writes about a horrific act of violence committed by a student of hers to her colleagues. She goes back back and further back to investigate the concatenation of violent acts and how that affects people of colour. The book asks so many questions that we all must ask like what do we mean when we use the word terrorist? What are we doing to our society when we imprison people? she writes with a grieving voice so real, so human, so necessary. And at the end, the book left me with a feeling of radical hope <3

[Simon Street · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well I have not read all of this book but my honest feeling looking even at the 5 star reviews is that no one has, and that's because it is impossible. The prose is too dense. A lot of the sentences are just non-sequiturs.
I'm a teacher and I've lead (art) projects in prisons and that is what lead me to this book. She has a really interesting and important story to tell. I really wish she had told it more coherently and clearly. I wish she had the humility to write more simply and clearly so we could see the other characters. She filled all the space with her own concerns, and there wasn't even any light and shade in those, it was all 1000% desperation.

[Sara QF · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book reminded me of the power that words have, not only in their meaning but in their physicality, too, through the sound they make as they roll off your tongue and the way spaces, commas and periods transform your breathing. Taneja materialises her grief through each word, each page, each chapter, leading us to breathe and feel the weight of the tragedy and its aftermath with her.